Romancing the Shadow

by Connie Zweig

  Family therapist Terence Real has written eloquently of this transmission of family shadow from fathers to sons. He distinguishes between overt male depression, which has debilitating but highly visible effects, and covert male depression, which may be chronic but well hidden by denial in heroic behaviors and addictions. Real points out that an epidemic of male depression has remained undetected due to cultural shadow issues about gender: Women are raised to internalize pain and blame themselves for distress. Therefore, they typically suffer from overt depression, which can be viewed as internalized oppression or the experience of victimization. On the other hand, men are raised to externalize pain and blame others for their distress. Therefore, they typically suffer from covert depression, which can be viewed as internalized disconnection or the experience of victimization that is warded off through grandiosity and perhaps victimizing others.

  The unconscious, unresolved suffering that stems from the depression of previous generations operates in families like an emotional debt, according to Real. “We either face it or we leverage our children with it.”

  Who in your family Carries the depression? Who denies it? What is the depressed character at the table trying to tell you? What are its deeper intentions?

  When anxiety or depression threaten to break through the threshold of conscious awareness, many people suffer addictions; they turn to alcohol and drug abuse, or compulsive sex and work to avoid their feelings. One woman reported that she felt so polluted by her alcoholic father’s blood running in her veins that she feared she could not escape her family’s fate. Both her older sister and twin brother succumbed to alcoholism, while she fought desperately to avoid the gravitational pull of her family shadow.

  Who is the family addict? Who takes care of this person? Who denies the problem? What shadow issues are camouflaged by the addictive behavior?

  Of course, some sins are brutally enacted within the walls of the family home. A child who witnesses a man battering his wife or a mother beating a child may not appear to be the victim per se; however, this child’s soul is brutalized. She or he loses a sense of innocence and safety, as well as the freedom to feel fully and to express feelings, out of fear of becoming the target. Becoming passive and depressed or anxious and hyperalert, a witness to violence may unknowingly banish authenticity and aliveness into the shadow.

  Other sins are not so cruel or concrete but may be passed on in a silent attitude or an invisible projection. A family with a lineage of strong women may imply to children that men are ineffectual, creating disrespect at a young age. A high-achieving family may teach that “we are what we accomplish,” so the children do not learn to value feeling or inferiority. Another may teach that those with less socioeconomic status are trash or that those with higher status are evil; or they may teach disrespect and disdain for their elders. In every case, the soul of the child is diminished as the child identifies with the parents’ feelings of inferiority and superiority.

  The inevitable result of the transmission of these sins is some form of self-hatred, which may be experienced as a tormenting inner critic, a disdain for the body, or a rejection of an essential part of our nature. Our client William, twenty, for instance, had absorbed his father’s shadow projection of homophobia. A small, effeminate, artistically gifted man, William had not yet told his family that he was gay; he feared that his strict, religious father would disapprove and never speak to him again. As a teenager, he had begun to use alcohol and marijuana to hide from the lie and dull the pain of his inauthentic life. Then he turned to heroin, the ultimate escape.

  In therapy, William slowly wrestled with his sexual orientation. He began to realize that he was not inherently flawed, disgusting, and perverted, but that a character within him constantly delivered that message from his father. He began to see and feel the beauty in his sweet, artistic nature; it was merely his internalized father’s voice that told him that his temperament was better fit for a girl. But William’s homophobic character, who drew strength from cultural and religious taboos, tormented him with self-destructive thoughts. And William succumbed to the undertow of heroin. Despite his hard-won awareness, he could not make the required sacrifice: He could not allow the homophobic character to die so that he could continue to learn to accept himself. Instead, he died of a drug overdose, a casualty of hand-to-hand combat with his shadow.

  In addition, as carriers of the collective shadow projection of racism, many people of color will pass on some form of low self-esteem or self-hate to their children. Today, Caucasian children who live as minorities also suffer this kind of projection. As one client put it, “I feel like white bread in my neighborhood.” Similarly, many Jewish survivors of the Holocaust internalized some form of anti-Semitism, which their children and grandchildren unconsciously pick up as self-loathing or unacceptability, despite mighty efforts to assimilate or achieve success.

  Sometimes the sins of our fathers and mothers are shrouded in secrecy. Family secrets may remain hidden not only to outsiders but to family members as well. Indeed, through the powers of repression and denial, secrets may be hidden even from ourselves.

  FAMILY SECRETS: THE SACRIFICE OF AUTHENTICITY

  Family secrets are the shadow’s tools for keeping lies, addictions, and violence—the family’s multigenerational sins—in the darkness. Typically, the secret comes about to protect a vulnerable part of a family’s history (“We escaped the Holocaust” or “Our grandparents had African-American blood” or “My sister was schizophrenic” or “We were dirt poor”) or a member’s questionable behavior (“My mother was a pill addict” or “My uncle molested me” or “My brother committed suicide” or “My wife had an affair”).

