by Connie Zweig
• The shadow dances through our dreams. Perhaps the most eloquent voice of the unconscious, our dreams can reveal unknown feelings and unseen attitudes that cannot be discovered in any other way. Thus, in a dream, a shadow character may enact forbidden wishes as a sadistic figure or break strong taboos as a criminal, which the dreamer could not uncover in conscious waking life. Who appears in your dreams to contradict your waking self-image? What do these characters do and what do they need?
• The shadow reveals its gold in creative works, which build bridges between the conscious and unconscious worlds. The arts have the power to loosen the tight grasp of the conscious mind, permitting unknown moods and images to arise. Writers and artists alike have helped to lift the veil and allow others a glimpse of the infinite richness of the shadow realm.
The encounter with the shadow also may be dramatic, even life-changing: A man, feeling out of control, hits a woman and faces his raging killer instincts, meeting the archetypal tyrant or abuser. A woman, feeling trapped and desperate, leaves her children for a more unconstrained life, meeting the dark mother or abandoner. Each of these moments is a shocking encounter with an internal stranger. Each has roots in the individual psychological history of the person, but each also has roots in the cultural context in which it occurs, as well as in archetypal or mythic reality.
In a contemporary Faustian story, a woman client, who was driven by a need to understand everything, had maintained an overcontrolled, highly intellectual lifestyle as a philosophy teacher. In this way, she had successfully avoided the chaotic emotional world of her mother. But, at midlife, an untamed, uncivilized, shadowy feeling began to pull at her. And a whispering voice could be heard, calling her away from the predictable world of academia and toward an unknown, uncertain life. We suggested that she do shadow-work by imagining this feeling as a wild part of herself and writing in the third person about allowing it to take possession of her life. This is her journal entry:
She became all that she was not. All she had worked to develop, strived to create, came undone. The threads of her life pulled. The story unraveled. And the one she had despised, the one she had disdained, the one she had burned at the stake of her fury was born. Born in her. Born of her. Torn from her. Like another life, a different life, yet her life, its mirror image, its twin.
She walked away then. She packed very few things, turned her back abruptly, and walked away then, away from the words, away from the morning light, away from the lemon tree. She walked away from the smiles, away from the shoes, away from the hum of machines. She entered the wildness, where the words stayed in her throat, and the sky remained dark, and the faces were fierce. She entered the wildness, where the feet were bare, and the sound was of owl and coyote and bear.
In these moments, when we become strangers to ourselves, face-to-face with an unknown, unsuspected Other, we turn and, in an instant, glimpse our own blind spots. Immediately, our preprogrammed response is to turn the other way. We shift quickly into denial, hardly noticing the white flash of humiliation, the red heat of rage, the cold wave of grief. They pass fleetingly and go unacknowledged.
Like letters left unopened, their messages remain mute, their gifts unreceived. Romancing the shadow means opening the letters and hearing the messages from hidden parts of ourselves. Romancing the shadow means listening to the voices that have been silenced and honoring what they have to say. To learn to romance the shadow we need, first of all, to be able to imagine the shadow characters hiding in our own souls.
ROMANCING THE SHADOW: KING ARTHUR AND THE KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE
Many people awaken in adulthood to a growing desire for greater self-awareness and authenticity and for a deeper intimacy with others, both of which can be achieved with shadow-work. We suggest that this awakening desire is part of a natural developmental process that occurs in adults, which has been charted in the transpersonal and spiritual literature. Unlike the transition from adolescence to adulthood, which occurs biologically and therefore automatically, the transition to greater consciousness must be chosen and then enacted intentionally.
This change involves, first of all, a shift in focus from the exterior World to the interior one. In young adults, this shift may occur as a result of difficult family problems or serious betrayal by a family member. It may occur as a result of painful disillusionment with a romantic relationship, which brings emotional chaos and self-reflection in its wake. Or it may occur as a result of an experience with altered states of consciousness, which bring a more internal orientation. For people in midlife, this developmental shift often takes place once again and signals a descent to the underworld, the search for a fresh perspective and a renewal of meaning.
Also, this awakening desire may occur at any age with the beginning of psychotherapy. When people enter therapy, they turn within and begin a rite of passage that signifies a change in attitude, a willingness to accept greater responsibility for the consequences of their choices. Psychotherapy, like ritual, may represent a quest for the lost gods.
Typically, people come to therapy to tell a story from their lives, a narrative of certain events and their feelings about them. They describe a set of problems as they perceive them; they seek empathy, insight, or concrete advice. As psychotherapists, we, in turn, tell them the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in the mythical kingdom of Camelot, which helps us to imagine together the shadow figures living within.
As the story goes, Arthur, a wise and worthy king, had a great table constructed so that all of his knights could have a place to discuss their individual perspectives on the kingdom. The king sat in the seat of power, which belongs to the ruler or, psychologically, the Self, because it alone holds the perspective of the entire kingdom, thereby protecting it and giving it direction and purpose. Each of the knights, in contrast, has particular interests to defend.
