This is James Hollis talking, in Why Good People Do Bad Things:

“All of us have stuck places in our contemporary life. We are well aware of some of them, and we mobilize New Year’s resolutions to overthrow them, albeit with mixed results. Others are less conscious and reassert themselves through our daily reflexive responses to ordinary life. These stuck places, if tracked, always reveal an invisible filament that leads back to some archaic fear that, overwhelming the child, still has the residual energy to intimidate, even shut down, the adult. Taking on this fear, however real or unreal it may prove to be, is the Shadow task that the psychopathology of everyday life brings to the surface and to challenge each of us.

An example of this archaic dilemma might be found in the preoccupation with dieting that forms so many of our resolutions. On the surface, all we have to do is eat less, but we slip into old patterns easily enough and the pounds return. What is the archaic fear that eating is surreptitiously “treating”? Such intimidating fear, if brought into consciousness, would ask: “If  I do not eat this, what then will nourish me?” Rather than  go unnourished emotionally, we will continue to transfer our psychological needs onto matter, and the pounds persist.

The paradox of healing our sundry pathologies is that only by a continuing attention to them, and a respect for what they are telling us, can we ever be free of them. In the end, we do not wish to believe that our life is governed by the agenda of others, or by fear, or by our defended response to both. We with to be here, as we are, as who we really are. In “the psychopathology of everyday life” we are invited to confront a great deal of personal Shadow material. Even if this summons asks us to revisit wounded places, we are progressively brought to larger life through a more differentiated relationship to our own psychological complexity. When we do not look within, something within is looking at us nonetheless, subtly making decisions for us. We wish to respect our pathos — our suffering — yet not be passive or pathetic.”

–James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things, Understanding Our Darker Selves, Gotham Books, 2007, p 81-82.

…when we do not look within, something within is looking at us nonetheless, subtly making decisions for us…

…The paradox of healing our sundry pathologies is that only by a continuing attention to them, and a respect for what they are telling us, can we ever be free of them…