The Shadow Self – The Authentic Self

Last Sunday, I mentioned the “shadow” and when Karen asked about it, this gave me a great segue to this Sunday’s topic. So, in order to find out what the shadow is and how to deal with it, I turned to Elizabeth Lesser and the Seeker’s Guide. She says:

SHADOW-WORK

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” —JESUS

Jung called the secret shame and the old voices buried in the dark heart the “shadow.” He wrote, “by shadow I mean the ‘negative’ side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide….” In their excellent anthology, Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams use the term “shadow-work” to describe “the ongoing inclusion of that which was rejected” in our psyches. “The goal of shadow-work,” they write, “cannot be accomplished with a simple method or trick of the mind. Rather, it is a complex, ongoing struggle that calls for great commitment, vigilance, and the loving support of others who are traveling a similar road.” Jung himself warned that shadow-work was a delicate process: “Each piece of the shadow that we realize has a weight, and our consciousness is lowered to that extent when we take it into our boat. Therefore, one might say that the main art of dealing with the shadow consists in the right loading of our boat: if we take too little, we fly away from reality and become, as it were, a fluffy white cloud without substance in the sky, and if we take too much we may sink our boat.”

We may know people who float around like clouds, unwilling or unable to recognize their own darkness, who consistently try to cover their anger with a smiley-face sticker, or their grief with a joke. And we also may know those whose boats are sinking from the weight of their unconscious emotions—those people who take everything to heart, and then don’t know how to handle their feelings. They may be full of rage or despair, or embittered by the trauma and misfortune that have come their way. Shadow-work is a balancing act, a slow process and a stage of growth whereby we fish in the waters for the darkness that leads to the light. In A Little Book on the Human Shadow, my favorite of all the shadow literature, Robert Bly writes a short passage that describes the shadow beautifully:

“ Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents’ love, put it in the bag. ” Elizabeth Lesser

When we were one or two years old we had what we might visualize as a 360-degree personality. Energy radiated out from all parts of our body and all parts of our psyche. A child running is a living globe of energy. We had a ball of energy, all right; but one day we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts of that ball. They said things like: “Can’t you be still?” Or, “It isn’t nice to want to kill your brother.” Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents’ love, put it in the bag. By the time we go to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say: “Good children don’t get angry over such little things.” So we take our anger and put it in the bag. By the time my brother and I were twelve in Madison, Minnesota, we were known as “the nice Bly boys.” Our bags were already a mile long.

All of us are dragging a bag of shadows behind us. Being a girl, I put in my bag things like my sexuality, my aggression, and the tidelike ebbs and flows of my emotions. My mother told me girls weren’t supposed to be sexual beings; my father expected that women should be sweet and yielding; and the culture maintained that women’s moods were way too fickle to be trusted. All that went in the bag. “We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again,” writes Bly. Shadow-work is getting those parts out of the bag in such a way that we heal ourselves and our relationships without causing more harm.

“ Each piece of the shadow that we realize has a weight, and our consciousness is lowered to that extent when we take it into our boat. ” Elizabeth Lesser

It’s helpful to read about the shadow, but I cannot stress enough the importance of experiential work in this area of the spiritual path. The beauty, and the terror, of shadow-work is that it demands we make our spirituality real. Noble ideals are put to the test if we take shadow-work to heart. If we just make an intellectual investigation of human darkness and the ideas of the shadow and projection, we’ll have done nothing more than add a few more words to our vocabulary. . . .

I had all the right vocabulary for a long time before I was challenged to make my shadow-work real. When my stepson first came from Los Angeles to live with us full-time, he was eleven years old and, as far as I perceived, from another planet. Where my other sons, ages ten and thirteen, were calm and relatively quiet, Michael, quite literally, bounced off the walls. He was so full of energy that he was often out of control—and I was determined to control him. “We see the shadow most indirectly,” write Zweig and Abrams, “in distasteful traits and actions of other people, out there where it is safer to observe it. When we react intensely to a quality in an individual or group—such as laziness or stupidity, sensuality, or spirituality—and our reaction overtakes us with great loathing or admiration, this may be our shadow showing. We project by attributing this quality to the other person in an unconscious effort to banish it from ourselves, to keep ourselves from seeing it within.”

