Romancing the Shadow

by Connie Zweig

  Family money holds such numinous archetypal power that some members may become obsessed with it, experiencing a loss or gain of money as a loss or gain of soul. Money is linked with the life force; it circulates like blood in the family system. When there is a lack of money, family members feel deprived and suffer with shame. When a young child wants to participate in family money matters, offering to lend Dad his allowance or to earn small change with his chores, he seeks participation in the exchange of family energies. When an older child leaves home for college and refuses family money, she seeks separation and differentiation. Rejecting family money may mean rejecting participation as a child in the family system—that is, taking a step toward adulthood.

  Because much wealth is inherited, most self-worth is inherited as well, like a family sin. For many, to have financial worth is to have self-worth, regardless of the source of the money. Ruth, thirty, discovered this link between financial and emotional inheritance when her grandmother left her a large sum of cash. When she told her therapist that she felt terrified of accepting the gift, she began to untangle the threads of family shadow. Her wealthy family had offered her every opportunity as a child: classes in art and ballet, designer clothing, and private schools. Propping up the family persona, Ruth had developed into a nice girl with nice parents in a nice house. But they had not offered her an opportunity to be authentic, to discover her own likes and dislikes, to express her own feelings and opinions. Instead, they told her constantly that she was a lucky child; she had so much that she had no right to complain.

  The burden of her parents’ expectation grew heavy. When Ruth behaved like a nice girl, she felt trapped. When she expressed herself even a little, she disappointed her parents and felt terribly guilty and, responsible for their feelings. Then she felt regret for causing their suffering.

  In her twenties, Ruth left home and did not look back. She became an extremely independent young woman, who fended for herself and needed no one, a condition sometimes known as counter-dependency. If her wall of autonomy were punctured even for a moment, she felt humiliated and smothered. Ruth came to believe unconsciously that if she accepted anything from her family, she would lose her own boundaries and her newfound identity, becoming once again a child without a voice, a subservient, well-behaved daughter.

  But when she turned thirty, Ruth became depressed. Her tender feelings of vulnerability, her natural need to love and rely on others, surfaced with a vengeance. And as these shadowy feelings sought the light of consciousness, she began to miss her family members. Slowly, Ruth came to understand the deeper symbolism of the gift: If she avoided receiving the gift, she could remain alone and avoid having to risk an authentic relationship with her family. But if she could accept the gift and allow herself to maintain some boundaries, she might have an opportunity to develop a more authentic family intimacy.

  Family money may be shrouded in secrecy, carrying potent shadows of greed, envy, shame, and low self-worth. One therapist friend, who works with cancer patients, told us that the discussion of money seems to be more stressful for his clients than the discussion of preparing for death from cancer.

  Paulette, thirty-two, who worked long hours as a waitress, hid her financial situation like a dark secret. Her parents lived on a fixed income and could not offer her support. She earned barely enough money to pay her bills each month and felt as if she lived “one step from the streets.” But when she socialized with friends, she acted as if she had plenty of discretionary income.

  When Paulette began to sabotage her work by arriving late and performing poorly, she grew anxious about her welfare and dreamed one night about becoming a “bag lady.” With shadow-work, she came to see that a rebellious inner character, who resented her family poverty and felt entitled to more money, undermined her efforts. If she allowed this character to take over, she might lose her job and end up in desperate straits. Paulette needed to befriend this saboteur and find its appropriate place at the table, so that it might lead her in a new direction while she maintained her daily responsibilities.

  Roger, forty-five, a social worker who had been in therapy for two years, arrived one day to say that his father had offered to give him $8,000 toward the purchase of a new car. Initially, he told us, he felt this to be a generous offer. But Roger had been working with his shadow issues and, when he listened more intently, he reported that he heard another voice within saying, “See if you can get some more” (character 1). Instantly, on saying this, he identified it as a greedy character at the table and felt ashamed at his own greed (character 2). He looked down at his shoes, unable to look his therapist in the eye.

  Roger noted that this greedy voice sounded familiar; it had instructed him in the past to take more from his father. In fact, this inner character felt entitled to more. The therapist asked when he had felt this entitlement earlier in life. And Roger then confided that as a boy he used to steal money from his father.

  As a result of discoveries in therapy, Roger realized that he took money from his dad because it was that which he believed his father loved the most. And as a child he had wanted more of his father, feeling angry and neglected most of the time. As a compensation, he unconsciously wanted to take something of value from his father for himself.

  Roger became aware of this pattern when he explored the mythological figure of Hermes, a trickster god who acts as a guide between the worlds but is also a liar and a thief. He identified Hermes in himself with a quality of desire that rises up in his chest. He experiences it as a craving, a compulsive urge to have something even if it does not belong to him.

  As a boy, Roger had equated that which he could steal with receiving love. So he felt fulfilled through the act of stealing, an admittedly twisted way of getting his needs met. Although his ego felt gratified that it could take what it needed, his soul went into hiding. At a deeper level, Roger felt ashamed of wanting money; he was ashamed of having any needs at all. And stealing only temporarily made him feel better. Eventually, he felt more unworthy than before.

