by Connie Zweig
Most psychologies and self-help programs, which seek to repair individuals from one dysfunction or another, hold an unspoken attitude toward the shadow. If they represent the ego’s point of view, as the vast majority do, then they seek the ego’s objectives: feeling in control, looking good, getting things done. Instead, this book makes an effort to represent the shadow’s point of view, to uncover the gold in dark places. It does not offer a mechanical, five-step method for “owning” the shadow; it does not advocate shadow-work for the sake of ego needs.
Whereas the ego weaves together the world, the shadow unravels the world. Whereas the ego acts as a catalyst of creation in the world, the shadow acts as a catalyst of destruction. Whereas the ego supports the status quo, the shadow is an agent of transformation.
Although this book does not promise a quick fix, it does promise a slow turning, a renewed orientation toward life, toward the depths, toward a fuller sense of authenticity. Romancing the Shadow offers an approach to life, a way of being in the world, being with others, and being with oneself that acts like a long drink of hot coffee—it opens the eyes and makes the skin tingle. It breaks through the wall of fatigue. It puts us slightly on edge. It prepares us to meet the shadow around the next corner.
OUR STORIES
CONNIE’S STORY: A TALE OF SHADOW-WORK
Let me tell you a story from my own life, a particular rendering of a universal pattern that demonstrates shadow-work and introduces you to some of our book’s main themes. Like the book, my tale weaves together a tapestry of personal, cultural, and archetypal realms.
Like the Greek goddess Athena, I was born out of my father’s head, with little awareness that I had a mother at all. Like Athena, I am a father’s daughter, a woman who, at some stage, unconsciously identifies more with her father and the masculine element within her than with her mother and the feminine. Father’s daughters tend to be adept in society, competent, and confident—except, perhaps, about their own femininity, which is not expressed in stereotypically attractive ways and so instead may be banished into shadow.
As the warrior goddess, Athena appears in myth carrying her sword and shield, and she is a virgin—that is, a self-contained woman. Known for platonic friendships with heroic men, such as Odysseus and Perseus, she aids them rather than bonds with them. Until midlife, I, too, felt no desire to bond permanently with a man, partially because, to me, the traditional roles of women appeared to carry an unspoken inequality, and I have greatly enjoyed my freedom and independence. Yet I always had a close male friend, a soul friend, whose creative efforts I supported and whose love I cherished.
As a young girl, the first daughter of two, I was very close with my mother, who was lovingly devoted and attentive. In our house, we made a game of dividing the family into “teams,” pairs of family members who shared similar tastes and appeared to be most alike. I was teamed with our mother, my sister with our father, because we physically resembled one another, respectively, and shared more interests: We liked to gossip about human nature, watch love stories, and shop for clothes. They liked sports, action adventure movies, and slapstick humor.
In the myth, Athena’s mother, Metis, was devoured by Zeus. My mother, too, was swallowed by my father’s Zeus-like power. She sacrificed her life as an artist to become a full-time wife and mother and slowly disappeared into depression, becoming in some way invisible to me. Although she remained a constant, loving presence, as her power diminished in my child’s perspective, so did her visibility. As a result, the archetypal wife and mother were banished into my shadow. And, at some unknown crossroads, the force of my father’s impressions on my plastic young soul seemed to take more deeply, so that I appeared to become a father’s daughter.
I can recall feeling in early adolescence that being a girl seemed somehow irrelevant to my identity (a shocking idea in retrospect). My father would tell me that with my abilities I could do anything, implying anything a man could do. Throughout my childhood, in fascinating, wide-ranging, combative dinner-table conversations, he groomed my mind to be, like his, a ruthless sword, to discriminate fact from fiction and soft feelings from hard reality.
My mother’s feeling world seemed increasingly remote, chaotic, and out of control. The desire of other girls to marry and have children seemed to me the death of possibilities; I remember intuitively understanding early on the use of the word “nuclear” to describe both the family and an unwinnable war. As I watched my girlfriends adorn themselves to be attractive to boys and to play increasingly sophisticated games of flirtation, I felt mystified. I wondered why they bothered. In this way, many feminine qualities were banished into my shadow.
