Robert Bly wrote A Little Book On The Human Shadow back in 1988. He pointed out that there are collective shadow bags available for those who care to pick them up and help to fill them: a bag for each town, community, family, religion, social group – they all have their own shadow bags. As Bly said, it’s almost as if certain groups of people make an unconscious, collective, psychic decision to put certain types of energy into their own shadow bag.
In this book he also suggested that an American citizen who was curious to know what might be in the national shadow bag at that time could find out by listening to what a State Department official said when he criticized Russia. Nowadays Russia may not be the object of our unconscious fears, but there are plenty of other unwilling countries which serve as the targets of our repressed shadow energies. How little has changed over time! The shadow energies do indeed go full circle, finding similar targets from one generation to the next.
And while some of us might bemoan the pressure to be a certain way, and see it as a by-product of modern civilization, Robert Bly shrewdly observed that even the most traditional cultures have always had a different but perhaps even larger shadow bag all of their own. In fact many non-westernized cultures have always put individuality, creativity and inventiveness into their shadow bags. This cultural pressure was required because conformity and tribal loyalty, rather than freedom of individual expression, was needed to ensure survival.
A final point about your own shadow bag: you can only see its contents by careful observation. Some useful questions to help discover what’s in your bag include: what, or who, triggers a strong emotional reaction in you – especially when you feel compelled to justify your reaction? Do you react to certain events in your life with a level of force and energy which is way out of line with the stimulus? In what circumstances do you find you simply can’t stop yourself reacting in a certain way, even when you don’t want to?
If you don’t understand why you react a certain way, here are some practical clues to identifying your own shadows.
•To start with, at some point you may recall making a decision not to behave in a certain way or not to like a particular person.
•Later in life, you find yourself acting that way “by accident”.
•And to cap it all, the behaviour seems as if it’s controlling you, rather than the other way round.
Often, you feel as if the energy behind the behaviour somehow isn’t even a part of you, almost as if it comes from somewhere else. But even though it seems unwanted and unknown, it still feels curiously compelling. Of course it does – this is energy which came from within you and was somehow disowned by you. Now it wants – and needs – to be owned by you once again so it can assume its original form and purpose.
Projection: A Way To Explore Your Shadow
Projection is a way in which we can ignore the existence of certain qualities in ourselves while attributing them to others. It’s one of the ways we defend ourselves against awareness of the energies we’ve put into shadow, both positive and negative. For example, a man who has put his anger into shadow – in other words who is unconsciously angry – may constantly accuse other people of being angry. It’s easier for him to see anger as living in others than it is to admit it lives in him.
His emotional growth is all about coming to terms with the reality that anger lives inside him, albeit in shadow, and reintegrating its energy into his personality in a conscious, healthy way. This is the essence of personal growth and development; it is a necessary step to regain control over the way you express your emotions.
The more deeply repressed a shadow energy is within your unconscious, the harder it will be for you to identify and own your projections. So those accusations of racism, sexism, immaturity, infidelity, untrustworthiness, disloyalty and lack of love which you fling at your spouse, your colleagues, your neighbours and your kids – well, better be careful, for those qualities might just be alive and well and living inside you.
And those awful behaviours and emotions you see so often in others? Forget for a moment what you see in others; the real question is this: what are you missing in yourself as you point out other people’s failings?
Get the idea? We all do this; and we do it all the time. And we never know we’re doing it until we start to examine our shadows.
Sigmund Freud was probably the first therapist, historically, to explain this phenomenon. He had it right when he said that the thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings which we cannot accept as our own, as belonging to us, can be mentally placed in the world outside of us and attributed to someone else.
This is a great way of avoiding ownership of your thoughts, feelings and actions. Such ownership could remind you of the need to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions. And this might encourage you to do some personal work on yourself. Sure, it’s easier not to do the work, but the world around you will pay a price for your indifference as the energy in your shadow bag continues to leak out and splatter messily over your friends and family.
And let’s face it, you’ll pay a price too: not just all those moments of hurt, of shame, of difficulty with your loved ones, of failed expectations, of fear limiting you, of low self-esteem, but also the mysterious re-appearance of exactly what you don’t want in your life, over and over again.
But here’s an interesting thing. Projection isn’t arbitrary. It seizes on something you see in another person, and the seed of truth in what you see becomes the basis on which you can generously “give them” all of your disowned material.
There’s something else important about projection too – it can lead to idealization.
