Romancing the Shadow

by Connie Zweig

  After a few months, Joyce pronounced that she dreaded the hour. It felt like the confession of her youth. She had thought of lying but, in the end, told her therapist the following story. That week, on a second date with a man, she had had sex without a condom. She had thought about her therapist during sex, fearing that he would be disappointed and she would feel guilty. She felt angry about the danger of AIDS and its constraints, she reported; she consciously chose to ignore it. She didn’t want to deal with reality, she said. She just wanted to have fun for a change. Besides, she said, she didn’t like condoms—although it turned out that she had never tried them.

  The therapist asked her which character at the table rebelled against authority. She called it Risky, the one who rebels impulsively against her strict Catholic upbringing and her mother’s insistence that she remain invisible. Because Joyce was told repeatedly that she was a boring, unexciting child, Risky gets her into trouble so that she can have another identity. But her unthinking rebellion is as dangerous as her unthinking conformity; either way, her authentic Self is not in charge.

  When asked how she would deal with condoms on the next date, Joyce decided that she would share her internal experience, telling him that she felt disturbed by her own carelessness. However, if he refused to use a condom, she feared that she would have sex anyway, out of her fear of abandonment.

  For Joyce, this process of self-discovery turned what appeared to be a series of random events into self-knowledge. Despite its dangers, her sexual acting out served to raise her awareness about who she is and what she needs. By learning to witness her impulsivity as a character and using the breathing technique to stay connected to herself, she began to make different choices. She realized that when she unconsciously allowed Risky to lead, rebelling against others’ guidelines, she was dismissing her own values. In addition, she felt bad about herself, going out of authenticity and regretting it later. In particular, she began to recognize that she grows attached to men after sexual intimacy, yet she does not choose men who would honor her vulnerability. So she ends up feeling rejected and hurt, as she did with her mother. And she blames them and then blames herself.

  To break the pattern, Joyce began to date without having sex, experimenting with becoming more outspoken and opinionated. She felt positive about being more prudent with her sexuality, despite her rebellious attitude toward her early religious training. In fact, she dated Raymond for two months before getting intimate, holding out for trust and friendship before sexuality. When the time came to become intimate, she discussed using condoms with Ray ahead of time. Today, they enjoy a conscious, committed relationship.

  Who lives in your sexual shadow? How does this character use sex to defend against intimacy or to resolve other family shadow issues?

  MONEY SHADOWS: SUCCESS OBJECTS AND SUCCESSFUL FATHERS

  Sara had not yet awakened to an inner life and remained unaware of the princess who sat in the seat of power at her inner table. An attractive young law student, she was highly concerned with her clothing and her car. She scouted bars at night in search of her “success object,” a man whose high-style image would match her own. Her first requirement of him: a six-figure salary.

  Sara met Will at a gala party one night and told her therapist that their chemistry was electric. After two months of ecstatic sex, she agreed to marry him. “He meets all my criteria,” she said. “He earns a lot of money, and I love the way he treats me like a princess.”

  But during the few months before the wedding, Sara began to feel worried and anxious. Will did not speak to her much and, on occasion, treated her so insensitively that it felt like cruelty. He seemed preoccupied and did not participate in planning the wedding. When Will dismissed her concerns about music for the celebration, she suddenly realized that he reminded her of her father, also a wealthy but insensitive man who frequently patronized her. In that moment, Sara knew that she would have to betray her own sense of dignity and self-respect to marry him. She suggested they try joint counseling, but he refused. With heartbreak and remorse, Sara canceled the wedding and returned her engagement ring to Will. Facing the death of her dreams, she entered therapy to try to understand why she had chosen to marry a man who treated her in these ways.

  Several weeks later Will called and told Sara that their separation was extremely painful for him. He wanted to work on the relationship and invited her to enter therapy with him. Having risked the fantasy of marriage, she had gained her own self-respect and allowed the relationship to become something better. For Sara, this self-affirming act helped to equalize the power in their relationship and permitted it to truly begin.

  Our client Barbara, thirty-three, also discovered that her unconscious relationship to money shaped her attractions to romantic partners. A flourishing motion picture producer in Hollywood, Barbara always wondered why she was drawn to less successful men, including those who earned a lot less money than she did. In an effort to uncover a secret hidden in her family shadow, the therapist asked her to describe her dad.

  Barbara’s father had been a successful executive in the movie industry, a dominant presence at work and at home. He had reigned in the living room as he had reigned in the boardroom, lecturing rather than conversing, expounding on every topic with the black and white morality of a priest. Barbara loved her dad, but she observed the destructive consequences of his communication style, his lack of relatedness, and his alcoholism on the family.

  In addition, her father controlled the family through money. He showered them with gifts to win their love, unable to be vulnerable or tender with them. Unknowingly, Barbara had come to believe that money had given him his power, turning him into a tyrant. So from the time that she began to date, she felt attracted to men who were more sensitive and artistic, better listeners, and certainly less ambitious. In effect, she was drawn to her father’s shadow. Yet this pattern kept her in a reactive mode, open to only a narrow range of partners.