  One Asian-American client revealed, in an offhanded remark, that when she was six months old her parents immigrated to the United States, but they could not support the whole family. So they kept her brother here but sent her back to Taiwan to be raised by an aunt for one year. And the experience was never spoken of again. She repressed the feelings, minimized this experience, and does not see its link to her terrible fear of abandonment today. A beautiful young black woman tells her therapist that her mother denies their African-American heritage, living in disguise as an Indian woman in a sari. The client, who lives with a white man, admits that she has no black friends. Finally, a woman who attends an expensive private college tells her therapist that her younger sister is anorexic, though no one else in the family has noticed. With the perpetuation of these family secrets, authenticity between family members becomes increasingly difficult, and family soul is diminished.

  However, to tell a family secret is no simple task; its repercussions may be earth-shattering. For some, the family container cannot hold, and it breaks apart. For others, the powers of denial stand like a fortress around the family secret, and the secret teller cannot be heard. Like Cassandra, the prophetess who was cursed to be disbelieved in the Greek tragedy Oresteia, the secret tellers are not given credibility and may even be banished from the fold.

  These days, as the public corridors ring with family secrets of abuse, it’s commonplace to assume that all secrets should be told as loudly and as quickly as possible. But the hero on an archetypal journey often cannot speak of what he has seen until his task has been completed. So the urge to keep the secret may at times be as strong as the urge to tell.

  In other cases, telling the family secret is required to lift the family curse, even though the consequences for the secret teller are high. Miranda, admonished by her parents never to speak the family secret aloud, kept silent for forty years. Like an obedient child, she lived life with her mouth shut, certain that, if she told the truth her parents would abandon her, disinherit her, or perhaps even die. Then Miranda was diagnosed with breast cancer, and her brush with death acted like a wake-up call. She felt compelled to live with greater authenticity. She decided to speak the truth and risk losing her parents in an effort to take back her own life.

  Her mother, at twenty-one pre
gnant and unmarried with two children, had given her up for adoption. A wealthy couple from the Upper East Side of Manhattan adopted her at birth. She remembers clearly being told at six years old that she was adopted—and that she was never to discuss the matter with anyone, or she would be sorry. Miranda acted the part of the perfect daughter and kept the secret. But by the time she was a teenager, she hated herself. Although she was a star in school, she took drugs after class, which was the beginning of her double life.

  When she married in New York City at age thirty, she also began an affair in Los Angeles. So in her thirties she was bigamous and bi-coastal. And she had two sets of parents as well.

  On the outside, Miranda wore the trappings of success: She drove a BMW, owned a house in a wealthy neighborhood, and climbed to the top rungs of her career ladder. But, on the inside, she rejected herself the way her mother had rejected her; unconsciously, she had buried her self-worth in the shadow. She also hated and resented her adoptive parents, because they would not allow her to speak of the secret and be herself. She resented her husband for the same reason; she felt controlled, self-conscious, and inauthentic around him. So her authenticity and personal power remained hidden in the shadow.

  When Miranda finally decided to look for her biological mother, she found her in a small town near the city where she was raised. After a long internal struggle, she told her adoptive parents about the meeting with her mother—and they were furious, threatening to disown her if she ever discussed it again.

  As Miranda continued to do shadow-work, she came to understand that although she was forty years old, she projected her power onto her parents and husband as a child would. Naturally, she resented and belittled them, feeling no choice but to hide herself and continue to depend on them emotionally and financially. In order to discover her own authenticity, Miranda needed to connect with her own rage and power and to stop projecting them outward. That is, in order to become an adult with a positive sense of herself, Miranda needed to accept her own origins—by betraying her adoptive parents and telling the family secret.

  Miranda identified the shadow character that had taken over her life as “the rejected one.” She imagined her as a small, waiflike girl who was filled with shame. Archetypally, Miranda saw herself as an orphan, an exiled, hopeless child who would never find her way home.

  As she connected more deeply to her own authentic Self, she had the internal experience that the character of the rejected one was not her, but merely a part of her, a shadow character which had taken control. Miranda herself was not an outsider, a powerless victim; however, her early life experiences shaped a part of her to identify with feeling that way. By making a more conscious relationship with the character and acknowledging her feelings without identifying with them, Miranda was able to slowly uncover some sense of pride and entitlement. Eventually, she began to develop her own creative voice by writing poetry.

  Miranda disclosed to her husband that she had been living a lie and wanted a divorce. In grieving the loss of her marriage, she began to tell her story to friends as well. Two years later, she met Gary, an engineer, and the powerful combination of shadow-work and their honest relationship enabled her to accept the limits of her relationship with her adoptive parents. The growing love between Miranda and Gary also enabled her to consider motherhood, which had always been cast in shadow due to her painful birth circumstances. In fact, Miranda could consider giving birth to a baby because she had given birth to herself. By facing the family secret, she had lifted the family curse.

  What are your family secrets? Who keeps them from whom? How does this reduce authenticity among family members and decrease family soul?

  Now that we have explored how family sins are transmitted from parents to children and how they may remain concealed in family secrets, we turn to siblings and their unique shadow issues.

