by Chris Grosso
“If something simply informs you in the environment (and it can be negative), that’s the tip-off. You see it and say, ‘Okay, I got it, I understand it.’ But if something wildly affects you, if you get extremely emotional and reactive and upset in either a negative or a positive way—hating something or outrageously loving or adoring something—then it’s likely you’re projecting. It’s people who end up shadowboxing their way through life or shadow hugging, but either way they are crippling their own potential, because every time you push shadow material out of your awareness, push it into the unconscious—let alone project it entirely out of your system and onto somebody out there—then you lose that amount of consciousness for your own self.”
Ken provided an interesting example. “Let’s say the average person is born with the equivalent of a hundred dollars’ worth of consciousness in their system. At the first stage of growth and development, they repress 10 percent of their psyche—say they had a bad childhood, and they repress 10 percent. Now ten dollars is taken out of the conscious bank account and put into their unconscious account, and now they have access to only ninety dollars. Maybe they go another stage or two and then they hit some difficult times, and maybe a third stage, fourth stage, and then use another ten or fifteen dollars. Now they have only seventy-five dollars left in their conscious bank account and twenty-five dollars in their unconscious account. They can’t use the money in the unconscious account, they can’t access it, so it doesn’t add anything. All it’s doing is causing problems. It’s causing pain and neurotic suffering, and they are likely projecting it onto the outside world, and that’s causing problems. Any time you project shadow into a relationship, you won’t see that relationship accurately, and you’ll end up giving wacky and idiotic feedback to the partner in the relationship. They know it and they don’t like it, so sooner or later that relationship is going to end in trouble. Of course they’re likely doing the same thing to you to some degree, but you’re headed for trouble if you’re doing that. Now they’ve got seventy-five dollars in their conscious bank account; maybe they’re seeing the world through more inclusive, integral eyes. Now they’re working, trying to get to the next level, and they want to become enlightened or awakened or something like that. Maybe at that integral level they lose another five bucks. Now they have only seventy dollars in their conscious account. It turns out that to get to that next level, the level of transcendence, they need eighty dollars. It takes that much consciousness to get into that, and you don’t have it.
“The fact that you simply push shadow out of awareness doesn’t mean that it goes away and stops causing problems—it causes an enormous number of problems, particularly if you project it and see it in somebody else. It distorts reality around you. It also distorts your own self-concept. You get a false self-concept or persona; you have a false self. Now, there was a year or year and a half during Treya’s illness when it was very, very difficult, and at one point I even got almost suicidal. And I remember driving to a gun store, frankly, and walking through, looking for a gun to buy. I looked at shotguns and thought of Hemingway, and thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll try a Hemingway,’ and then I looked at other types and thought, ‘Well, okay, that was another famous author who ended his life that way,’ and it was just a devastatingly difficult time for me. And we’d also been facing the one difficult characteristic that Treya had, which was, when you have cancer, that kind of becomes your trump card for every argument you have. So no matter what argument we ended up having, it always ended with her saying, ‘But I have cancer.’ And that just ended anything I could say. I just couldn’t see how to get around something that horrible. And whatever problems I had were minuscule compared to hers. I didn’t make them go away, so I was still facing these incredibly difficult issues.
“At any stage of development from bottom to top, you can get into trouble with that level’s needs or drives or motivations or characteristics, and you can either remain in fusion with them as the development continues or let go of them. As I mentioned earlier, you’re supposed to transcend and include each level. But if you don’t transcend, part of you remains infused with it or stuck to it; then you have an addiction to that quality, and your shadow is an addiction shadow. If, on the other hand, you push too hard, you don’t let go of it, you disown it, you shove it into the basement, then that’s a shadow allergy. Both involve losing track of aspects of yourself and creating a false self, because it’s an inaccurate self-image, an inaccurate self-concept. You’re not being truthful with yourself about what is in yourself, what you are actually like. What are the real qualities and characteristics and aspects that define you, so there’s no untruthfulness or lie? The shadow is the locus of the lie. It’s where we have a self-deception. Once that happens, all our interactions with others and the world out there and the environment are going to be distorted, because we’re interacting with a false image of what we are. We’re never being truthful in any of our interactions with the world. That always causes some sort of problem, because most people will be able to detect that something’s not right. You’re either overreacting or underreacting, or you say things about yourself that make most people roll their eyes, thinking, ‘There’s no way he’s that.’
“One of the irritating things about shadow material is almost everyone else can see it except you. That’s why they’re always called blind spots, and blind spots are just that: something you can’t see. You can’t see what you can’t see. That’s what causes so many problems in life and in our interpersonal relationships: You’re running around doing all this stuff, and people are spotting this stuff and every now and then somebody will sit down and try to give you feedback. Unless you’re used to working on this and can lower your defenses and open up to this kind of stuff, you’ll become reactive. You’ll get defensive. You can always tell when someone is getting defensive. You try to bring something up to them and you can see the hackles rise. They get scrunched over and fold their arms and cross their legs and glare at you, all these sorts of standard defensive moves, so it’s a constant problem. It’s a problem that comes mostly from the complexity of being a human being.”