When you project your Sovereign energy outwards onto another (in other words, you see your own gold in someone else, rightly or wrongly), you are idealizing them. Idealization is a necessary step in childhood emotional development – children tend to idealize their parents – and it is part of the early stages of falling in love. You might think, though, that it’s better, on balance, to keep your glory for yourself, particularly if you want to be an emotionally healthy adult with power and presence in the world.
Carl Jung explained how the parts of our personality we hold in shadow are likely to give rise to projection. As he said, projection can happen on a small-scale, one to one basis, or on a national or international basis. So when unstable, immature and unpredictable national “leaders” start projecting their shadows onto each other the rest of us had better watch out.
Another form of projection in our society has become known as “victim blaming”. This is particularly common with the victims of sexual assault. This is where the victim is criticized or blamed for having somehow been responsible for the perpetrator’s actions.
We victim blame because it makes us feel safer.
Any story of misfortune, particularly those involving violence or harm, can impact us at a deep level. Human beings are empathic creatures, and when we hear a story about another person we tend to consciously or unconsciously project ourselves into the story to understand how we’d feel and what we could potentially learn from the story. We can also project our own fear into the story.
That happens when we imagine how it might feel to be the victim – we then feel some fear, or at least some lack of safety. After all, if it happened to them, it could surely happen to us.
So to recreate a sense of safety we project the victim within us, the part of us which fears attack, onto the other person. They then become culpable and we are relieved of our fears.
Maybe that’s why so many TV programs feature horrific stories of murder, death and suffering. Why else would we watch such things? Where is the reward, the motivation for watching, if it is not to project our fear outwards and so relieve our emotional burden?
Yes indeed; but there is another dimension to this. Inside each of us there is a potential perpetrator, a part of us capable of inflicting harm and damage on others. To the extent that we were victimized by others, whether that took
the form of emotional, physical, or sexual harm, so we may carry the energy of the perpetrator.
Such hostile energy is often repressed and denied because it is both socially unacceptable and difficult for us even to admit to ourselves that we carry it. But when we carry that energy in shadow it will leak out, perhaps as a defence of the perpetrator’s actions, perhaps as victim blaming, and perhaps as active persecution of another person in some way. This happens because the energy of the perpetrator is within us.
When we hear about violence, victimization and similar events on TV or see them in the movies, or when we read about them on our internet home page every day, perhaps we’re unconsciously seeking out a mirror for the part of ourselves which we prefer not to know about and keep under wraps by telling ourselves: “I couldn’t possibly do that.”
One client told me how he was “overtaken by a fit of madness” when he found himself “unable” to stop accusing his wife of being unfaithful. The irony was startling, for in fact he was the one who was actually having an affair. This is a classic projection, attributing blame to an innocent person; for how much easier it is to project the guilt and shame of your own infidelity onto your wife than to admit what lies within yourself.
Likewise, a bully may unconsciously project his own vulnerability onto the target of his bullying behaviour. He can then act out aggressively against the victim while not feeling his own insecurity and vulnerability. Such aggressive projections can occur anywhere from the micro-level of interpersonal relationships all the way up to the macro-level of international politics and armed conflict between nations.
A final example of negative projection is the way in which people can project their own internal harsh judgements or conscience onto another person. This kind of projection can lead to false accusations of personal or political misconduct.
We project our positive qualities onto others as well. Many of us do not allow ourselves to see our positive energies such as optimism, hope, intelligence, power, presence, potency, and creativity. Instead we disown them and project them onto others.
Projection keeps you safe in some way by not allowing you to see the things about yourself which are – or were once – too frightening or painful (or magnificent) to fully own. However, when you project what is really your energy onto others, the less energy you have available for yourself. When you take back the projections you’ve placed on others, you stop seeing them through the filter of your own shadow. You see them as they really are.
Not only that, but when you take back your projections you grow more in your own emotional maturity, simply because you are making yourself more complete, more whole.
You may have come to believe that you simply do not possess the energies repressed into your shadow bag. You don’t even think twice about what’s going on when you spot these qualities in others and don’t feel them in yourself. But the truth is, you are projecting your energy, repressed or not, and you’re diminishing your power by giving it away.
Conversely, you serve yourself by reintegrating shadow energy into your conscious awareness. You can make it part of the person you are today – and if necessary, you can also transform the energy of shadow back into a more positive form and reclaim once more the gold it originally contained.
There are some areas where this process of reintegration is particularly important: sexuality is high on that list. If you don’t feel much interest in sex, while surrounded by others whose sexuality seems to be obvious and keenly expressed, you might be disowning your own sexual energy and seeing it in someone else. Equally, if you feel disgusted about other people’s sexual antics, maybe the disgust you’re really avoiding is disgust at your own sexual drives and urges?