Because our culture is structured around the masculine principle, many people find little value in conventional feminine qualities, which therefore carry cultural shadow. For many men, this means banishing into the unconscious those parts of themselves that are deemed feminine—nurturing, vulnerable, and caretaking qualities—and even overdeveloping those parts that are deemed masculine—aggressive, competitive, productive qualities. As a result, many men seek those buried shadow qualities outside of themselves, in women, while at the same time unconsciously devaluing them until, one day, they devalue their partners.
For women, this second-class status of the feminine makes it difficult to identify with our very natures. So, unknowingly, we adopt a certain set of characteristics to survive, which, like makeup, covers another set of qualities that may be less suited to survival. One lovely woman client told me that, in order to deflect the constant seductive pressures of men that began in her early teens, she intentionally neutered her appearance and learned to act gruff, like one of the guys. Her experience, mirrored in my own, eventually leads to an internal conflict between feeling powerful in the world and feeling attractive as a woman. Until recently, we faced a forced choice: either power or femininity goes into the shadow.
In retrospect I see my identification with the masculine and rejection of the feminine as a root of my one-sided development. Its costs were high: Because I valued men and the masculine over women and the feminine, I had few women friends, often patronizing them and considering their concerns trivial. This included my own sister, whose interests in fashion and style seemed superficial to me. Without a global sense of sisterhood, I could not share the social and political concerns of other women.
Instead, I retreated into a spiritual community based on a patriarchal, monastic model. For nearly a decade during my twenties, I practiced meditation intensively and taught it to hundreds of people, encouraging in them a transcendence of this world and of the body. Like Athena in her virginity, I cultivated self-containment by turning inward. But when the cycle was complete and I returned to my senses, moving back into my awakening body and burgeoning emotions, I faced a difficult transition.
Suffering for many years with a lack of intimacy, I was unable to be vulnerable with others or to find a community of like-minded souls. Instead, I threw myself headlong into journalism with a dedication that previously had been reserved for my meditation practice. After moving into publishing, I could imagine myself striding brazenly through the world of commerce much like Athena with her sword and shield, symbols of a rigid, heroic boundary that protects the illusion of a separate self In these ways, she served me as I served her for many years. And my tender feelings of vulnerability and dependency remained concealed in the shadow.
However, in my mid-thirties I began to long for a more nurturing, sensual, intimate life. I imagined living another kind of femininity, which did not require the sacrifice of my hard-won independence.
I got my first clue to healing the Athena pattern in a dream: I found the bloody head of my father in the bathroom sink, I knew in the dream that my mother and I had done the murderous deed. In working with this dream in Jungian analysis, I came to see that my alignment with my father—and through him with the male-dominant bias of society—had to be sacrificed. I needed to sever the connection with the logical masculin
e mind that had run my life like the captain of a tight ship. As I pushed my father from the pedestal until he fell far enough to crack, the young girl’s eyes cleared, and I began to see his flaws: My hero suffered from a serious addiction and abused his power out of secret feelings of powerlessness. As his shadow side came home to me, turning the hero into an all-too-human Dad, his authentic gifts came to light as well: a brilliant, loyal, generous man with a hunger for knowledge, whose legacy to me is social conscience, a compassion for all humanity.
Recognizing these multiple realities in him permitted me to see them in myself, to have a more direct relation with my own darkness and my own light. Eventually, I could see how my childhood image of my father also had affected my choice of lovers, as well as my choice of a spiritual teacher. Before shadow-work, I had been, in both instances, trapped in a dynamic determined by unconscious intense feelings about my father, not by conscious adult choices.
