There is a quiet assumption that spirituality and inner work is just another form of self-improvement. We think our job is to constantly pick the “good” side of ourselves and get rid of the “bad” — more positive vibes, less anxiety; more zen, less losing our temper. We treat personal growth like a competitive sport or a relentless cleaning project, trying to scrub away our messy parts until we finally emerge on the other side as “pure.”

But when you step back and look at it, that whole approach is controlling and exhausting. It can easily become a form of self-aggression that doesn’t really help. The anxiety doesn’t disappear; it just goes underground. The frustration stays raw. The harder we try to force ourselves to be perfect, contained and compassionate, the more fractured we feel. We’re essentially at war with half of our own nature and calling it self-improvement.

The Structure of Duality

Duality isn’t a mistake. It’s just part of nature’s design, and it’s one of the primary ways our minds process the world.

We understand life through opposites. Strength only means something in relation to weakness. Light is only recognizable against dark. The design itself isn’t the problem — the tension between opposites is actually what moves us. Both poles are functional, specialized, and come with their own built-in pros and cons. Intensity can’t do delicate, and delicate can’t do intensity. Only context determines which one serves.

The trouble starts the moment we take a side, build a rigid identity around it, and begin judging everything through that lens. Then we start organizing the world around us by exiling, elevating and neglecting everything we relate with — whether towards our own inner aspects or other people, we tend to either push things away, cling to them, or ignore them entirely.

What Happens to the Exiled Parts (Aversion)

When we decide a part of ourselves is unacceptable and needs to be suppressed, it doesn’t just disappear. It goes underground. And underground, it charges. The suppressed part eventually breaks to the surface — but then it’s completely out of proportion, louder, cruder, and more destructive than it ever would have been if we’d never sent it underground. The irony is, every time it explodes in this way, it feels like proof that we were right to hide it in the first place. The loop feeds itself.

Take your inner fire, for example — that edgy, intense part that can say “no” and actually mean it. As kids, many of us were told that this side was too much, too aggressive, or just “bad.” So we locked it in the basement. But every time we push it down, we add fuel to the fire. When it finally bursts out, it looks like a monster, confirming everyone’s worst fears — and driving us to lock the door even tighter next time. The problem isn’t the fire itself. The problem is the distortion that happens when you try to suffocate it.

What Happens to the Elevated Parts (Attachment)

It’s not just the messy parts that get distorted — the “good” or “spiritual” parts do too. We take states like calm, compassion, and openness, everything we deem worthy, and elevate them into something superhuman. They stop being natural human states and become benchmarks we have to hit. But it’s difficult to hold these while doing taxes, dealing with a screaming toddler, or just having a bad hair day.

Human life is fluid, and trying to freeze-frame a single “good” state is impossible. So every time we fail to live up to this polished, spiritual version of ourselves, we feel like a failure. But the problem isn’t that you’re flawed — it’s that you’ve turned a passing human state into a permanent identity standard. The more pressure you put on yourself to embody the ideal, the more stressed you become, driving the elevated state you’re chasing further and further away, only deepening the longing. We end up trapped in a cycle of endless striving and constant disappointment.

What Happens to the Neglected Parts (Ignorance)

Not everything we push aside turns into a ticking time bomb. Some parts of us simply wither. Think of your quiet simplicity that doesn’t always have a clever answer, your naivety, or even your total mediocrity. These are the qualities that were never really welcomed, praised, or given room to grow. Qualities we fade into the background and seldom recognize — instead dismissing them as “boring” or unworthy of our attention.

But what we repeatedly ignore doesn’t just stay small. Unlike the shadow parts that fume and explode, these gentler aspects don’t make noise. They stop growing. They become underdeveloped and diminish because no one ever checked on them.

Why We Do It

The whole thing works internally exactly like a dysfunctional family dynamic operates externally. The “golden child” eventually collapses under the pressure of having to be perfect all the time — just like our elevated aspects. The “scapegoat” ends up fuming in the dark until they finally explode — just like the parts we suppress. And the “neglected child” quietly withers away from lack of attention, never getting the chance to find out who they really are — just like the parts of us we ignore.

We do to our own inner life exactly what was once done to us. We internalize the voices, the rules, and the patterns of those who raised us, applying them to our own minds today.

We lock away whatever was treated as dangerous. We put on a pedestal whatever was rewarded. We ignore whatever didn’t get us any attention. Over time, these survival tactics just become our automatic default.

Whether we’re terrified of being “too much” or “not enough,” all three habits turn our natural qualities into a distorted emotional weight that draws us down — until we either collapse under the pressure of trying to be perfect, explode from the suppression, or find ourselves sitting alone in the dark, wondering how on earth we got there.

The Return

But when we bring our elevated parts back down to earth and let our hidden parts step into the light again, neither of them turns out to be what we feared or what we longed for. They just become ordinarily human.

Our rejected aspects are freed from the distortion of suppression and the label of being “too much.”

The aspects we were attached to go back to being what they always were.

And even those ordinary, unassuming qualities we ignored reveal their own quiet value when we finally give them a chance.

Continue reading in The Witness Position — Part II: The Solidification of Identity