Whether you like it or not, if you have been socialized (and you have if you are reading this), it matters a great deal to you to be good. Most people think the key to being a good person is to disown, condemn and eradicate anything bad from yourself, while owning, glorifying and maintaining anything good about yourself. The problem is, most people are wrong about this. One of the most powerful things you can do to be a good person is to take ownership of what makes you a bad guy.

First, let’s look at the issue with the mentality that the key to being good is to eradicate what is bad and wrong from you.

1. This is very black or white thinking. Black or white thinking is definitely simpler. But it is rarely a reflection of what is real and true. To understand what I mean, let’s take something like the character trait of envy. Envy, or I should say, what people do in response to envy, can ruin your life. It can make you compete in ways that are self-sabotaging. It eats you up inside and creates intense stress. It can cause you to act in ways that destroy your relationships. To the opposite, it can be a very strong motivator to improve and succeed, it can make you aware of exactly what you want and therefore be a tool for self-awareness, it can enhance relationships because it is a recognition of things like the other person’s achievements and positive attributes.

2. Badness and wrongness is really subjective. It varies so much from one social group to the next, such as one family to the next and one culture to the next. The vast, vast majority of people have not reached the level of consciousness where they truly take others as a part of themselves and thus, intrinsically cannot harm others without harming themselves. A point where other’s suffering is their suffering and other’s joy is their joy. The reality is that if you look at all the things that humans consider bad and wrong, you will notice quite quickly that they are the things that can cause a problem for other people. This is because humans are a group social species. Our survival and ability to thrive depends on being part of the group, being accepted by the group and having closeness with the group. If the group sees us as bad, this does not happen. They reject us and push us away. And because of this, for the vast, vast majority of people on earth, the reason they want to be good, is because goodness is what guarantees them that the social group will accept them and bring them close. After all, this will mean their needs will be met and they can have a high self-esteem. Most people are extrinsically motivated to be good. This is why a person’s sense of “goodness” is defined by a person’s social group. But man do social groups not agree. For example, one family sees competition and a competitive nature as a really bad thing which will lead to the corrosion of relationships. The other sees it as a really good thing which will lead to success. One culture sees direct eye contact as polite and engaged. Another sees it as disrespectful and aggressive. One culture sees blunt honesty as rudeness. The other sees it as integrity. Also, these ideas change over time. Don’t forget that at one time, many people thought slavery was actually good due to things like deeming it necessary for industry and believing that certain people lacked the ability to run their own lives and therefore benefitted more by other people running their lives for them and that it was a useful form of punishment to reform bad behavior. Now, it is widely seen as a terrible thing. Also, today, being educated is considered a good thing. But for a good chunk of history, being educated as a woman was considered a bad thing due to things like thinking that educating women would undermine the institution of marriage and cause a destruction of society, believing that women could not handle mental strain and were easily corrupted and thus, education would lead to nervous collapse and corruption. Take this 1875 quote from Sex and Education; or, a Fair Chance for Girls by Edward Clarke. “While girls can go to school and study as boys do, this will cause them to suffer from “neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system”.

3. So many of the things people think are bad, aren’t actually bad. We just think they are. A good example of this today, is negative emotions. Take anger, anger is an emotion that occurs when someone’s boundaries that define their best interests are being violated, especially when that person feels powerless to getting the other person to stop violating their best interests. The emotion of anger is the reaction to that experience. It is an alarm bell going off within them saying: This is a No for me and motivating the person to do something about it. The emotion is not a behavior. A person may choose to behave in a certain way because they feel anger. But, the behavior is then the next thing up to be questioned in terms of goodness or badness, not the emotion. When a person has no anger, they have no personal boundaries. No sense of what is right and good for them vs. bad and wrong for them. As people we do not deeply, deeply question our sense of what is right and good. We simply accept it and act according to the idea of good and bad that we have been socialized into and indoctrinated with.

4. When we try to reject and push away what is bad about us, it doesn’t actually work. All that happens is, we suppress, deny and disown it. We go into resistance about it. We create an internal triangulation dynamic that causes us to develop a core self concept of shame. We create a split in our own consciousness and these aspects of ourselves go to war. We are forever after at war with ourselves. Also, when we resist something like this, we are actually feeding it energy. So, the monster we are afraid of actually grows bigger and badder and finds new creative ways to rear its head. For example, let’s look at the Latter-Day Saint culture of Utah. Otherwise known to the world as Mormons. This is a sexually repressed culture where sex is seen as bad and wrong outside of very specific parameters. Well, they lead the entire United States in being #1 in online Porn Subscriptions.

5. When we suppress, deny, disown, and reject a “bad” part of ourselves, we push it out of our conscious awareness. We lose self-awareness, most especially of these parts of ourself that we see as bad and wrong. We do this to try to preserve our self-concept. We find it so tormenting to see ourselves as bad, that we decide not to see anything about ourselves that would cause us to consider ourselves bad. This is why no one is the villain in their own story. If you want to know more about this, you can watch my video titled: “Self Concept, The Enemy of Awakening”. When this happens, those traits are actually subconsciously in control of us, and we don’t even know it. As a result, we are hurting people left and right. But we are convinced that what we are doing is good and right. In other words, the cultural taboo around badness, makes it so we can’t face and go into denial of the things within us that would cause us to see ourselves and be seen as bad. But they are none the less very alive and well in us, finding ever sneakier ways to come out.