I also needed to discover who lay sleeping in the shadow of Athena. For I, like many women who live out this pattern, had remained intoxicated with power and intellect, forgetting my more erotic, soulful connection to my body and to nature. The Greek story of Medusa begins when, as a beautiful woman, she is raped in Athena’s temple. But Athena, instead of aligning with Medusa, had a knee-jerk identification with the male aggressor. She punished the victim by turning Medusa into a snake-headed Gorgon with a petrifying gaze. Whether this was an act of envy or revenge, the creation of the Gorgon concretized the image of the shadow through projection. Forever after, Medusa’s gaze turned to stone anyone who fell prey to it.
I, too, have petrified people with my gaze, halting the natural and spontaneous flow of feeling between us. Cut off from my heart, I have played the role of the wrathful goddess, judging and condemning others to an inferior status. It pains me now to think of the suffering that I caused others with my Medusa looks.
Just as Athena turned Medusa into a Gorgon, she also played a role in her destruction. When Perseus, an arrogant young hero, vowed to behead Medusa, Athena offered help: She gave him a polished shield that served as a mirror, enabling him to kill the Gorgon without having to look at her directly and become petrified. In creating a reflection, the goddess’s mirror shield enabled him to see the shadow—an image of that which is too terrible to see directly. In this way, Perseus was able to vanquish Medusa. From then on, Athena wore the snake-haired head on her chest, an outer emblem of her own wrathful, death-dealing energies for all to see.
I, too, did the difficult daily work to reclaim aspects of my shadow and my lost feminine heritage by seeking to understand my conscious identification with my father and the masculine principle. Then I turned to face my mother in an effort to make conscious those aspects of myself that I had absorbed unknowingly from her. Although I had come to believe that my identification with my mother had been broken early, it had only been buried.
One day I asked a friend, Jungian analyst Marion Woodman, what she thought about my wheat allergy, a mysterious problem with food that had appeared several years earlier. She replied, “Wheat is the food of the Great Mother, Demeter. When you have more fully differentiated from your own mother, you’ll be able to eat wheat.”
I was stunned. Differentiate from my mother? I was nothing like her! A classic Demeter woman, she had lived for her children, whereas I had lived an independent, professional life. But, in Marion’s words, I heard the call of my own Self. At that moment, my shadow-work changed direction. I began to focus on the early fusion with my mother, which had been covered over by my more conscious father’s daughter pattern.
My mother, like her mother before her, has a passion for bread. She craves dark bread full of raisins, light brown bread full of seeds, twisted toasted blond bread with warm butter. All my life I had witnessed her struggle with this craving and, eventually, her addiction became my allergy. My body, at the level of the immune system, had rejected Demeter and all that she implies. In an effort to differentiate from my mother’s suffering and avoid her traps with food and marriage, I had become allergic to wheat and to relationships. I had been forced to find new forms of sustenance as an Athena woman, an independent warrior.
As I raised my mother from the curse of devaluation and did shadow-work to understand my unconscious rejection of the feminine, she began to take on grace and beauty before my eyes. My mother’s gifts, which had remained hidden to me, seemed suddenly startling; An artist of extraordinary talent, she is a lover of beauty who is dedicated to her craft. And, as an inquiring fan of psychology, she is a student of human nature, whose lifelong journey to heal her own soul modeled shadow-work for me and bequeathed the greatest gift: the hunger for consciousness.
Today I can raise Athena’s sword and shield when I need them for self-defense. But I can also lay them down when I need a more open, vulnerable stance and a connection to the deep feminine. In addition, I continue to honor Athena in other ways: As a psychotherapist, I use her mirror shield to provide a reflection for my clients. As a writer, I call on her as the goddess of weaving: She helps me to unravel the threads of the old life by breaking my identification with the masculine, by accepting my dark sister, Medusa, and by knitting together a larger story, which is the book you hold in your hands.
Several years ago, my mother began painting seriously again, creating huge colorful canvases that bring her viewers great joy. It had never occurred to me to hang a painting by my mother in my home. But, one day, while considering the gifts of shadow-work, I had the feeling that I wanted to live with one. I asked my mother how she felt about it—and she was thrilled. Today my living room wall is filled with her creative work, a symbol of the tie between us and of the separation, of the unity of mother and daughter and of the diversity of individual life. These are the promises of shadow-work.
