Shadow Work Spiritual Life Coaching: Chronic Condemners, Criticizers, and Complainers

Shadow Work Spiritual Life Coaching can provide you with the tools you’ll need to shine a light on your repressed shadows and bring an end to criticizing, condemning and complaining.

One of my favorite quotes from motivational author Dale Carnegie is, “Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain, and most fools do.” Criticism and complaining are also forms of judgment and in this way, the ego manages to feel better about itself through the act of continuously deriding others. In this aspect of the shadow, it is able to rationalize that it has a superior position or “place in the world” than the individual with whom it is criticizing.

Let me premise this by saying that criticism can be beneficial and non-egoic if its pronounced in a way that is not unsavory. For example, a movie critic may be offering helpful advice if her true intent is to better the quality of motion pictures and it’s said in a way that is diplomatic instead of derisive. The type of criticism I’m referring to here is not of the constructive type but rather has to do with contemptuous derision that ultimately serves no purpose other than to mentally bully the other person. In other words, it’s a personal attack.

Like destructive criticism, complaining serves the ego’s purpose to feel superior to others, superior to life, and little else. Chronic complainers complain about life all the time as if they’re superior to it. The emotional pain-body can sustain itself through the act of complaining alone. When you complain, what you’re truly doing is vocalizing your own blocked feelings of inferiority in relationship to the world in which you live. You’re playing the role of the victim to life, rather than honoring or respecting what is.

Chronic complainers tend to drain your energy because when they know they’ve got a listening audience to project their own verbal garbage, they’re not easily muted. Complaining is the pain-body’s way of venting all the negative thoughts it receives from the egoic mind on a daily basis. Psychologists have estimated that we think about 60,000 thoughts in a given day. Well you can probably guess what percentage of these thoughts are negative if you’re a chronic complainer. Garbage in means garbage out.

Like verbal bulldozers, chronic condemners obliterate everything in their paths because they’ve convinced themselves that they know it all, and will frequently remind you that they have a better idea, better solution, better way of doing things than what is currently in place. Nothing that already is meets with their approval. They simply know better, always.

Because they are so married to their own egotistical opinions, condemners have left no room, no openness to other concepts, ideas, or solutions other than what they have already formed. And in spite of piles of evidence to the contrary, these people will continue to stubbornly stand by their own invalid arguments. Behind the veil, these people are scared to death that they will be seen as unintelligent, uninformed, unenlightened, or just plain wrong. They fear it so much that they create their own grizzly reality based on their own worst fears.

Shadow Work Spiritual Life Coaching can help us to become cognizant of an unconscious impetus to criticize, condemn, or complain. This will help us to transcend the role of “victim” to life, and learn how to accept and honor the present moment, no matter what it brings.

Personal Life Coach, Jason Lincoln Jeffers is the founder of The Art of Transformation, a company devoted to teaching Self Realization to the world. His Personal Life Coaching program uniquely combines spiritual wisdom with self transcendence, holistic wellness coaching, life path astrology, pain-body counseling, heart-based manifestation, and relationship coaching.