This has happened to me on a number of occasions. In retrospect, I see how most of the time it was out of care and concern, but when an individual is locked into a particular state, whether it’s addicted to drugs, alcohol, or any other activities or substances that they associate with the safety of their own life or well-being, more times than not, they’ll be put on the defensive. Early on in my own addiction experience, I remember my parents pressuring me to stop. In their defense, they had not taken the time to learn about what addiction actually consists of (mentally, biologically, neurologically, etc.) and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just stop. I have a vivid memory of being in a psych unit in Middlesex Hospital and my dad being outwardly pissed off at me for “doing this again.” If he had understood the complexities of addiction at the time, I’m sure he would have responded differently (which he has since). But in that moment, he was like so many other families struggling to understand and navigate working with their loved ones’ addictions or self-defeating behaviors. Through the years, my dad has gone on to learn and love me in a way that I still at times almost don’t feel worthy of, but in the beginning it was hard for everyone involved.
“As I’ve said, we are comprised of so many parts, from quarks to atoms to organisms. We contain every one of those in our body to this day. Every single one. Atoms don’t tend to have shadow elements, because you must have one part of you that’s pushing the other part out, and then you must have a place where you can push it—an unconscious—and then that’s something that your consciousness is going to do, and then you must have a defense mechanism. Atoms don’t have that, molecules don’t have that, and cells don’t have that specific kind of thing. It’s only when you start getting up to organisms and then at least early mammals, because they have a cortex and they have a limbic system and they have a reptilian brain stem, so these thing
s should be unified and integrated.
“Any time something is built like that, there’s something that can go wrong with it. Whenever that many things are put together, there’s always a chance you can do it wrong. That’s what happens. It’s the price humans pay for the complexity that we have. What each stage is supposed to do is transcend and include the previous stage. By transcend, it means you let go of the previous stage. You drop it and move to a higher stage. There’s something, this emergent reality. Something new comes into being. It isn’t present in the previous stage. That’s what an emergent is. You move up to this higher level, which is partially an emergent, and so there’s a newness there, but to do that, you should let go of that previous level. If you let go of that in a healthy way, then you’ve transcended it. If you don’t let go of it, if some part of you remains attached to some part of that previous level, then you’re addicted to that part of that level but in an unconscious way; you’re not facing it consciously, so you don’t know what’s causing it. Suddenly now you find yourself drinking or shooting heroin or whatever you’re doing, but you have an addictive behavior now because you didn’t transcend that previous level correctly. But then you’re also supposed to include it. You transcend and include—include means that you embrace it. You integrate it. If you don’t do that right, if you fail to integrate it, then you are disowning it. You’re dissociating it. You’re repressing it. Now that’s an allergy, because evolution is built out of transcend and include. You can break down in either one of these, either by remaining addicted to parts of it or by becoming allergic to parts of it. That’s the breakdown of the transcendent part or the breakdown of the include part, the integrate part.
“If everything goes right and we transcend and include, we move beyond all our previous levels but we also include them. We embrace them. We no longer exclusively identify with them. The whole point of going through an entire growth process is that by the time we get all the way to the highest level, we’ve transcended all the previous levels. This means we’ve let go of all of them, we’re exclusively identified with none of them, it’s truly neti neti. I’m not this, I’m not that. The pure witness, the pure self, big mind, is all that’s left, and you have no attachments, no addictions, no grasping in any part of your being. But you also embrace them; you have also included them, you’re no longer exclusively identified with them. But you’re including them the same way you’re including everything else that’s arising in the universe moment to moment. You’re identified with them, but no more so than you’re identified with everything else that’s arising moment to moment.
“There was one very low point with Treya and me, and it was from this low point that we all of a sudden realized that things could get that bad. We knew we had to really work to change. Fortunately, both of us had a great number of tools to help us. We had both been meditating for fifteen years, and I knew an enormous amount of psychotherapy and how to use and apply it. Slowly things started turning around. That’s the point where we started to learn lessons, really powerful lessons, daily. And we grew and grew. We had an authentic love for each other, and that’s why it worked. We never stopped loving each other, no matter what happened. Although her cancer got worse and worse, our bond just got better and better.
But any part of those two components can break down. Most people break down to some degree. Almost nobody gets out of childhood without losing at least 10 percent, and with some people it’s 15 or 20 percent, but by the time it gets to 10 percent, you have some moderately significant neurosis. By the time you get to 15 percent, you have some very noticeable problems. You know it, and so does everybody around you who interacts with you for any amount of time; they all start to know it. When it gets to 20 or 25 percent, you almost always come to the attention of the authorities, one way or another. Either you yourself will feel so bad that you’ll go seek professional help, or if it’s bad, you might end up briefly incarcerated or institutionalized.
“It’s a widespread problem that nobody fully escapes. It’s weird because we know a fair bit about how shadows are created and what causes them, and there are a lot of different schools and there are a lot of disagreements as well. There’s a fair amount of general understanding of what this stuff is, but we don’t seem to apply it on a culture-wide level at all. Most people can get through high school without any understanding of shadow material—how to spot it or notice it in themselves, let alone simple ways to deal with it. There are a handful of very simple techniques.”