In our metaphor, the kingdom represents the psyche as a whole, including the individual’s needs and the interlocking needs of others in his or her life. The knights, or characters at the inner table, represent the personal and archetypal patterns of functioning that influence our behaviors, shape our decisions, and color our feelings. At any moment, one of them may usurp the seat of power from the king, taking over the ruling authority during an inner coup—perhaps as a needy child seeking affection and security or as a harsh critic afraid of imperfection or as a compulsive overeater whose hunger cannot be satisfied. Then the inner kingdom falls into disharmony and suffering under the reign of a knight or shadow figure.
So, we do not see the psyche as a solid, unified front surrounded by a Teflon wall. Instead, it is a dynamic, fluid, multiply intelligent world populated by myriad characters that may quickly appear on center stage or retreat from moment to moment. During these shifts, the whole of us may seem to be possessed by a part, while the other parts remain backstage. While one part acts out, it may not feel like “me” at all.
Each of these parts or characters at the table has a personal history or creation myth. Also, like each god and goddess, each has a wound to bear and a gift to give. The more unconscious and less differentiated the characters, the more tightly they can hold on to the seat of power, possessing us like alien forces and stealing our free will. But as we begin to make them conscious and differentiate or personify them in our imaginations, the less tight their grasp becomes and the more our range of choice expands.
Archetypal psychologist James Hillman writes of the link between the characters, which he calls our pathologies, and our compulsions, which he calls Ananke, the goddess of necessity. When we feel as if we are claimed by a foreign power, held hostage by a character that causes us to act in irrational, unfamiliar ways, we are caught in the circle of Ananke. The less we can imagine the force that drives us, the more compulsive and unconscious our activity will be. But the more we can imagine it and relate to it, the less we will be possessed by it. Eventually, with ongoing shadow-work, we can offer it a place within the divine ord
er, a sanctuary in Camelot, where its power can be honored and its voice can be heard. We begin shadow-work by tracing the roots of the characters in our personal history.
TRACING THE ROOTS OF THE SHADOW IN PERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY
Each shadow figure or character at the table has a story to tell with a similar plot line: At a young age, our full range of aliveness, feeling, and dependency was too much for our caretakers to bear. Unknowingly, they betrayed our young souls again and again, inflicting the wounds of neglect, intrusion, cruelty, and shame. To survive this wounding environment, as children we made a Faustian bargain, concealing the unacceptable parts of ourselves in the shadow and presenting only the acceptable parts (or ego) to the world. In an ongoing, subtle series of feedback loops with parents, teachers, clergy, and friends, we learned, over and over, how to present ourselves in an attempt to feel safe, accepted, and loved. In this way, ego and shadow are inevitably created in tandem within us all.
This universal creation of the shadow figures takes place via the following coping strategies or defense styles, which act archetypally like guardians at the gate of the soul. They help us to survive in untenable situations by protecting us from the anxieties of rejection and abandonment. But, paradoxically, just as we defend against shadowy feelings and behaviors, the shadow is formed. Just as we attempt to protect our vulnerable young souls, we lose contact with them.
The disavowal of our thoughts and feelings (denial) begins at an early age as we discover that our parents may withhold love if we cry or punish us if we are wrong. As wounded children themselves, our parents defend against the return of their own difficult, buried feelings when they are stimulated by a child’s natural spontaneity, raw emotion, and eroticism. As their defenses flounder, the parents often protect themselves by unknowingly judging and condemning their young ones through shame and rejection.
If, as children, we internalize our parents’ critical voices, shame and self-loathing get built into our self-concept. We learn to feel insufficient, fraudulent, unacceptable. The quality of our parents’ feelings and values then shapes our later defense styles. We tell them “I am not like that” or “I didn’t do it” in an effort to avoid judgment, blame, and punishment and to feel acceptable. In this way, so-called negative shadow content, which is deemed unlovable, is stuffed into the unconscious (repression), buried in the body (somaticization), or attributed to others (projection), while so-called positive traits, which are deemed acceptable, turn into our ego ideal (identification).
For example, when we bury uncomfortable feelings to avoid dealing with them (suppression or repression), we pay the price of our aliveness. Our client Carol came to therapy struggling with a midlife depression. As a young girl in the rural Midwest from a farming family of seven children, she learned to appear happy (character 1) and hide her feelings of sadness in an effort to protect her parents from feeling failure or helplessness. As a result she concluded, even unknowingly, that her feelings were not acceptable. She developed a persona with a narrow range of feeling and behavior that has caused her to appear superficial, like a Barbie doll. Internally, continuing to protect her parents, she feels overly responsible and acts moralistic (character 2), compelled by Ananke to obey the command of a punishing, wrathful god. As a woman, she has continued to live out the girl’s persona, so that when she married she believed it was her job to be her husband’s caretaker, to keep him happy by being a proper wife.