Discovering what projections you’ve put on others is always interesting. Sometimes it can be quite challenging, but it’s always rewarding.
Another benefit of owning your projections is the energy you’ll gain. This is the energy of repression and denial which you no longer need to use in keeping your shadow energies locked away within you. This is energy which becomes available for you to consciously use in running your life.
Years ago, I took part in a series of ten-day-long, residential integrative therapy workshops during which each participant had the opportunity to do one or two pieces of deep emotional healing work alongside the theory and teaching. As soon as I set foot in the room on the first day, I could sense something tangibly different about the energy of my fellow participants. They all seemed to have a much greater presence than most people I knew at the time.
When I discovered how much personal therapy these men and women had undertaken, I knew I’d found the answer: they’d been in therapy for ten, fifteen, even twenty years. It’s so obvious, now, as I look back. Yet this was the first time I’d experienced the way in which reclaiming the energy of repression and projection can produce a far more powerful way of being present in the world.
The best way to reclaim this energy for yourself is to attend a workshop where you can discover what you’ve hidden, repressed and denied, and then start the work of reclaiming the cut-off energies in your shadow bag.
You’ll find this will rapidly eliminate your more dysfunctional and unhelpful behaviours and help you get much more control over your thoughts, feelings, and actions. You’ll also develop a lot more control and choice over how you react to others, even when you’re under extreme provocation.
Transference
Transference is something that develops between two people when one of them unconsciously “sees” the other as a significant person from their past. Transference can develop during therapy or counselling when the therapist seems to assume the identity of some historical figure in the client’s life. That’s common enough, but transference is much wider than this.
When anyone in your life reminds you in some way of a historical figure in your life with whom you still have “unresolved issues” or emotional “baggage”, then you may start reacting to them as if they really are that person from your past.
Perhaps your boss at work reminds you of your difficult and challenging father or your brother, and you find yourself responding to your boss just like you did to your dad or brother all those years ago. Now there’s a dynamic that will most likely create difficulties for you!
Or maybe your girlfriend or wife reminds you of your mother, at least in certain ways, and you gradually become aware that you’re responding to her as if she is indeed your mother. This, as you may already know, is generally not helpful in an intimate relationship!
Then again, you might find you have a work colleague or a friend who seems to irritate you, just as your annoying younger sibling tried your patience to the limits all those years ago in your family.
While this kind of transference can be useful in revealing where you have unresolved emotional issues to work on, there’s also a problem: you’re not really connecting with the person currently in your life. Rather, you’re relating to them through a filter – through the memory of someone else which has been triggered for some reason or other.
The key here is to go beyond the transference, to find a way to step out of it somehow, so you can see the people in your life today as they really are, not as some reflection of your past.
The unconscious is very powerful. It seeks out people who embody the energy of those with whom we have unresolved issues from earlier in our lives. This is what Freud called the repetition compulsion: an unconscious drive to achieve resolution of the outstanding emotional issues you have with a historical figure in your life, by finding someone who resembles them in your current life.
(What this means is that when you have outstanding issues with your mother, you might find yourself repeatedly encountering and getting involved with women who behave like your mother!)
One way to stop this happening, to prevent the emotional regression that makes you feel like a little boy again and which makes your power in the world melt away, is to find a woman with whom you really ca
n work out these difficulties. Of course that’s not always so easy without professional help, because you’re right in the middle of the emotional drama when it breaks out, and you may well regress to your childhood ways of being in the world.
A more useful and potentially transformative alternative is to take part in an emotional process workshop where you can do some shadow work. With the help of the facilitators and the other group members, you can set up a representation of your childhood experience and replay events from the past in symbolic form. This time, though, the object of the work is for you to experience a more positive and empowering outcome.
What happens in a workshop? Simply, where you were once wounded, now you will be blessed. Where you were once unheard or unappreciated, now you will be honoured. Where you were rejected, you will find acceptance. The feelings you suppressed will be brought out, given space and time to express themselves, and restored to you. By transforming the energy held in your shadow in this way, you will be better able to express yourself in the way that you wish, as the mature man you now are, when similar situations arise in your life today.
Each time you do this work, you become more of who you were always meant to be. You feel more powerful and you get more of control of your life.
This can seem like magic, but there’s a beautifully simple and elegant explanation of why this works so well: the techniques used in this work will effectively “reprogram” your brain with a positive and empowering outcome for you. This also gives you a new set of beliefs about yourself. You come to know you are a potent and powerful man, and you embody that belief in all you do.
Warrior, Magician, Lover, King Page 20