In 1986, Swaggart exposed fellow Assemblies of God minister Marvin Gorman, who had been accused of having an affair with another pastor’s wife, who was at the time undergoing counseling with Pastor Gorman. Some said this was done out of fear that Gorman was taking away from Swaggart’s audience and donations. Gorman was based in New Orleans and was adding stations throughout the southern region and was beginning to add stations on the west coast and the northeast. Gorman was also in the planning stages for a weekday telecast. Once exposed, Gorman was defrocked from the Assemblies of God and his ministry all but ended. The following year, Swaggart exposed fellow Assemblies Of God televangelist Jim Bakker‘s sexual indiscretions and appeared on the Larry King Show, stating that Bakker was a “cancer in the body of Christ.” He and similarly-minded Baptist evangelist Jerry Falwell investigated Jim Bakker and eventually uncovered his indiscretions. In 1987, Jim Bakker’s ministry was falling apart as a result. As a retaliatory move, Marvin Gorman hired a private detective to follow Swaggart. The detective found Swaggart in a Louisiana motel on Airline Highway with a prostitute, Debra Murphree, and took pictures of the tryst. ^{http://www.answers.com/topic/jimmy-swaggart#Controversies_and_criticisms}

One of the most unusual things that I have witnessed throughout my life is that many of the most religious people I have known have also been the most troubled in many respects and often the most dishonest, perverted and so forth.  Similarly, many of the most seemingly dishonest people in the world who are honest about their “dark sides” are often the most honest and least troubled in the world.  What would have happened had Haggard been honest about being gay?  What would have happened if Swaggart had been open about his attraction to women?  How would the Catholic church be different if all of the Priests who were interested in young men had a different outlet for their sexuality? The point is that none of these people ever learned to be honest about how they felt.  Instead, they hid this information beneath the surface and created personal identities that seemed completely at odds with what was going on inside of them.  There is something very powerful about talking through how we really feel and being open with others about it.  There is also something extremely limiting about not talking about what we believe or how we feel about something.  When we deny how we feel, we tend to attack and be repulsed by others who represent how we feel.  The more you put yourself out there in terms of how you feel, the less likely you are to be affected by your dark side.  Most of us are affected by our dark side and it is continually wreaking havoc throughout our lives and negatively affecting our existences. Your career and life will begin to change when you acknowledge your own dark side. What would you like to do that you cannot justify?  What are you not in congruence with? Several years ago, I was on a small Greek island taking a vacation alone.  I had been playing pool and so forth with the bartender, Niko, who was also the only waiter of the Hotel since there were not really any people staying there.  I was actually very much enjoying the peace of staying on this hotel where there were hardly any other people.  Niko was a really nice guy and very happy.  One evening at around 11:00 pm, while I was dozing off to sleep, he knocked on my door. “C’mon, lets go into town and dance with some girls!” he told me.  I got dressed and walked outside, and we began walking towards town.  We had to cross several large hills and go down numerous dirt paths.  He was not all that proficient in English, but I was enjoying the adventure regardless.  The walk into town must have taken us at least an hour and when we got there we entered a native Greek bar where locals and others were having a nice time talking and dancing. I walked up to the best looking girl who was not dancing, grabbed her hand and pulled her out to the dance floor.  She did not speak more than a few words of English.  At around 4:00 in the morning, she walked back to the hotel with myself and Niko.  It was very late at night and we both ended up falling asleep on separate beds in the hotel room, with our clothes on.  The next morning around 7:00 am, I awoke and went into the bathroom.  Inside the bathroom I saw the girl sitting on the floor. She had taken and entire bottle of shaving cream and sprayed it all over the walls and made various Greek characters.  She was laughing in a strange way at what she had done and appeared to be somewhat delirious.  I thought this entire thing seemed really strange but I was tired and went back to sleep.  I did not know if this was some sort of Greek mating ritual or not, and decided that I better go along with it. Around 11:00 am I woke up again and went into the bathroom. The girl was sleeping on a separate bed.  This time she had taken all of my shampoo, cologne and other stuff and emptied it out all over the the bathroom.  I decided to get up and go down to lunch.  I took a shower without any shampoo and did not shave, and got the girl up and we walked down to the restaurant on the beach. Niko did not start work until around 5:00, so he was sitting at a table.  He was having a great time.  He was smoking a cigarette and drinking shots of a Greek liquor called Ouzo.  He spoke a few works of Greek to the girl I had brought with and she answered back to him in Greek.  He made an unusual face and I sensed something was wrong.  Niko, the girl and I all sat there and the girl did around 5 shots in less than a few minutes.  She seemed to be having a really good time.  I had sort of blocked out a lot of what had happened in the bathroom.  The display she had made on the walls of the bathroom had disturbed me, but I still was not sure what to make of it.  Since she did not speak much English I had no way of asking her to explain any of this, either. “We all have good time last night!” Niko exclaimed, raising a shot glass.  “This is how we live in Greece.  We have good time!” he told me.   He had ordered a giant spread of all sorts of Greek food that was on the table in front of us.  He was very excited as he explained one local delicacy to me after another.  There was no one in the restaurant except us. About 20 minutes into our meal, the the owner of the hotel approached the cafe we were sitting in and started speaking to Niko.  He appeared to be pretty angry.  Niko started speaking to the girl and then she got up and walked away to where I could not see her. Niko and the hotel owner argued back and forth for a few more moments and then the owner left. “What was that all about?”  I asked. “He said you seem like nice person and does not understand why you threw soap all over his bathroom,” Niko said. I explained that I did not do this and that it was the girl.  A few seconds later, the owner who was serving us food came up to me with his wife who had been working back in the kitchen.  They started yelling at Niko as well.  Apparently, the girl I was with had done the exact same thing in the restaurant bathroom.  She had thrown the soap all over the walls and was in the process of emptying the toilet paper canisters all over the bathroom. Niko explained to me that the girl was insane. I was starting to understand this.  What happened next was about the most amazing thing I had ever seen.  The island I was on was very small, and there were not any hospitals.  