Why do we always want to be right? Why do we run and hide? And why is this behavior so hard to give up?

Sorting out answers to these important questions requires we first get to know the Little-L portion of the Lower Self. This is our inner child, the part that says, "I can't"

It holds young, split-off parts of our psyche that we must call back. So our childhood is where we must search for understanding.

The perfect imperfections

The problem is not that our parents weren't perfect. In fact, their imperfections are what made them perfect for being our parents. For their imperfections worked to surface our own.

After all, why come to this difficult dimension if we are not going to see what our work is?

Our parents were chosen, then, for a very good reason: they are the perfect people to surface our split and expose our faults. Note, if our life experience didn't involve a traditional mom-and-dad family, we still got the setup our soul needed. No one's life comes as a surprise to the Spirit World.

Our parents—our whole family, really—have been carefully selected for the way they interact with our inner makeup. As a result, we all experience challenging childhood experiences. This is unavoidable.

The more personal healing work we accomplished in previous incarnations, the less rocky these relationships will be. We all have free will—we always have and always will—and are now experiencing the effects of causes we, ourselves, set into motion.

Believe it or not, life on Earth is fair and just. If it doesn't seem that way, we have not yet uncovered and unraveled all the hidden aspects. We have not yet discovered the whole truth.

Consider how siblings often have markedly different responses to their childhood atmosphere. This all relates to the size and depth of our pre-existing soul dent.

Over time, we develop karma with other souls. This is cause and effect that operates over many incarnations. Indeed, we each travel through many lifetimes with certain souls, until we finally resolve all our issues with them.

Why we must find ourselves

Our universal challenge is to uncover and heal the hidden belief that we don't matter. Because, ever since the Fall, we have lost our awareness that we are each special, lovable and loved.

We are all—each and every one of us—an aspect of the Oneness. As such, we are each an important aspect of God, of all that is. But due to the dark, distorted layers of our Lower Self—which we acquired through the Fall—we have lost our connection with our source.

We have lost touch with our own selves. We no longer know who we truly are.

This is why we must now find and get to know ourselves.

Currently, in this separated, limited and temporary state, we think we are unlovable and not enough. We think we don't matter—to others, to God, and even to ourselves. As a result, we are born into childhood circumstances that support our untrue hidden convictions.

To feel unlovable and unloved as a child is deeply painful. It's also humiliating.

We spend our lives trying to avoid feeling this.

We believe the lack of love we received proves there is something wrong with us. And we fear letting others see this "truth" about us. We also fear feeling the pain of this.

It is this fear that fuels our defenses.

Why we fight the wrong way

Fear, then, is one of the three primary faults we must each grapple with. It's based on the illusory notion that pain is something to fear—that it has the power to annihilate us—and that there must be something wrong with us.

We mistakenly believe that we are broken. Although, in some ways, this is true. For, indeed, we are here to heal our fractured psyches.

This mistaken conclusion leads to our second main fault, which is pride. Through pride, we attempt to overcome our missing sense of self-worth by becoming better-than.

When our ego colludes with this little-l part of our Lower Self, we become competitive. Our goal is to prove to others and ourselves that we do matter—that we're enough.

This striving to be better-than is not the same as our desire to be our best selves. No, this striving is propelled by a false conclusion that we need to right a wrong. As a result, we think we must now always be right.

Maybe if we're perfect, we think, we will win.

Such immature thinking pairs with old, stuck feelings, and arises from our wounded inner child. It stems from the dualistic trap of our current black-and-white thinking.

In duality, everything splits in half—a good half and a bad half. All children see the world this way. In this limited reality, everything good relates to life and everything bad relates to death.

We fight, then, as though our lives depend on it.

What we're fighting is the illusory idea that we're not good enough. This is the untruth we must learn to die into. In doing so, we will learn that there is truly nothing to fear.

This is the only to learn this.

Further, it's not true, what we currently believe to be true about life and ourselves. It will be humbling to discover that we have been wrong,

Yet, coming out of this illusion is how we step into freedom.

Using our will the right way

What lies on the other side of the illusion of duality? Unity. This is the dimension we gradually move toward when we face into both sides of duality. But to do that, we must face our old pain.

Each time we die into our old pain and unravel our confused thinking, we clarify what lives in our shadow—in our darkness.

This is how we bring more light into life.