  SHADOW SISTERS/SHADOW BROTHERS

  We have been using King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table as an image of the internal world of shadow characters that can take over the seat of power. Externalizing the metaphor, we might view the family as the kingdom and the characters as the siblings around the dining room table, each vying for love, attention, and resources. When the kingdom is in balance, the goddess Themis abides: She regulates the proper order in human relations, establishes boundaries, and prevents the shadow from intruding.

  In this atmosphere, each individual feels his or her needs honored. Therefore, there is less need for siblings to act out. However, with an absent or alcoholic king or a tyrannical or depressed queen, the kingdom is thrown into chaos. As a result, the sibs enact the shadow with each other in an unconscious effort to reestablish harmony.

  Felice, a landscape architect, had a dream about this image: I dreamed of getting up from my seat at the family table. When I returned, my seat was missing. I went down into the basement.

  Felice grew up with six sisters, each struggling for a fair share. She felt that she disappeared in the crowd. In fact, one of her sisters literally disappeared—she died of anorexia. Felice’s survival strategy was more subtle: emotional suicide. Having been beaten by an older sister and undefended by her parents, Felice surrendered: Out of fear of attack, she did not speak up or disclose her feelings. As a result, she felt unseen and misunderstood. When she was ten, her father returned from a trip with key chains for the girls. Felice offered her older sister the choice between them. After choosing one, the sister changed her mind and wanted Felice’s chain. Felice felt defeated again and unworthy of keeping her gift. Her own sense of entitlement was banished into the shadow.

  Years later, as an adult, Felice repeated this pattern: When their mother died and the family inheritance was doled out, Felice could not bear to open her safety-deposit box. It took a full year before she could look inside.

  Slowly, with shadow-work, Felice came to realize that she deserved to have needs and desires of her own and that she deserved to have them met. In addition, she could not continue to feel responsible for her sister’s jealousy. She had to take her own seat at the family table. And in this way she found the gold in her dark side—her sense of self-esteem and capacity for assertiveness.

  Some sibling pairs develop by pushing against each other in opposite directions until they seem, as adults, to carry the projection of the Other for one another. Like the mythological sisters Eve and Lilith, or Psyche and Orual, each holds the mirror reflection for the other: one is artistic, the other athletic; one is smart, the other beautiful; one is accommodating and well behaved, the other rebels and acts out. This kind of splitting can trigger terrible envy between sibs, causing one to reject the other or to idealize the other and reject herself. Brothers, too, may appear to be opposite, yet they are complementarily linked at a deeper level: Like Jesus and Judas, Abel and Cain, Osiris and Set, one creates, the other destroys; one becomes godlike, the other devilish.

  We suggest that this strange but significant phenomenon—the one who is most like us is also the most different—stems from a key family dynamic: the division of the pie of family shadow. During the birth and early years of each sibling, differing pressures on parents may lead to distinct shadow content. As each sib absorbs a parent’s shadow in a unique way, they unconsciously split the pie: each sib cuts off parts of him or herself, such as aggression, sadness, or ambition, in an effort to preserve the family persona and to belong. Then the indigestible parts are played out among them, as they fight with each other in the pain of self-denial, suffering from cutting off their budding potentials in order to keep the family together.

  For instance, the birth and development of a gifted “golden child” in the family may mean that others feel they cannot compete. So they hide their own talents or give up the fight altogether, ashamed of their lack in the sibling’s reflection. On the other hand, the gifted child may suppress her own self-expression out of the discomfort of being envied, or she may shine as the family star.

  The story of Gloria and Toni, two sisters now
in their forties, illustrates this splitting of family pie. Gloria and Toni have not been close in their adult years. Although their mother says they were inseparable as children, Gloria primarily recalls their differences, their otherness. “She’s such a stranger to me—stranger and kin,” she says.

  A perpetual reader, Gloria takes great joy in thinking about ideas; her sister did not finish college. Whereas Gloria is awkward in her body and disinterested in physical activity, Toni is a star athlete in whatever sport she tries—baseball, tennis, golf. And whereas Gloria, as a child of the 1960s, rejects all concerns about image, her sister dresses to the hilt, as if fashion designers put together her wardrobe. A student of yoga, Gloria looks for natural highs and spiritual solutions; Toni believes that life is so full of suffering that depression is the only authentic response.

  Gloria wonders aloud how two children of the same gender, raised by the same parents only two years apart, could develop such distinct abilities and follow such divergent paths. She remembers that their father, the authoritarian head of this Latino clan, used to talk about La Familia as if it were one monolithic structure, as if it were a sacred name that, when invoked, could keep out enemy intruders. He saw the family as one single entity, no individuals, only the sacred group, the tribe, the clan. The boundary around the family was secure, but the boundaries within the family were lost. And the opportunity for family soul was limited.

  Perhaps, Gloria says thoughtfully, she and her sister developed such contrary qualities in a desperate effort to differentiate from their enmeshed family. With so little space for individual soul, they used each other to push against, to find a separate name, to carve out a separate purpose or fate. It’s almost as if they developed the two opposing sides of one psyche, like ego and shadow. Although their differences appear to be irreconcilable, at a deeper level they may demonstrate an alliance of opposites which, like yin and yang, together make a whole.