Situation # 9

“Oh hindsight, I love you. Especially one time recently, as he only took a few days to do his work. Historically it has taken months to years and a lot of addictive behavior for me to recognize this love in my life. I have quite often experienced his wisdom as shame, instead of mentor, so I definitely tried to drown him out. Nah, I did not completely ignore my weaknesses in the past. I felt their haunting presence, a drum beat of, “Why bother, that stuff never works out when you try it.” So, I reframed the idea of my weaknesses into areas that I’m just not that into, and focused on my strengths .

All along, life kept telling me that I wasn’t going to make it if I didn’t get some traction on these weak areas. The psychs call these “inferior functions.” You know how we like to say, “no one is perfect?” It turns out, the inferior functions usually reside on the flip side of our greatest gifts. Now this was something my fragile ego could accept. Not quite as distasteful to face weaknesses when you see their connection to innate strengths. The shame lessened over time, because who wouldn’t lean into strengths? Constant disappointment is surely no way to live, yet the need for more integrated functioning never goes away. What I mean by “integrated functioning” is that the reality of who we are and the goals of how we want to function in the world are brought into an alignment, a detente, so to speak.

Tanya Markul

Anyway, I pep talked myself so well that I jumped right in and hilariously enough, was surprised to have another epic fail.

Specifically, my goal was to improve Situation #9 by working on the inferior function x (something I historically suck at). The details don’t matter, because we all have different superior and inferior functions.

I was pissed that my attempt didn’t work out. Of course anger is the child of pain, so I was hurt too. This time I sat with the pain of failure long enough to start hearing the hindsight as a lover and not a shamer. He said that there were some things that I was just plain ignorant about. Not because I’m dumb, but because life requires us to put ourselves right in the middle of certain things to learn about them. That is a success Jill, to try a new thing, he said. Another thing he showed me was the way in which I was too emotionally invested in the outcome of Situation #9 to keep an even keel when I ran into other people’s inferior functions. Haha, basically expecting other humans to have a better fix on their inferior functions than I do.

Fundamentally, I have learned, which now defines this foray as a success instead of a failure. Situation #9 may remain for now, but I also have additional tools to take with me on my next run at x, y & z, as it seems revealing weaknesses is a continual life process along with numerous situations to handle. The goal post has changed as well, the drumbeat of perfectionism has changed into a goal of having a higher percentage of healthy ways of living, relating, communicating, and coping than non-healthy ways. That is success.