Later, in a natural developmental process, partially as a result of the safety of her marriage and as a result of entering midlife, her hidden feelings unexpectedly erupted. In this way, she uncovered Moody (character 3), the name she gave to the character at the table who contains her parents’ message that sad feelings are not acceptable. Moody has usurped the seat of power and Carol, still unable to tolerate her feelings, has become seriously depressed.
We see moods as undifferentiated feelings; the mood of depression, embodied in the character Moody, contains the undifferentiated feelings of sadness, grief, loss, hopelessness, despair, and even rage, which became suppressed together. With shadow-work Carol began to recognize that her depression was not merely about dissatisfaction with her external life or a hormonal imbalance. It stemmed from her disconnection with the depths of an authentic soul life. When she began to attend to the difficult, banished feelings, she found the gift of a richer, more authentic emotional life.
When we unconsciously adopt the characteristics of a parent or other authority figure (identification) to reduce the pain of separation or loss, we also defend against our own separateness and vulnerability. When a child says proudly, “I’m smart just like Daddy,” he drinks in the values of his father, defending against feeling stupid and small. When he grows to adulthood, Daddy’s Boy may still operate within him and contain the roots of his father complex, the inner voice that tells him how to take a stand in the larger world, how to be powerful, visible, and productive. The shadow appears when his training to avoid feeling small and powerless leads him to self-sabotage as a compulsive workaholic, which requires that he sacrifice his marriage and his authenticity On the altar of productivity.
For instance, our client Anthony, now forty-two, had been terrorized by his father and brother as a young boy. Today, he cannot tolerate men who are weak and powerless, judging and criticizing them as victims. As an alternative, he developed an overly responsible character with a workaholic lifestyle and two professions so that he could feel strong and powerful. But when he reached forty, Anthony began to suffer from exhaustion and lethargy, and he grew depressed and hated himself for being weak. His protector had become his saboteur.
Eventually, he began to see that through identification with his father/aggressor he could feel strong; however, he had become a tyrant not only over others but over himself. Through projection, he could expel his weakness and disgust onto others, treating them the way he had been treated. Yet in doing so he had cast into shadow his own vulnerability, which returned to haunt him at midlife.
When these kinds of defenses break down and anxiety-provoking feelings begin to break through the surface, we feel flooded with fear. At those times, we may adopt the behavior of an earlier stage of life (regression) in an effort to ward off the anxiety. In regression, we time-travel into the past, longing to be adored or cared for by another, free of adult responsibility. On those occasions, we may give up the voice of our authority, become unable to act independently, yearn for a former lover, disappear into a depression or illness, or literally return to live at our parents’ home.
Or at difficult times we may attempt to self-medicate (denial), anesthetizing ourselves through substance abuse and distracting ourselves through compulsive activities. Denial also acts as a platform for the creation of extremely autonomous characters in dissociative disorders, such as multiple personality disorder. This splitting off (dissociation) of a particular thought or feeling during a traumatic event, such as sexual abuse, results in creating one or more autonomous characters with lives of their own, which are unrelated to the authentic Self. In these myriad ways, the inner characters are born, living outside the boundaries of conscious awareness but secretly influencing our moods, responses, and life choices.
DEFENDING OURSELVES WITH SHIELDS: POWER, SEX, MONEY, ADDICTION
As we develop, our shadow characters pick up swords and shields—power, sex, money, addiction—to protect their identities, compensate for feelings of shame, and defend against further injury. First of all, the characters seek to compensate for their feelings of weakness, inferiority, incompetence, and powerlessness and for their fears of non-existence.So they devise ways to gain invulnerability by using a power shield to banish these uncomfortable feelings. They may resort to violence, verbal abuse, emotional control, or withholding love and approval. But the result for them is the same: Those internal characters who carry the more vulnerable feelings move deeper into shadow and become more entrenched in the unconscious.
At the same time, the ego grows stron
ger and stronger. Like a reigning monarch, it builds empires via status, authority, or, fame. And the shadow character, who appears to speak as a friend, actually inhibits the authentic voice of the Self and speaks as an enemy. Using power to serve the ego, the shadow character turns the archetype of power into a power complex, a demon hungering for satisfaction. Soon, we do not have power; it has us. (Because this is such a central theme, each of the following chapters has a section on the power shadow.)
We make a distinction between two kinds of power: authentic power, the ability or willingness to stand for the authentic voice of the Self, which also has been called empowerment; and inauthentic power, which stems from the ego and serves to reinforce a defense or coping strategy of the persona. At times, an individual’s expression of authentic power may look like a power trip or an inability to adapt to an outer authority. But each of us must learn to make this distinction for ourselves, differentiating between an inner tyrant, ogre, or witch and the assertive voice of the Self. In other words, we need to learn to use the power to act without an act of power.
In myth, the god of power and war, Ares, is the lover of Aphrodite, the goddess of sexuality. Power and sex go hand in hand; they are a matched set. Within us, the characters at the table use sex, like power, as a shield to defend against feelings of isolation, impotency, or unattractiveness. Sexuality carries the life force from one human being to another. As creators of human life, we experience one of our most intimate connections to the creator, to the gods, in sex.