Soon after he moved in, we discovered that on top of his natural exuberance, Michael also was suffering from Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological disorder that manifests itself in tics and hyperactivity. Although it was mild, and many people never knew about it, Michael’s Tourette’s was hard on him. It manifested itself in tics and restlessness, which he tried to mask by constant activity.

I felt as if there were two strangers living in my home: one was Michael—a little, wild stranger; the other was myself—a big, controlling stranger. At work I was the one known for her sensitivity and compassion: I listened to coworkers’ problems; I championed our scholarship fund; I worked to make our staff more diverse. Now, someone with problems, someone different from the rest of the family, was living with me. Did I greet the “other” with love and compassion? No, I did not. I was horrified to find that I was not the person I thought I was. Michael was just a little boy, suffering not only from a traumatic move from his mother’s house to his father’s new family, but also from a disorder beyond his control. Instead of trying to love him, I tried to make Michael change. I wanted him to calm down, to sit still, to fit into the mold. We entered into a battle of wills.

“Doing shadow-work,” write Zweig and Abrams, “means asking ourselves to examine closely and honestly what it is about a particular individual that irritates us or repels us; what it is about a racial or religious group that horrifies or captivates us; and what it is about a lover that charms us and leads us to idealize him or her. Doing shadow-work means making a gentleman’s agreement with one’s self to engage in an internal conversation that can, at some time down the road, result in an authentic self-acceptance and a real compassion for others.”

The year before Michael had come to live with us, I had wanted to have a Fresh Air kid—a child from a disadvantaged home—spend the summer with our family. Why not share the bounty of our life with a child who needed the kind of love we had to give? I argued to my husband. He argued back that there was already enough chaos in the house and we’d better wait until we were more stable. After Michael had been with us for a year, my resistance to his behavior was becoming a big issue in our marriage. One night, in the middle of a fight, my husband said something that finally got through to me: “Remember that Fresh Air kid you wanted? Well, here he is! He’s Michael.” That’s when my shadow-work began.

For the next few years I made my relationship with Michael my spiritual path. In ways more graphic than I ever would have chosen, I got to see aspects of my shadow self: how desperately, at the expense of other people, I wanted to control life; how arrogant and aggressive I was; how right I thought I was; how conditional my love was. Every time I would spout loving-kindness philosophy at work, and then go home and resist loving Michael, I would feel sick. Did I really want to walk my heartfulness talk? This was as good a chance as any to do it. Over and over I went through the process of shadow-work: feeling my resistance to Michael’s inability to sit still and just be; beating myself up for it on the one hand, or blaming Michael for it on the other; then going deeper into my feelings—using the ways in which I reacted intensely to aspects of Michael’s behavior to learn more about myself; and eventually forgiving myself, forgiving Michael, and accepting the situation; and finally, taking responsibility to make our family work.
In the end, we both made it work. Michael went through his teen years, got a handle on his energy, and became a gifted actor and basketball player.

I loosened up and learned how to give more of myself, how to love more fully. Where he would say that I became a second mother to him, I would say that he taught me, firsthand, how love heals and how control doesn’t. Michael is my son by choice, which makes our bond rare and precious. Choosing to work on my relationship with Michael was as important a step on my spiritual path as the more glamorous-sounding ones. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem or long meditation retreats might provide a shot of inspiration, but shadow-work creates long-lasting change. I could have remained shut down. Or I could have opened just enough to maintain a cold-war kind of peace in our family. God knows, that’s what I would have preferred to do many times. But my shadow was insistent, and thankfully, I listened to it and got a taste of what the Jungian analyst Marion Woodman calls “the dignity of unprojected human love.”

I believe in the possibility of psychological change. This kind of faith is helpful during shadow-work because the territory is often dark and full of conflict. Going through the darkness may take a long time. Real growth happens in stages, and sometimes a stage may seem to go on and on forever. Trust the process. Reach out. Get support and help from friends and healers. Be on the lookout for your own resistance to change. Read the feedback life provides. And don’t fear that by bringing your negativity out of the shadows and into the light that it will overpower you or run amok. As Jung says, “Once the negative side of your battle has become conscious, it will lose power.”

Lesser, Elizabeth. The Seeker’s Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure (Kindle Locations 3390-3467). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I want to finish with another wonderful quote by Rainer Marie Rilke who wrote:

“So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?”