A Brief Tour of the Shadow
Think of your ego as your self-image. Your self-image is how you see yourself—your appearance, abilities, and personality.
Parts of our self-image we like; other parts we don’t. To avoid dealing with the parts we don’t like—our moral defects or shortcomings (our fears, selfishness, and judgments about others), instincts, and weaknesses—we repress them. By repressing these undesirable aspects of ourselves, we become unconscious to them.
But like when we sweep dust under a rug, the repressed aspects are still present, only we can’t see that they belong to us. Instead, we project these undesirable aspects onto others: we see the undesirable trait outside of us, projecting the trait onto other people.
This is why projection, in psychoanalysis, is considered one of the ego’s defense mechanisms: To protect itself when the ego doesn’t know how to deal with parts of itself—ugly parts, if you will—it simply pushes them out of consciousness (repression) and then projects them outside of it (projection). Once projected, the ego no longer has to deal with the defect.
All of our undesirable traits—anything we fear will damage our self-image—gets repressed out of consciousness. Carl Jung labeled this composite of repressed qualities our shadow. Our shadow is all the nastiness (part of our full humanness) we have within us, but can’t accept. When we have a strong negative reaction to something someone does or says, it’s likely that we’re “projecting our shadow” onto them. If we weren’t projecting our shadow, we probably wouldn’t be having such a strong reaction.
Contacting the Shadow
To development psychologically, then, requires us to contact our shadow: to get to know it, understand it, and accept it as a part of what we are.
With integrity, we begin to take note any time we’re having negative reactions to others. When someone angers us, for example, we can determine what qualities we see in the other person that is activating us. Let’s say a neighbor is being unkind. We can ask ourselves: What aspect of ourselves is unkind?
We accept our shadow by bringing it into conscious awareness and no longer repressing or projecting it onto others. (This, of course, doesn’t mean that your neighbor wasn’t unkind. He may very well be, but if you weren’t repressing your own unkindness or some other attribute you saw in him, you wouldn’t become so emotionally activated by him.)
Another way of contacting the shadow is through the 12-Step Program, which has shadow work built into Step 4: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” This step requires us to examine our defects and shortcomings in a benign, compassionate way.
Through the course of our shadow work, life becomes more benign, more peaceful. We no longer ruminate about issues, harbor resentments, or toil with negative emotions. It’s a fair price to pay for the uncomfortable, often painful, work involved in meeting our shadow (and it is indeed work). But the long term benefits for our soul are beyond measure.
Related posts:
Trackbacks & Pingbacks