Our true value has never been in question. We are the ones who are not currently in truth. This is what we must now fight to transform. For it takes effort to untangle our conflicts, sort out our misunderstandings, and release our old pain.

This is what it means to do the work.

Which brings us to our third major fault: self-will. Our ultimate goal is to align our will with God's will. To use our will in service to the divine. To do this, we must learn to trust God—to trust that it's all good.

Even this difficult journey through our unconscious is for the good.

Currently, though, we are using our will to serve ourselves. We are stubborn and we resist facing ourselves. We rebel against authority and destroy opportunities. We're impatient, demanding and always want to get our way.

We want to have more. To be better. To win.

But none of these things are based on truth. For the truth is, this is not a "me versus the other" world. It's always "me and the other."

On a deeper level of reality—the level of unity, of Oneness, of our Higher Self—we are all already in connection.

When we're lost in the illusion of duality, we don't realize that when we hurt someone else, we hurt ourselves. Yet this is true reality, in the greater reality. That's where we are all heading, where peace and harmony prevail.

When we do our healing work, we are learning how to get there.  

All our other faults cascade from these three basic faults of fear, pride and self-will. And they can always be found together. Meaning, if we find one, we should search for the other two.

As we do this, we will come to know our Lower Self. We will see how it operates to keep us in separation. And we will unearth the untruth—the wrong conclusions, or images—it uses to justify this.

If we want to know ourselves, we must first come to see how our own Lower Self is operating. Then, and only then, we can start to make different choices. This is key for making progress on our spiritual path.

But there's still another problem we must deal with: the Big-L Lower Self.

In Jill's Experience

I've been doing self-development work for a few decades, as has Scott. So it's humbling to admit that in our first six months together, my young inner self ran off at least a half-dozen times. It was exhausting for both of us.

One minute we're fine, the next, where's Jill? Seldom was it over anything significant.

That's the thing about our primary relationships. They drop into the slot of our original wound. As such, they rub against whatever hasn't been healed yet.

I can claim considerable progress, though. I don't blame Scott for making me feel hurt. And I don't drop into a hole of victimhood. So I don't make him responsible for fixing my pain.

This is my work, and I take responsibility for doing it.

I've found it be incredibly healing to let Scott hold me while I sob it out. This is true, even when he's the one who triggered my Emotional Reaction. Like me, Scott is imperfect.

But at this point, we both know how this goes. We realize something happened, and we'll want to sort it out. In the moment, though, what matters is attending to this young part that's hurting.

I can welcome her and make space for letting go of the old pain. I hold in my awareness that 1) this isn't all of me, 2) I'm currently caught in illusion—there must be some untruth in me—and, 3) we can come out the other side of this together and more whole.

As the Pathwork Guide teaches, any time we're in disharmony, we're not in truth. And the truth is, we're all one. Scott and I are on the same team. The wounded parts of me don't need to be banished.

Scott and I work equally hard to clear out old debris so we can be in harmony together. For that to happen, we must both be willing to do our own work.

In Scott's Experience

The biggest challenge I've experienced working with the Little-L Lower Self is its tendency to go into a trance. Take the tendency to hide in plain sight, and go back to the story of skiing at Lake Tahoe.

If I could have remained aware of this habituation, and noticed immediately that part of me was hiding, the interaction between Jill and me would likely have been very different. We could have both stayed present with each other.

But that is the nature of these things.

When I first learned about this process a decade ago, it explained so much. I had a teacher at the time who was focused on this stage of the work. The Little-L Lower Self lives in the past, she said, where it got stuck.

This split-off consciousness has its own beliefs, will, feelings and sense of time. It just spins in an endless pattern, saying something like, "It's not safe, therefore I will hide." And it stays just below our conscious awareness.

When it is activated, this part is not aware that we are stuck, once again, in an endless loop. My teacher showed me the first step is always to break the trance.

For if I'm stuck in the trance, I will continue to act from that place. That's what happened in Tahoe. I simply wasn't aware that part of me had begun hiding behind a mask.

It's really helpful to have a partner who can say, "I notice something is off. What's going on here?" That alone can sometimes break the trance. This enables me to bring higher functioning to the situation.

It can be disheartening to keep repeating this interaction. But each time I bring consciousness to it, each time I listen to that little boy in me that felt lost all those years ago, I heal a little more.

The power of the trance drops just a bit.

I'm able to exit more easily, and to stay a bit more present to Jill. Over time, those little bits add up.