  Curiously, whenever she ended up in a relationship with a man who was strikingly unlike her father, some part of her always felt disappointed. On the other hand, whenever she dated a powerful man with money who wanted to spend it on her, she fell into her father complex, feeling controlled and inferior. She could not allow herself to be treated well without feeling that there were strings attached.

  In therapy, Barbara did the slow, steady work of sorting through her father complex: She recognized how much she was like him and how much she disowned him. Eventually, she discovered that she could respect some of his traits without becoming him. And she could be attracted to some of his traits in a man without feeling trapped by him. Through ongoing shadow-work, Barbara continues to date a wide range of men and to explore her own feelings about money and intimacy.

  How do you or did you use money as a shield during dating? How do your family shadow issues around money affect your choice of partners?

  POWER SHADOWS: VICTIMS AND VICTIMIZERS

  Our cultural worship of the powerful, invulnerable hero persona has resulted in a collective tendency to bury vulnerability and victimization in the shadow. Struggling to maintain an image of perfection and triumph, we have tended to blame the victims, whether they are poor welfare mothers, battered wives, or drug addicts. Our policies have suggested that if the disenfranchised strive harder, they, too, can achieve success or accommodate their abusers. If they do not succeed, they have brought on their own fate.

  Several decades ago, the women’s movement challenged our collective tendency to ignore the more complex truths of victimization, which was followed by challenges from advocates for people of color, gays and lesbians, and children. And, slowly, another response to abuse and exploitation has emerged, which points to cultural blind spots and rationalizations. But today some social commentators suggest that we have swung to the other extreme, becoming a culture of victims. In this paradigm, individuals who form a victim persona are seen as childish, manipulative, and unwilling to take personal responsibility. Within t
his cultural split, neither the hero nor the victim can confront the reality of the power shadow and its insidious effects.

  At an individual level, the consequences of this split for finding a romantic partner can be devastating. Patterns of power may be laid down as early as a first date. Typically, the hero-identified person abuses power, while the victim-identified person relinquishes it. But these two sides of the power complex also exist within each person as an interior power struggle between two characters—the overpowering tyrant or victimizer and the powerless victim.

  Justine, thirty-five, an executive buyer for a fashion retail chain, had given up meeting men in conventional ways, such as at parties, because she often felt shy in groups of people. Instead, she decided to place a personal ad in the local paper. When George called, he sounded interesting and asked to meet her at a bookstore near his home, some thirty miles from Justine’s neighborhood. In response, Justine suggested a site closer to her home, but George was adamant about his choice. Immediately, Justine felt uncomfortable. Their first joint decision became a power struggle.

  The daughter of a tyrannical and abusive father, Justine had learned at a young age to accommodate men in an effort to feel safe. So, while dating, she tended to surrender her own preferences and give up power. But Justine had been doing shadow-work, so she identified this victim character and, in this case, could listen to a different voice. She chose not to meet with him after all.

  Three days later, George called back and agreed to go to her meeting place. Reluctantly, Justine joined him for coffee and they spent a few hours in casual conversation. A few days later, George called and told her that he had won two free airline tickets to Hawaii, inviting her to join him. Justine hesitated, but she was tempted. She was bored at the time, eager for an adventure. She asked to go out with him again before she decided. During their date, George disclosed to Justine that he was involved in a lot of lawsuits. Instinctively, she found him a little dangerous; however, she found him exciting as well, so she overrode her fears and agreed to travel with him.

  That night Justine dreamed: she was flirting with a black-haired man who seemed imposing and intense. In the dream she felt that he was enclosing her, “like the kind of man who could kill you, but won’t.” She felt attracted to his strength and power but, at the same time, she was afraid of the danger.

  On their next date, Justine found out more about George’s lawsuits: He earned his living in petty litigation. She felt disgusted and afraid and canceled the trip. George was furious and applied intimidation tactics: He told her that he would sue her for $400, the price of the plane fare, because her name was on the ticket. A lawyer advised her not to be concerned, and, after a few more harassing calls, George disappeared.

  In her encounters with George, Justine had tried not to give up her power, as she had done in the past. However, a deeper pattern of victimization remained: Out of her own feelings of inadequacy, she had responded to a man who had shown a slight interest in her, ignoring her own ambivalent feelings toward him and banishing her instincts. After this troubling experience Justine recognized that she could be seduced by danger, so she needs at least three dates with a man before she can trust her own evaluation of him. In this way, she honed her instinct and faculties of discrimination while she learned to protect herself from her tendency to give up power and make snap decisions.

  Whereas most conventional power struggles are about ego, others that may resemble them are, in fact, quite different.

