As children, we put things into this bag because we want our parents to love us in the moment and to continue loving us into the future. As children, it seems that stuffing parts of ourselves out of sight, into what we call the shadow, is an obvious and easy way to become what others want us to be.
To be more specific, your shadow is made up of your unwanted childhood characteristics (unwanted either by you or by others), and your shadow bag is in fact your unconscious.
And so we put into our shadow bags the parts of ourselves which don’t meet with our parents’ approval. But even then we are not safe. Siblings and peers exert pressure to conform. Our society and culture has many expectations of what boys and girls should put into their shadow bags. Girls may put away their anger so it’s out of sight. To be angry may not be lady-like. Boys may put away their tears. After all, it’s not manly for a boy to cry, is it?
Early childhood is only the start of this process, however. When we move on to junior or elementary school, high school and even university, we stuff more and more parts of ourselves into our shadow bag. That’s because peer approval is an extremely important part of our social world – no matter what age we may be.
A shadow bag slung over your shoulder is a perfect metaphor for several qualities of your shadow. First, this imaginary bag lies over your shoulder, behind you, and this reminds you that your shadow, which carries all the repressed parts of you, is out of sight.
Second, just like a real bag which you have to carry around, the shadow bag over your shoulder can be very heavy, and can drain a great deal of energy from you. Yet it’s not so much carrying the bag that drains your energy as the effort required to keep the things you’ve stuffed into the bag, inside the bag. Strangely, no matter how hard you try to keep them in there, they’re always going to leak out anyway – often at the most inappropriate moment, as you probably already know.
And third, if you stuff a large proportion of your emotions and behaviour into your shadow bag, you’re obviously stuffing a large proportion of your personality into that bag, out of sight. And by the time you’re an adult – say 21 years of age – you may be left with only a small fraction of the complete 360 degree personality, the rounded ball of energy, you were born with.
Fourth, like your sun-lit shadow, you can’t get rid of it. It’s always with you. Sometimes you see it, sometimes you don’t. But it’s yours for life. Unless, that is, you take the infinitely courageous step of opening the bag and taking the contents out and reacquainting yourself with the parts of your personality you stuffed away long ago. Why do that, you might ask? After all, those parts of you went in the bag for a good reason.
Well, yes, that is true. Or, more exactly, it was true when you were growing up. And yet they can come out for an equally good reason: so you can become more of who you were always meant to be, before the world got in the way.
When you take the repressed parts of yourself out of shadow you begin to change: to grow, to mature. In fact this is one of the best ways of working on your personal growth and development. (People have a variety of names for this work: archetypal coaching, archetypal counselling, emotional process work, emotional healing, healing the shadow, or simply shadow work.)
As you do this work, you’ll find you’re much less likely to be emotionally “triggered” by others. The more work on your shadow you do, the less triggered you’ll be. You’ll regain your natural personality. You’ll get much more conscious control over your thoughts, feelings and actions.
Above all, you can take back control of your life and stand in your power and potency, knowing what’s true for you, knowing that you have a right to exist just the way you are, a right to occupy the space you stand in, and a right to consciously choose who and what you are in the world.
Sadly, most people seem to keep their shadow bag slung over their shoulders, dragging it around for the rest of their lives. Thing is, though, the energy of what’s repressed into shadow doesn’t go away. In fact it actually grows because it hasn’t got anywhere much to go. But whenever a slight opening appears in the top of the bag, the energy of your shadow emerges. What emerges can be powerful and frightening, twisted and warped, even monstrous; certainly it can look very different to the way it did when it went into the bag all those years before.
Another possibility: sooner or later the weight of the bag becomes so heavy that you decide something has to be done. It’s wearing you out. Life isn’t going the way you want. You struggle. You know life should be easier than this. You can’t seem to change things. Your relationships fail. You’re addicted. You can’t keep boundaries. So you open the bag, peer inside, and embark on what can be (if you so choose) a lifelong process of pulling things out of the bag, claiming them as your own, and reintegrating them into your personality.
Just one thing, though. When you pull things out of the bag, they don’t look quite like they did when they went in. They seem different. In Robert Bly’s words, they have “de-evolved towards barbarism”, and that’s really why they need to come out. I believe they don’t so much “de-evolve” as gradually build up more and more energy which can transform them into an all-too-powerful shadow version of themselves.
Among other things, children may bag up their anger, fear, grief, their natural sexuality, their wildness, their impulsive nature, their spontaneity, their creativity, their appreciation of themselves, and their sense of self-worth. For good measure, most boys also bag up their feminine side – the Anima, as Carl Jung called it – to a greater or lesser degree. That’s what we expect in our culture: most men want “manly” or “masculine” sons. And with such an enormous but unspoken set of expectations contributing to his internalized image of masculinity, what else is a boy to do but go along with it?
Anyhow, life goes on, at least for a while, with greater or lesser ease. It takes a lot of energy to hold all these things in the bag and so they leak out now and again, often unhelpfully, but even so life looks more-or-less OK. At least the owner of the bag can survive with it. Heavy though his bag is, the energy of the man’s Hero archetype helps to keep him going.