6. A great many of these things that a person might be judged as “bad” for, are not things that should be eradicated as they are in fact necessary for them to keep. Many things in life have two sides to them. There is a very old saying that I’ve always loved that goes “that which can poison, can also heal and anything that can heal, can also poison.” You will come to find, when you take the time to understand anything deep enough, that each thing comes with what we could call positive and negative potentials. Because of this, you cannot devalue anything in its entirety. Also, a person’s desires and the fulfillment of their potential and purpose is often dependent on things that they consider “bad”.

Because of these reasons (and I’m sure others I could come up with given enough time) the way to become a good person (and in this context we mean someone who behaves in a way that promotes positive outcomes and well-being for other people) is to own your “badness”.

What it means to own your badness is to accept that it is a part of you rather than pushing it away. And from there get very curious so as to see, hear, feel and understand it. And from there, with the information you gathered about it, decide what to do with it consciously. When you do this, you will be faced with the choice to either make changes and shift that thing about you or to accommodate that thing about you in a way that promotes positive outcomes and well-being for other people. Or to do a mix of the two. If you want to learn more about this concept, make sure you also watch my video titled: “Double Down or Choose To Change”.

So that you can understand this, here is an example. Horatio is a very, very competitive person. He has been told that his competitive nature is a real problem. One of his brothers refuses to talk to him because of it. He spent many years feeling guilty about being competitive and then slipping back into being competitive. He used to wish that he could just take a knife and cut that part out of him. Horatio is now a salesman at a renewable energy company. And he has recently tripped on the idea of taking responsibility for his negative personality traits in the work place when it was presented at a business conference. This business talk has caused him to consider that his competitive nature is what pays his bills and is also what makes him more successful than the other salesmen at the company and so, it can’t be all bad. So, he takes some time to really understand his own competitive nature. First, he researches competitiveness in general from a scientific perspective. Then he explored when he first noticed his competitive nature. Then he really explored his current competitive nature. As a part of this, he realized that he wanted to stand out as a young boy badly to be paid attention to and valued by his father, who only valued exceptional things. He noticed that for him, winning is how he gets his sense of self-worth. He feels unmotivated to do anything if there is not competition involved. The competition also focuses him and drives him to more successful results. On top of this, Horatio realized that he really like being in charge. And dominating in a competition makes him feel in charge. So, let’s look at what it would look like for Horatio to either make changes and shift his competitiveness or to accommodate his competitiveness in a way that promotes positive outcomes and well-being for other people. Or to do a mix of the two.

If Horatio makes changes to and shifts his competitive nature, he would do something like let go of the idea that standing out above everyone else is the only way to get attention and go for attention in other ways. He might focus on building his self-worth in other ways and find friends who value other qualities in people than winning. He might put himself in situations where he needs to cooperate rather than compete. He might force himself to celebrate someone else’s success and do trauma work on the trigger that arises as a result of doing this. To go this direction, is to make it so he is no longer so competitive.

If Horatio chooses to accommodate his competitiveness in a way that promotes positive outcomes and well-being for other people, he would do something like acknowledge that because he needs his competitive nature for success at his career, and because he knows his competitive nature is so deeply embedded in him and he isn’t very motivated to change it, he is going to warn people that he is a super competitive person so they can decide if they want to be around that or not and he will not expect people who don’t like it to be in a relationship with him. He is going to select for environments where his competitive nature benefits others. He is going to exercise his competitive nature through sports, so he can get the pent up need out of himself before visiting his family. He is going to get into relationships with women who are not competitive and who support his ambitions and celebrate his wins, because competitive partners bring out the worst manifestations of his competitive nature. And he is going to create the boundary relative to himself that his competitive nature does not move him to do anything to compromise his integrity.

If Horatio were to do a mix of the two, he might decide that by taking conscious ownership of his competitive nature, what is right to do is to do trauma work on the trigger of losing as well as focus on building up his really low self-esteem, because he doesn’t want his competitive nature to be a cover up. At the very same time, he may choose to put himself in environments, like his current profession, where his competitive nature is encouraged and rewarded and choose a partner who compliments his competitive nature at the same time as allow his competitive nature to be exercised in the safe container of athletic sports.

What is important to see is that when you actually take ownership of an aspect of you that you have judged as bad, you are now in a position to do what is best for it and with it. You have a powerful resource on your side. And you can become a good person, even with that thing, because you know how to handle it and use it in a way that promotes positive outcomes and well-being for other people. After all, people may dislike a perfectionist until it is them going under the knife for surgery. And people may dislike someone with a competitive streak, until that person plays for their team. And people may hate a conniver, until they desperately need a new strategy. The only way to ensure that any aspect of you is in alignment with the wellbeing of others, is to see and take ownership of the parts of you that could be against the best interests of others. The only way to be a good guy is to take ownership of what could make you a bad guy.