STEVE’S STORY: A TALE OF SHADOW-WORK
Sometime near midnight one evening during my eighteenth year, I was driving down a dark street in New York City when I caught sight of a man out of the corner of my left eye. I lost him for a moment, then I heard a thunk on the hood of the car and saw his body flying up into the air like a rag doll. My first thought: My insurance rates will go up. In that moment I was aware that I had no sadness or remorse for the man I had hit. I should have felt something, but I did not. My feelings were asleep. My vulnerability, fears, and empathy for others were hidden in the shadow. This troubling incident set me on my path: I knew I needed to awaken my ability to feel, so I enrolled in psychotherapy.
I had a special birth: The firstborn son to Holocaust survivors, I entered this world on a high holy day. Like a young prince, I was loved and cherished and had the doors of opportunity opened for me. But when I entered adolescence, I began to feel secretly unworthy of these privileges, physically unattractive, and inferior to others socially. Deeply alienated throughout my teenage years, I suffered a loneliness of the soul. I later came to see these feelings in part as a shadow inheritance of my parents’ pain from the Holocaust, which I carried in me for many years as my own unacceptability.
In a famous twelfth-century myth, the legend of the Holy Grail, a young man is born whose name, Parsifal, means innocent fool. When Parsifal was ready to leave his mother’s house, unknowingly to follow in the footsteps of his father and brothers who had died as knights in battle, his mother grieved. On his departure, she gave him three instructions: respect fair maidens, go to the Church for food, and don’t ask questions.
I, too, set off on my journey from my parents’ home with similar instructions. When I left for college, I understood that my task was to assimilate into society, to act like others act so that I would not stand out: I was told to be polite to women, open the door for them, and protect them from danger. I was advised to stay within the Jewish tradition to gain my spiritual nourishment. And, my elders said, there was no need to ask questions: Everything to be known was already known; I needed merely to memorize it. For the first few years of college, I followed these instructions. I placed women on a
pedestal, adoring them but treating them with polite distance. I identified with my Jewish roots and with my father’s highest value of gaining financial security. And, remaining an average student, I did not ask questions. My curiosity and aliveness were buried in the shadow, beyond my reach.
Beneath a mask of bravery and independence, I hid my feelings and acted tough and invulnerable. With sarcasm and an acerbic tongue, I kept people from getting too close to me. When one woman said that she felt afraid of me, I secretly liked the feeling. I had achieved my goal: to hide my vulnerability and fears of rejection. I also got a glimpse into my shadow’s hidden purpose: a desire for power.
One day, while traveling in Europe, I climbed an alpine peak that overlooked a breathtaking vista. In that moment, I was overwhelmed: The beauty of the natural world and the unity of all life filled me with awe and bliss. Like Parsifal, who stumbles into the grail kingdom while still young and naïve, I had no way to integrate the experience and it disappeared like a dream. When I failed to ask the key question that would have opened a spiritual doorway—What is the meaning of this experience?—the landscape of my life remained desolate. And my spirit remained asleep, concealed in the shadow.
When I fell in love at age twenty-two, I innocently married as my father had done: for life. Projecting my soul onto the goddess, I held my wife aloft, adopting a role as her caretaking partner but unable to give her intimacy or authenticity because I was cut off from my own shadowy vulnerability.
Entering graduate school, I chose to study psychology essentially to avoid participating in a war I did not support. At this conventional school, behaviorism reigned: Carl Jung was viewed as a madman, and psychology meant running rats in meaningless experiments. I put one foot in front of the other, but my mind remained asleep. My inquisitiveness and ability to think for myself remained in the dark. Eventually, I completed my course work—then dropped out before writing a dissertation. I came to realize that, in all of this schooling, I had never had an original thought or asked a meaningful question. Perhaps, like Parsifal, I was unknowingly fighting my father’s battles.