Sooner or later though, things change. The bag’s being topped up all the time. It gets heavier. Even Heroes get tired. And if a man hasn’t opened his shadow bag by the time he’s forty or fifty – and sometimes much sooner – the energy inside will be ready to find its own way out, disrupting his life, causing problems, perhaps even creating misery.
Much better, then, that a man finds a place where he can open his shadow bag with support. A safe enough space, like an emotional process workshop run by facilitators skilled in the arts of emotional healing. Why a workshop? Well, when a man decides to open the bag because something just isn’t right in his life, there may be trouble ahead. Simply, it’s better to be supported when you open your bag!
A man can’t have good sexual relationships, maybe, so he opens the bag and finds a hurt child inside who’s raging at woman. Maybe he explodes with anger at the least provocation, so he opens the bag and finds a very angry and hurt little boy raging at him. Perhaps he feels meek and mild, like a man without boundaries, so he opens the bag, only to find a victimizing bully who wants to destroy everything around him.
Or perhaps he can’t run his own life or accept the responsibility of leadership, so he opens the bag, only to find a raging tyrant or an abdicating King living inside. He already knows, most likely, about the addict in the bag without even looking inside. That one really frightens him because he seems to have no control over it at all!
And finally, when his relationships with women break down, he may open the bag, only to find his own feminine energy and the sexual desires he put in there have taken on a very different appearance: they’ve become hostile to him. Robert Bly believed that when we put our shadow into the bag, it becomes hostile to us, and is then reflected back at us in life. His principle was: the outside becomes like the inside.
Not all shadow is negative. Often it contains a great deal of “gol
d” – positive qualities which weren’t acceptable to others when we were children. This might include qualities like vulnerability, tenderness, compassion, empathy, love, assertiveness, confidence, magnificence, power and potency. Maybe you have a sense of your own “missing” golden qualities, the ones you put into shadow as a child.
These positive qualities go into the bag because in many cultures children are taught that it’s wrong to be “too big for your boots”, that “pride goes before a fall”, that it’s wrong to “blow your own trumpet”, and so on. So where do they put their self-confidence, self-worth and self-esteem? Into shadow.
Children do this to conform to the expectations of the people and culture around them. The logic seems simple to a child: “If I conform, I will be accepted. If I do not, I will be rejected.” Given this situation, most children will choose acceptance every time. Fortunate indeed are those whose differences and special qualities are nurtured and encouraged.
(The film Billy Elliot, based on a true story about a boy from a coal mining town in England who wanted to become a ballet dancer – and managed to do so – reminds us that a few children somehow find the energy to defy the norms of family or culture and still thrive.)
The reality is that children can be humiliated and diminished, whether unconsciously or deliberately, by many things. They may suffer hurts to their self-esteem at the hands of parents, relatives, other adults, siblings, teachers, and the school system. They may be shamed because they do not have the “right” talents, appearance, or abilities for the culture in which they live. They may want to do things which do not meet the expectations of the people around them, who then choose to see them as different, weird, or perhaps even abnormal – and reject them.
We all know it can be hard to feel different. Which of us, as a child, did not want to be popular, good or “normal” in the eyes of those around us? Which of us did not want to be accepted by the others?
This desire for acceptance explains why so many children gradually hide more and more of themselves. But, as we’ve seen, what goes into your shadow bag, whether positive or negative, will change in character.
Anger may become rage, sadness can build into deep grief which burdens a man’s soul. Repressed sexuality may transform into an addiction to sexual kinks, or the victimization of women. Fear may become acute and irrational anxiety, devoid of connection with reality. Self-protection and risk management can transform into judgementalism, cynicism or predatorial behaviour.
As for a boy’s sense of self-worth and self-importance, well, when shoved into shadow, they may inflate into grandiosity or collapse into a sense of insignificance. When you see someone who has a grossly inflated sense of his own superiority and grandiosity, it’s a fair assumption that most of his self-worth and self-esteem were beaten (maybe literally, maybe metaphorically) out of him as a child.
The same is true when you see a man who’s playing small, hiding his abilities and not daring to show the world who he really is. As a boy, he probably put most if not all of his self-worth into his shadow bag. This somehow kept him safe from shame and humiliation, or worse.
Alice Miller, one of the pioneering child psychotherapists of the twentieth century, wrote a book called The Drama Of The Gifted Child. In that book she described the drama for each and every one of us: it is that we arrive on the earth “trailing clouds of glory” and then, unaccountably, our glory is rejected.
The glory of a child is his innocent purity, within which he carries a truly wondrous set of appetites, spontaneities, angers, desires, and drives. This is his gift to his parents. Sadly, his parents may find they don’t want that gift, at least not in the form it arrived.
Maybe what they really wanted was a “nice” boy or girl who would do more or less what they desired, who would follow in their image, perhaps. A child who would be convenient for them, and fit in with their lifestyle. A child who was what they had hoped for, not the one they actually got. And so they unconsciously set about making their child into something else.