  Over time, Roger came to see that the internal costs of stealing were high: anxiety, guilt, and the feelings of being dirty and unworthy. As he grew more aware of these negative consequences, he became more capable of negotiating with Hermes when he appeared. When an opportunity to take something or to avoid paying for something arose, Hermes would jump at the chance to get away with it. Roger struggled with his new awareness, using the creative arts to listen to Hermes without surrendering control to him and thereby avoiding the internal consequences. When he succeeded, he returned the greedy Hermes to his proper place at the table and uncovered the gold in this shadow character: an ability to raise his fees to earn what he was worth and to spend money on himself without feeling undeserving.

  In childhood, Hermes had been his protector; he had given Roger a way to calm himself and maintain his feelings of being loved by actively taking the love he craved. Later, that same friend became an enemy. As an adult, it was no longer acceptable for him to compensate for his lack of self-worth by attempting to accumulate more money in a dishonest, secretive way.

  We stayed with the issue for several weeks and discovered in it an element of intergenerational family shadow. Roger’s father had called on Hermes as a Polish immigrant escaping to Switzerland after his army was defeated in World War II. He set up a smuggling ring to steal gold from the Nazis, using the gold to transport his family out of Europe and into the United States. So, in his aspect of thief, Hermes had saved Roger’s father and family; in his aspect of guide between the worlds, Hermes had brought them to a new life. Working together, we came to realize that today Roger could call on Hermes as a guide to the inner world of his underprivileged clients.

  Does your family money carry more shadow or more soul? What is the nature of your emotional inheritance? Do you have family secrets about money?

  LEAVING THE FAMILY HOME: CULTIVATING INDIVIDUAL AND FAMILY SOUL

  Some people live their entire lives within a t
en-mile radius of their family homes. Internally, too, they remain in position in the family constellation, forever the provider, the dutiful child, the critical outsider, or the family scapegoat. Unable or unwilling to examine family sins, these people pass them on with the family jewels.

  Others leave home at an early age. Called away by romantic or spiritual longings, they heed the voice of the Self, as described by Rilke in the opening poem. However, although they physically move far away, without shadow-work these people remain caught in the clutches of family shadow or family secrets.

  For those who leave and do shadow-work, another opportunity arises: to return home with the gift of consciousness and offer it to the family in a spirit of reconciliation. The result may be a more authentic intimacy and a deepening of family soul. This intergenerational development is expressed in this aphorism by President John Adams: “I was a warrior, so my son could be a farmer, so his son could be a poet.”

  How can you maintain your individual identity yet remain deeply connected to family members? Do you need to leave home in a more complete way? Or is this the time for you to return and cultivate family soul?

  In the next chapter, we look more deeply at a particular family sin: the parent’s betrayal of the child’s soul.

  CHAPTER 3

  A PARENT’S BETRAYAL AS INITIATION INTO SHADOW

  I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.

  And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly

  that I am ill.

  I am ill because of wounds to the soul,

  to the deep emotional self

  and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time,

  only time can help and patience,

  and a certain difficult repentance

  long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake,

  and the freeing oneself,

  from the endless repetition of the mistake

  which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

  —D. H. LAWRENCE

  Well-known science-fiction writer Ursula Le Guin wrote a short story that centers around a stunning image of the scapegoat, a tortured soul who is exchanged for the happiness of an entire community. In her tale, the residents of the seaside city of Omelas appear to be unusually cheerful. They are not naïve, like children, or bland, as if drugged. They are simply and genuinely joyous. They do not use swords or keep slaves, she says, as if to tell the reader that these people have no shadows.

  However, in the basement of a public building a young child sits in a locked dark room. Abandoned and undernourished, it grows thin and feeble-minded. Having screamed for help to no avail, it only whines occasionally now. This wretched one remains in the dark until a resident of Omelas arrives to bring cornmeal and water.

  The people of Omelas know that the child is there. They know that it has to be there. The people’s happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, and the abundance of their harvest depend on this child’s misery. It is the existence of this child and their knowledge of it that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. If the child were to be brought up into the light, cleaned, fed, and comforted, the prosperity of Omelas would disappear. And so, day after day, they exchange the blessings of their lives for the suffering of this one small soul.

  Viewed in light of the parent-child relationship, the abandonment, betrayal, and sacrifice of the child has deep mythic roots. Etymologically, to betray means to serve up, perhaps to serve up to the gods, as in a sacrifice. To sacrifice, in turn, means to make sacred. Mythic fathers throughout time betray and sacrifice their children. In the New Testament, God sacrifices his only son, Jesus, on the cross. In the Old Testament, Abraham agrees to sacrifice his son, Isaac, in an effort to follow God’s commandment. In Greek history, the king of Troy abandons his infant son, Paris, to die of exposure, but the prince returns to lead the Trojan War. During this same war, King Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces, sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to gain fair winds for his fleet.

  Mythic mothers, too, betray their children for questionable causes: Princess Medea, deserted by her lover Jason, who gathered the golden fleece, slays their sons to take her revenge. And Agave, mother of Pentheus, king of Thebes, slaughters and dismembers her son in a Dionysian revelry.