The woman in the restaurant made some calls and within around 30 minutes several older people from the island appeared, went into the bathroom and grabbed the girl, put her in a car and drove her away. “What are they going to do with her?” I asked. “We are going to talk to her for the next few days, or weeks, until she gets better.  This is how they handle things around here.” Niko explained that this sort of thing happens with people from time to time.  People on the island have sometimes gone crazy and lost their minds and this has been happening from hundreds of years.  When this occurs, the people from the village come and they talk to the person as a group for days and days until the person gets better.  They sit around speaking to the person as a group and do not stop until they are convinced the person is “cured” of whatever is wrong with them.  They ask them thousands of questions. “All they do is force the person to give honest answers and tell everyone what they are really feeling and what is wrong.  Once the person does this, they always get better.” “Will she get better?” I asked Niko. “Sure, of course.  Everyone always gets better.” A month or so after I returned to the United States, Niko sent me a letter and in the letter he talked about the girl and how she had gotten better and was now perfectly normal.  Niko said she had moved to the island from a larger city because she had something bad happened with her friends who had died in an automobile accident she had been involved in.  Apparently, whatever had happened was so bad that the girl had been drawn over the edge and unable to speak about it.  I seem to remember she had been one of the causes of the accident. What was so incredible to me was how the people of this small Greek Island had learned to cure people over the hundreds of years.  With no psychiatric hospitals or psychologist, all they did was put the person in a big circle and start asking them question after question until they were able to confront the truth of whatever was wrong with them.  This girl had not been able to confront the truth, which put her in a position of becoming close to insane. We respect people in the world who are in accord with and understand their dark sides.  We often do not trust people who are not in touch with their dark sides.  We need to be able to talk through our deepest and most profound feelings in order to really be out there in the world.  We need to be in touch with these feelings in order to truly experience the success and power we are capable of.  The lesson I got out of this small Greek island and my experience with this girl, is that confronting our truths can often save us.  What was so fascinating about this experience was that what had happened on the Greek island was not a product of business.  With only a few thousand people living on the island, they did not have a huge medical industry or network of psychologists who would prescribe her drugs or recommend a course of therapy.  All they had on the island was the people and they had a way of coming together that cured people.  They would get people to confront whatever was hurting them and making them not in accord with the small society they lived in.  The society was so small and dependent upon everyone being well that they had devised a “cure” over 100′s of years that actually worked. Carl Jung describes that “shadow” as aspects of ourselves that we are not proud of.  A shadow is part of the unconscious mind that contains shortcomings, repressed weaknesses and various instincts.  The Shadow contains every part of us that is unconscious, denied and undeveloped.  According to Jung, everyone carries a shadow “and the less embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”  On the island, there was a part of this girl that was being brought out by the people on the island and then rectified whom she was.  She had not come to terms with something horrible that she had been involved in, and the idea of not coming to terms with this was something that had almost driven her off the edge.  In fact, she had almost become insane. I have known women who were sexually abused by their fathers and did not even remember it until they had been in therapy for years.  People in situations like this may attempt suicide, or cut themselves.  They repress incredible feelings and bury them as far as they can.  While most people do not have experiences like this, we all have aspects of ourselves and our consciousness which we repress.  We blame others for our feelings and try and repress what we really feel. I have been to various retreats throughout the years in which individuals ostensibly experience incredible psychological breakthroughs which transform their lives forever.  Most of these breakthroughs invariably involve bringing feelings from the unconscious to the conscious which have been suppressed.  This is done in various ways.  It is done by people being placed in circles and yelled at until they confront the truth.  It is done by people beating pillows with baseball bats and screaming until they get to the bottom of stuff.  There are multiple ways that people are challenged to confront their unconscious.  People suppress various things and yet the things they are repressing still manage to act themselves out.  The commonality between what Jung is writing about, the girl on the island, and what occurs at these retreats is that people are being forced to be honest with themselves and what is going on beneath the surface. Prior to being honest with themselves, peoples’ lives are affected unconsciously by their shadows.  One of the most common ways we do this is through projection.  For example, we project onto other people the parts of ourselves we want to deny.  We generally will not readily identify with the characteristic we are interested in denying and, instead, put this all onto other people.  People that are carrying a part of ourselves that we deny will make us extremely uncomfortable.  People with this characteristic may repulse us.  We will be highly critical of them and believe they are against our moral ideals and values.  Generally, the things that irritate us the most are those that are part of our shadow that we are denying. One of the most interesting things about the Shadow is that it is something that continues appearing again and again in our lives.  Your career will never reach its full potential until you learn to take control of your personal shadows and see what is affecting your life in a negative way.  You need to be honest with yourself and understand what you are not coming to terms with deep down.  You may be shying away from certain types of work, achieving certain things, or repulsed by certain types of work that really represents who you would like to be.  You may be interested in being a cook, but feel you need to be a business person because this is not respectable enough.  You may be interested in making money but believe people who make money are evil and so shy away from this.  You may be interested in being a farmer, but have negative connotations about what it means to be a farmer.  You have no way of knowing what aspects of yourself that you are repressing are holding you back.  You will begin to achieve more in your career and life when you allow your unconscious to be conscious. THE LESSON Come to terms with how you feel and be open about it, and you will be much less likely to be affected by your dark side. Acknowledge your deepest and most profound feelings in order to improve your career and life. Your career will never reach its full potential unless you gain control of the personal matters that are negatively affecting your life. Allow your unconscious to be conscious and face what you are avoiding deep down to achieve your potential.