That’s not unusual. To a greater or lesser degree each of us was diverted from our own path, the one which would have made us into the person we were always meant to be.
Now, as adults, we may feel an urge to find our real selves by seeking out this true path and seeing where it takes us. That’s a choice summed up for me in Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken, where he writes:
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by
And that has made all the difference.”
It’s not that our parents were malevolent – it’s just that they needed us to fulfil a particular role in their lives. As Robert Bly so painfully observed, “Our parents rejected us before we could talk, so the pain of the rejection is probably stored in a preverbal place.” This is why it can seem so hard to change anything in conventional counselling or therapy. And it is why archetypal counselling, emotional healing work, and shadow work are so powerful – these are techniques which get right to the heart of the issue, quickly, safely and powerfully.
You may be thinking that the concept of a shadow bag sounds like a “one size fits all” kind of idea. But while the principle is the same for all of us – we have a shadow bag and we put into it the parts of ourselves that are not acceptable – the details differ from person to person.
For example, if you put aspects of your sexuality into the bag when you were a child you’ve likely suppressed a lot of your natural energy as well. Equally, a man who put his inner feminine, his Anima, into his shadow bag during childhood might not show much of his compassion, emotional vulnerability and softness. A woman who put her masculinity, her Animus, into the bag as a kid may have lost a lot of her energy and drive in the world.
Did you ever stop to wonder how many of your strengths and weaknesses are the result of the unconscious decisions you made to please others?
One client told me over and over that he had no artistic talent whatsoever, even though his dad was a successful artist. Eventually we discovered he’d made a choice early on in life not to “compete” with his dad, for his dad was a jealous and petty man who hated “artistic rivals”, as he put it.
Another client who came “to rediscover fun in his life” and who described himself as “a real klutz at sport” told me he gave up his passion for soccer at the age of fourteen because his father was a professor who praised him only for his academic achievements. His dad, he told me, with all the pain of a little boy craving his father’s love and approval, had never expressed any interest at all in his sporting prowess: “He never came to a single match. Never once congratulated me on scoring a goal.” Many other men have told me that their fathers never once said “I love you, son.”
Such are the twists of fate which determine whether we choose to take the road less travelled – or not.
Is your road through life your own choice or someone else’s? And how would you know, anyway? Think back, and it may become clear. Some of my clients tell me they can remember a specific moment when they decided something important about themselves which shaped their future.
One man came for therapy because of his lack of trust. He was able to describe a moment in school when the “teacher” hurled the old-fashioned chalk board eraser made of wood at him, hitting him on the head. The class laughed long and hard, no doubt relieved they were not the victims that day. In that moment, he said, he could actually remember making a decision never to trust anyone in authority again.
Another client was twelve when he took home his wounded heart after being beaten with a gym shoe at school for copying his friend’s homework – this being in the 1970s, when it was acceptable in England for teachers to hit children in their “care”. When he told his parents of his emotional and physical pain, describing how a teacher had thrashed him with a gym shoe on the buttocks, they replied: “If a teacher hit you, you must have done something to deserve it.” He told me that he remembered, in that moment, decidi
ng he would never again trust his parents nor confide anything of importance in them.
What Did You Repress Into Your Shadow?
A child can repress many aspects of his or her personality in one or more of the four archetypal quarters.
In the Warrior quarter, that might include anger, fierceness, determination, boundary setting, and being fully present in the world. Someone who put this kind of energy into shadow as a child might look like a victim, someone who can be pushed around, a walkover, in adult life.
However, the energy of those qualities doesn’t go away, even after years in shadow. In fact, with the right stimulation, in the right circumstances, the energy of these repressed Warrior qualities can explode as violence and rage. Equally, it can be unconsciously turned against the self, producing feelings of depression, passivity and hopelessness.
In the Lover quarter, a boy might put his compassion, love, sensitivity, desire for connection, and tenderness into the shadow bag. Again the energy doesn’t go away; later in life it may express itself as an addiction, or as narcissism, neediness, an endless sequence of failed relationships, a lack of true connection, or stoicism.
In the quarter of the Magician, qualities such as reasoning ability, intelligence, comprehension, understanding, and intellect may go into shadow. Maybe a child finds it’s wiser, or safer, to hide his cleverness, and so he decides to adopt a strategy of appearing dull, even stupid, in his childhood world. Later in life, the energy of those qualities may come back out of shadow as some kind of limiting fear, sometimes as a cynical attitude of superiority and knowingness, sometimes as a blank, overarching sense of confusion in which there are no answers and nothing is clear, and sometimes as endless cyclical thinking which never reaches any useful conclusion.
More than anything else you, like almost everyone else, will have put most, maybe all, of your magnificence, potency, and power, the energy of your Sovereign, into shadow. These are your own natural clouds of glory, the ones which came with you on the day you arrived on the planet. This energy, locked in your shadow bag for much of your life, can become twisted into grandiosity, emerging as an inflated opinion of yourself, a sense of superiority and an air of arrogance, or a sense of inferiority.
Warrior, Magician, Lover, King Page 19