So how does the shadow work in regard to relapse, whatever the substance is? Once we become aware of that, how can we use this to begin to truly heal and change these patterns that we’re caught in?
Ken said, “I discussed this in 1980 in a book called The Atman Project, and a few years later, Robert Kegan brought out a book called The Evolving Self, in which he said the same thing. Part of the key to growth in general, including therapeutic growth, is that we can use the chakras. When someone steps up to the second chakra and identifies with it, then that’s the subject, that’s what they are. They’re looking at the world from that second chakra. They’re using it to see the world, so it’s become their subject. It’s their self, they’re identified with it. When they let go of that and move up to the third chakra, then they have let go of their identity with the second chakra, so now they can see it as an object. They’re free of it. But now they become identified with the third chakra, and they can’t see that; that’s where their self is and where they are now acting from. If they’re doing that, they’re stuck at acting from power and the self they can see. Now they must wait until they turn that power into something they can see, make it an object of awareness. Unless they do that, it tends to let go. They are free of it. They have transcended it. It’s one of the reasons that mindfulness works so well with things like this, because you keep seeing things as objects and then letting them go. See it as an object and let it go. If you can’t see it as an object, it remains a hidden subject. That means it can be split off as a sub-personality—that’s a subject that can’t be seen.
“When you have a sub-personality, you don’t know it. It’s looking at the world. You can’t look at it. If you could forget it, you wouldn’t be identified with it. It would be an object. It would no longer be yourself. The whole trick to development is that the subject at one stage becomes the object of the subject of the next stage. Then the subject of that stage becomes the object of the subject of the next higher stage. You’re dis-identifying with, you’re getting rid of all those until you get all the way up to pure subjectivity that can never become an object, and that’s generally known as Purusha.” He was talking about the Sanskrit term meaning cosmic self or consciousness. “Or the pure self. It’s a vast, open emptiness, because you can never see it as an object. It’s the pure seer. It’s pure awareness itself, without any content of awareness. When you fall into that, you’re radically free of all content, so you’re resting as the witness. I see the mountain. I’m not the mountain. I have these sensations. I’m not these sensations. I have these feelings. I’m not these feelings. I have these thoughts. I’m not these thoughts. I’m the pure witness of all of them. The discovery of that freedom is known as the great liberation; that’s how you become free of these things. That becomes central. That’s a real part of an overall development. It takes us into wider and wider and wider expanses of pure freedom and pure awareness. That’s what’s wild.”
I could dig this, because in that stage, who’s left to be addicted or to have these struggles? We’re left as what Ken calls I-am-ness. That being the case, though, how can we take working toward that, or working with that, and use it in a way for those who have or struggle with any form of addiction, from drugs to workaholism to whatever, so that we can heal? Not a quick-fix Band-Aid healing, but deep healing?
“Part of what happens, unfortunately, with an addict is that it starts generally with something in the interior awareness (upper left quadrant) of an individual and ends up fi
xated to some aspect that it can’t let go of. As the next stage emerges, in this hidden, underground way, there’s an obsessive lust for this thing that we’re identified with. We don’t want to let go of that. That becomes a seed that gets more and more thirsty, more and more hungry for whatever it is that it’s lusting after. Then what starts happening in the brain (upper right quadrant) is that these things start to get hooked up. Whenever you’re producing addictive thrusts in your interior, it starts to have a correlate in the brain; the brain starts to release hormones, dopamine, serotonin, any of these hypercritical, hyper-pleasure-releasing events. Part of the problem becomes that you have this unbelievably intense pleasure release connected with these facets in your psyche that you can’t let go of. We’ve invested them with an enormous amount of attention and drive and desire and identification, and when that hooks up with this corresponding brain release, that forms a kind of dual unit that can become incredibly hard to break into. That’s the start. Because something went wrong developmentally to hook somebody this way, and then the brain starts responding to a release of drugs, which themselves are incredibly addictive. Now you must also consider the relational and social constructs (lower left and right quadrants of the brain) as well, and those start to come apart fast as the addict needs more and more money and starts to rearrange his world.
“Over time, addicts cut out almost all friendships, work, most forms of relationship. They start to center their human interaction around a group of people they share the drugs with, and whether they love them or not, they’re attracted to them because that’s where they get to do this activity. This group forms an intensely real part of the addict’s life, and the person becomes attached to that group. All of a sudden you have the person’s interior, brain, and relational and social aspects of life (all four quadrants) that are activating the addiction. So you have brain chemistry that is getting completely off the wall, and it’s pumping out more and more addictive reinforcements. Your work relations are becoming disastrous. It’s tragedy after tragedy after tragedy. Eventually, dozens of relationships have been reduced to maybe four or five. The addict is left with ‘Where do I get my next hit? How do I pay for it? Where am I gonna crash? What am I going to do for something resembling friendship?’ That becomes secondary as the addict is brought up in this new world that they find themselves in. When you have that many different areas of your life so aggressively aiding the addictive act, it’s the worst possible thing you can think of, preventing any sort of sensible response. It’s part of something so wired as to make it almost impossible to do anything about it.