  In a parallel way, contemporary fathers, unconsciously perpetuating family sins, may judge and condemn their young sons as rivals to be pushed aside, as obstacles to their freedom from responsibility, or as weaklings to be turned into men by any means necessary. Like the gods banishing Hephaestus for a defective foot, these fathers may express their hostility through verbal abuse, corporal punishment, competitive aggression, or neglect and abandonment. Or they may idealize their young daughters as trophies for their own sense of pride or devalue them as objects for their own selfish pleasures. For some, the betrayal is malicious and intentional, simultaneously a betrayal of the natural order of parent-child love. But for most, the betrayal is covert and unintentional, a breech of trust, a failure to mirror, a transmission of his own shadow.

  And mothers, too, betray their young ones in a variety of ways today: Medusa-like mothers stare down their daughters with a cold, perfectionistic glare. Or they trespass on a young boy’s body with hands that seek to fill their own emptiness. Some mothers rage like the three Furies, who punish sinners of all kinds. Others devour their children, holding them hostage physically or emotionally, until they have no will of their own. And many play the shameless virgin mother, a saint whose children have to carry her invisible shadow.

  Looked at on the inner plane, Le Guin’s abandoned child is our very soul, whose tender feelings and vulnerable needs are sacrificed by parents in just the way that their parents sacrificed theirs. Banished from the inner kingdom, these feelings become shadow characters, who, like Paris of Troy, later fight for a place at the table. Marion Woodman points out that the soul child, radiant with light, often appears in dreams to be abandoned among bulrushes, in a tree, or in some other forgotten place. One of our clients dreamed that her soul crouched in a dark dungeon that shone with one beam of light.

  The parent’s ego, then, uses the repression of the child’s soul to maintain the position of power in the family and to prop up the image of family persona. In a strange twist, the child unknowingly identifies with the powerful parent, whether it is the same-sex or opposite-sex parent. As a result, the child develops an ideal image of this parent, a fantasy of father or mother that is compelling because the archetype of Father or Mother lies at the center of this image. And in this way the child unconsciously models him or herself after this parent, resulting in the formation of particular ego patterns, such as father’s daughter or mother’s son. At the same time, the child unknowingly rejects the less powerful parent, burying his or her qualities in the shadow, resulting in the formation of particular shadow patterns.

  Unconsciously, our parents want to create us in their own image. And we, as children, want this identification process to work. However, a parent’s response to a child rarely lives up to the ideal image; even with the best of intentions, even with the highest moral effort to nurture, support, and mirror the child’s authentic nature, the parent fails. An inevitable betrayal occurs, and the child’s ideal is shattered, initiating him or her into a parent’s shadow. As the child meets the parent’s shadow and continues to try to become acceptable by repressing unacceptable feelings or behaviors, she rejects authentic aspects of herself, repeating the betrayal internally and forming her own ego and shadow. And, in this way, another human child develops psychologically into an adult.

  This fall from innocence, however, is not a simple, obvious, or avoidable evil. We do not refer here to the insensitive act of a cruel parent in physical or sexual abuse but to the subtle, inevitable moment in the life of a child or, more accurately, a series of moments, in which a parent turns away, attends to other
pressing needs, or conveys an unintended, unconscious message. It is impossible to maintain a child’s innocence according to a standard of perfect parenting—that is, the parent cannot meet the child’s longing for love, desire for safety, and needs for mirroring at every given moment. The parent, whose soul has been wounded, is bound to fail. From the point of view of the child’s soul, the betrayal is inevitable, and the parents are the instrument of that betrayal.

  Archetypal psychologist James Hillman points out that betrayal can be seen as a necessary turning point that permits an individual to move out of a childlike state of naïve trust and innocence into an awareness of the complexity of every human being, including the dark side. When a father betrays a son, for instance, by divorcing his mother, gambling away the family funds, or disappearing into depression, the boy faces not a godlike, idealized image of the older man, but a naked, limited human being who in some inevitable way cannot be trusted.

  If, as adults, we continue to long for relationships that are free of disappointment, Hillman says, we may never grow up but remain in the position of the innocent child. This position, which he calls primal trust, carries the seeds of betrayal. Just as faith carries doubt within its nature, or a taboo carries the possibility of transgression, so primal trust activates its opposite—betrayal. In those moments, we reexperience the fall from grace; we move from fusion to separation, from innocence to knowledge.

  Our parents as our betrayers, then, also act as agents of consciousness. We do not say this to excuse the tyranny of abuse or minimize the pain of injury but to deepen our notions of the parent-child relationship. Despite our assumptions that betrayal is evil, despite our deepest wish to live life without being wounded, betrayal has the hidden potential to open us to something larger. Thus it involves more than personal psychology: It’s a gateway to an archetypal, perhaps fateful reality. In our betrayers we recognize our own capacity to betray. In this way, betrayer and betrayed are tied together in an alliance of opposites. The Other who carries the shadow then becomes a vehicle of the gods, requiring from us a richer ambivalence, a capacity to love and hate.