  INTRODUCING CRISES OF COMMITMENT

  As two people begin to date regularly and spend more time together, growing closer and relaxing into intimacy, their defenses relax as well, and they start treating one another more like family. With a growing feeling of safety and familiarity, they live less in persona and more in authentic feelings. Eventually, they make decisions about how much time to spend together, when to begin sexual intimacy, meet each other’s friends and family, become monogamous, become engaged or live together, get married, and, perhaps, have children. These decisions appear as crises because one partner may present the other partner with an ultimatum. However, we view them not as conventional commitments to an external form but as a series of natural internal conflicts that arise between the call of the Self for greater safety in intimacy and the ego’s fears of dissolution or abandonment.

  Although this direction toward deeper commitment is not universal, it is what many people seek. We believe that it stems from an authentic need of the Self to feel seen by and secure with a loved one by creating a mutual bond of trust. At some point, one of the partners feels an internal pressure for more safety, recognition, and commitment, which needs to be addressed. We call it a “crisis” because if this inner voice is not heeded and shared with the other person or defused internally, the pressure builds, creating internal consequences, such as depression or resentment. We tend to tolerate these negative feelings for as long as we can, suffering them to avoid the risk of expressing them. But at a certain point we cannot stand it any longer; we must risk losing the relationship as. it is in order to allow it to evolve into something new.

  If the crisis of commitment is honored, then the relationship can jump to a new level of intimacy. If it’s not honored, the partner expressing an authentic need at least has honored himself or herself, regardless of the outcome. And that act is empowering and self-affirming, preparing that person for the next step.

  Crises of commitment appear around a range of issues, each requiring a responsibility to the Self: honesty about our experience, sexual limits, and desires; commitment to monogamy; the need for separation; the readiness for engagement, marriage, or pregnancy. In honoring a call of the Self, the relationship moves forward, and another crisis of commitment inevitably follows. Or the relationship ends.

  For example, if a woman goes out on several dates with a man and feels subtly emotionally abused, she may face a crisis of commitment: a conflict between her need to speak up and describe her experience and her fear of losing him and feeling alone again. If she does not heed the call, she may begin to feel like a victim, become depressed, and resent his behavior. If, like Sara, she heeds the call and risks giving up the relationship, the power shifts—and it will become something else. It needs to produce more mutual respect and equality or, in all probability, it will end.

  In another circumstance, if a man has dated a woman for ten months and feels ambivalent about her request for a commitment to a monogamous relationship, they face a crisis. A client described this dilemma: “I do care about her, but there are so many difficulties. I don’t feel in love with her. I’m only twenty-six years old and I am not ready to commit to the future from my heart. And she’s always late, which drives me crazy. I can’t stand waiting around for anyone. Yet there’s this sweetness between us. And we share a passion for the arts.” The therapist helped this man to explore his ambivalent feelings for this woman. In the end, he decided that it was not his fear of intimacy that blocked the commitment; he did not wish to commit to this particular woman.

  Another man, thirty-eight, had been through a crisis of commitment concerning monogamy in a long-term relationship three times before. He decided, at that point, that this problem involved a lack in him, not in his partner, which caused him to avoid commitment. By doing shadow-work to take responsibility for himself and clarify some of his negative projections, this man moved toward commitment with his partner. His pattern, which was to stay in ambivalent relationships and blame his partners for not meeting his expectations, was shattered with this decision. And the vector of his destiny moved forward.

  Thus the key to working through a crisis of commitment is to acknowledge the authentic demands of the Self to keep the relationship process alive and evolving to another stage. It does not imply commitment to the current form of the relationship; at its highest level, it implies commitment to the internal process of development.

  CRISIS OF COMMITMENT: WHEN TO HAVE SEX

  With the cultural shift f
rom sexual freedom to sexual caution, which stems primarily from the AIDS epidemic, many singles today take more time to get to know one another before becoming sexual. But besides the danger of sexually transmitted diseases, there are internal reasons to consider before becoming sexually intimate with someone. Bruce and Sally had been dating for a month, talking intensively and discovering shared passions, as well as necking lovingly for long hours. When Bruce suggested that he was ready to make love, Sally realized that she was not. She felt unsafe for a number of reasons: Bruce still spoke daily with his ex-wife and maintained strong feelings for her. He spoke adamantly about not wanting to make a premature commitment to monogamy, not wanting to feel tied down after a twenty-year marriage.

  Sally, on the other hand, had been single for a long time and longed for a strong bond with a man in which she could feel loved and safe. They began to wonder whether, despite their affections, they had met at the wrong time.

  In staying with her feelings of vulnerability, Sally waited and watched to see how Bruce responded. Fortunately, he did not pressure her or threaten to end the relationship. But he did mention that he felt unaccepted in some deep way and probably would until they could have sex. Sally felt his pain and agreed that evening to begin an intimate relationship soon.

  In therapy, Sally wondered whether she was overriding her own tender feelings in order to please him. Her Zeus-style father had overpowered her, as well as her mother’s, feelings routinely. Perhaps the character within her that had learned this habit from him was now in full gear. In this case, she would have sex for the wrong reasons and would suffer the regret of feeling inauthentic and out of alignment, betraying her own soul. She wondered whether she was complying with a man’s desire, feeling her own soulful desire, or really becoming ready.