Owning Your Shadow
How many times have we referred to Alice in Wonderland in the past couple of years? Don’t we all know someone who disappeared down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures and world views? There are the vaccinated and antivaxxers, there are those in detention versus the freedom advocates. The continuously moving Covid19 goal posts appear similar to the unpredictable Queen’s Croquet Ground. Heads get chopped off, jobs are lost – and the Cheshire Cat grins. In our virtual world, reality has become a very pliable material indeed – with painful consequences.
As these polarities between those who are for or against an issue harden in fear, I am reminded of what C. G. Jung called the shadow. The moment we “fall from paradise” and leave a state of union and wholeness at birth, we arrive in a world ruled by duality. Suddenly there are day and night, do’s and don’ts, good and evil. Social conditioning assures that our whole being is sorted into a reject basket and a public-relations one. Certain abilities are praised, while for others we are punished. We have wanted qualities for which we are loved and accepted; and we have unwanted character traits we learn to suppress, hide and tone down, because they are rejected by those we depend on.
This is a necessary socialization process to foster ego-strength; the ego being the agent to act in the day-to-day world. (C. Jung 1968) The development of such ego-shaping values is based on the religious and cultural belief systems of our tribe, and as such they remain widely unquestioned, because everybody is into the same morals.
When I lived in Africa, I learned that voluptuous women were considered the most beautiful and teenagers struggled to put on sufficient weight to be attractive, whereas Western young women do everything to be as thin as possible, because this is the idealized body shape of their culture. The Judaic religions teach that sexuality and spirituality are opposites: The priest has to be celibate, Mary conceived as a virgin, and the devil is a hairy, horny seductive threat. While in Hinduism temples are decorated with deities and their tantric dakinis in sexual union. In some societies, a woman’s body needs to be veiled and hidden, in others a shape-enhancing dress code is considered beautiful.
Any war is fuelled by shadow projections. There are the opposites of communists and democrats, right-wing and left-wing politicians, believers and infidels, police and criminals – and now we also have the vaccinated and those, who are ardently anti vax.
Projecting the shadow is always the easiest way to manage our own. Why is the world obsessed with watching crime on TV? So we can be the good citizens, after we have discharged our antisocial tendencies by projecting them on the actors? Many therapists working with families know of the Black Sheep, the one who carries the shadow projection for all the other family members. Collectively shamed villains such as murderers and rapists, are rarely understood in the context of the often desperate, abusive and chaotic upbringing that shaped them.
We project our highest aspirations as a golden shadow onto movie stars, supermodels, Nobel Prize winners or sporting heroes without much consideration for the often brutal discipline and narcissistic self-focus it took to get there. And we are even more intrigued, when one of these heroes has a fall from grace and the shadow side becomes apparent. Such an event fills the newspapers, and hogs prime time on the news. Even though physics tell us, where there is a lot of light, there is also a lot of shadow.
Whenever someone triggers or upsets us, when an issue presses our buttons, it is usually a sure sign, that we are dealing with our own shadow projection. If the matter were not part of my psyche, it would not upset me. Because we have suppressed a significant part of ourselves for the price of being ‘good and lovable’, just like when we were kids, this does not mean this aspect is no longer part of us.
It is during those times, when we are upset and angry, or feel depressed and without drive, that the shadow demands attention. If we do not take these emotional states as a call to self-reflect, we split into our version of a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. When too much of our libido becomes suppressed, we are secretly driven to engage with what excites and fascinates us. If we do not own our shadow, it claims its price as loss of energy, loss of power and very often loss of money. Hidden passions such as addictions are expensive, secret affairs can cost a marriage, and embezzling finances may end a high-flying career.
The Aztecs chose a Bogey Man to carry the collective shadow. The Bogey Man was supremely powerful and did not have to work, but he was ritually sacrificed at the end of each year - and with him all the dark deeds of the community. (Johnson, 1993)
When I lived in the Black Forest in Germany, the time of carnival, which is Latin for “the feast of the flesh”, was celebrated over many days as a sexually explicit, drunken, lawless event, which ended with the beginning of lent. It enabled this catholic, rural community to release the pent-up shadow energy, which had built up over the year, especially at the end of winter, when families had been locked up in their snow-covered houses for months on end, eating stale food, getting on each other’s nerves.
Which brings me back to the theme of our Covid19 lockdown. As we emerge from home detention, I sense a similar tension. The urge to celebrate a “freedom-day” is not unlike the carnival release I witnessed close up for many years. One Melbourne woman celebrated by getting a hotel room on her own. Others are dancing in the streets. There is also a tremendous amount of fear and uncertainty in the community, which fuels shadow projections. Fear to get sick, fear to die, fear to get manipulated, controlled, or conspired against. The definition of trauma is feeling “overwhelmed and helpless”, a state many experience at present.
In therapy the aim is always towards shadow integration. Learning to love the other side, to embrace the age-old fears of rejection; taking the projection back; understanding and accepting the angry one, the upset one, the inner thief, the rebel, the loser, the mad one, and especially the afraid one in oneself. We all host a whole menagerie of anthropomorphic creatures within. As we get to know them, the lines become more blurred, the world is less black and white, or less right and wrong. As we make friends with our fears and accept them as part of our human vulnerability, we can reconnect with glimpses of our wholeness; we begin to tap into the vast reservoir of inner gold. (Johnson, 2008) This inner wealth is complex and multifaceted and it transcends the ego. As the demarcation lines between right and wrong become blurred, we discover that love is more important than an opinion. Loving ourselves with all our faults and weaknesses enables us to also love others with all their crazy ideas and idiosyncrasies.
Carl Jung’s image for shadow integration was the Night Sea Journey though the dark night of the soul. (C. G. Jung 1968). Each time we descend, we get the opportunity to re-member a once split off aspect of our Self; we get the chance to reclaim the rejected and feared. Every time we return from another one of these ventures into the underworld, we bring back the water of life, a sense of renewal, as the inner gold of increased wholeness and authenticity.
Bibliography
Johnson, R. A. 2008. Inner gold; understanding psychological projection.
—. 1993. Owning your own shadow; understanding the dark side of the psyche.
Jung, C. G. 1968. Mysterium Conjunctionis II, in Collected Works 14. Bollingen: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C.G. 1968. The structure and dynamics of the psyche, in Collected Works Vol 6. Bollingen: Princeton University Press.
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