by Connie Zweig
A year later, engaged to be married the following spring, Dick changed the location of his work in order to move with Madeline and the children into a house he bought “for us, not me,” A sequence of events then unfolded in rapid succession that quickly became devastating for both.
First, one night Madeline told Dick that she wanted to cuddle without having sex. He responded coldly that she should sleep in the other room. Several days later, he informed her that on his recent trip to another town he had applied for another job. And finally, a week later, arriving home drunk, Dick turned toward Madeline with an eerie look on his face and, in an instant, violently pushed her against the wall, pinning down her shoulders and slapping her repeatedly in the face. Madeline was too stunned to respond, even to call out. She stood helplessly against the wall in shock until her four-year-old daughter walked into the room and called out “Mommy.” On hearing the innocent voice, Dick swerved around, dropped his grasp, and ran out of the room in a panic. Madeline slid down the wall into a heap on the floor and sobbed.
To Madeline, the physical abuse felt like a shocking betrayal. Within two days, she had packed her family’s belongings, left the house, and refused to speak with Dick. For her, the relationship was over; forgiveness was not an option. Having been sexually abused as a child, Madeline would not tolerate domestic violence.
Dick had no insight into what caused him to act in this way. He was a mystery to himself. “This isn’t the real me,” he kept saying again and again. But this was the real work of his shadow. Let’s retrace the events from the perspective of Dick’s internal experience.
Proceeding with marriage plans, they had met with a lawyer and struggled over a prenuptial agreement. The signing of the agreement was a particularly difficult event for Dick. Giving up his own voice, he had agreed to conditions that did not adequately represent his interests because he was afraid to tell Madeline what he really thought, fearing that she would leave him if he did.
As a child, Dick had been severely beaten by his mother, so he felt safe only alone in his room, withdrawn from the family. As a result, he developed a protector character that could not speak up for him or express his vulnerability. In a similar way, he had withdrawn from Made-line to protect himself from her abandonment. When she refused to have sex with him, he felt neglected and betrayed, experiencing this rebuff as another rejection and pushing her away. In addition, he became increasingly sensitive to how little time she made available to him, compared with the time she had for her children and friends. The green-eyed monster of jealousy had taken hold of him, but his vulnerable feelings remained out of reach in the shadow.
Dick’s trip out of town was part of his escape plan. When he lied to Madeline about his travel intentions, she took it as another blow. In fact, after she heard about his desire to find a job elsewhere, she slapped him in the face in a moment of anger. He held her off and remained calm on the exterior, his persona intact. But on the interior Dick felt attacked as he had been by his mother. And for a brief, almost forgotten moment, a raging character appeared and fantasized tearing Madeline to pieces. But Dick’s angry character was unacceptable to him, so it was quickly repressed in the shadow. Consciously, he had vowed never to treat anyone the way he had been treated.
Approaching the afternoon when he had too much to drink, Dick had been harboring internal resentment for months about having to hide his feelings. He had been living with fear of abandonment and feeling the need to protect himself. He also had been living with the rage of having been assaulted, as he had been as a child. And he had been living with a bitter jealousy of Madeline’s young children. None of these feelings was acceptable to him, so they were carried out of reach of awareness by shadow characters. Under the influence of alcohol, which loosened his ego’s control, these volatile feelings burst forth, resulting in his slapping her and speaking abusively.
Dick’s shadow had, in fact, accomplished its unconscious purpose—to push her away. He had done the same with many women during the past decade. But with Madeline, his heart had been touched, so he felt crushed and devastated. His intense grief and feelings of self-hate led him to shadow-work.
During the next two years, Dick learned to identify his authentic need to be heard. Because it had not been honored as a child, he did not know how to honor it as an adult. Tracing his personal history, he recognized his shadow as a powerful ally that came to his rescue when he felt unsafe. The shadow had protected him for years against his mother and other women, helping him to hide when he felt over-powered. But the ally had become an enemy that sabotaged intimacy and stood in his way of creating a meaningful, vulnerable relationship. Dick entered a program for perpetrators of domestic violence and worked for many years to identify the triggers of his rage.
Engagement also contains an archetypal dilemma: the choice between loyalty to our mother/father or loyalty to our forthcoming wife/husband. This motif appears in fairy tales in which either a parent or a partner must die symbolically for the other to live. Michael Meade explores this theme in “The Lizard in the Fire.” In the story, a man tells his son that if he sleeps with a maiden, he will die. When he does so, the youth does appear to die. His parents do nothing but weep, but the maiden finds a hunter who lights a fire and places a lizard upon it. Then he tells the people that the boy will remain dead if the lizard dies, but he will return to life if someone pulls the lizard from the fire.
When the father tries, he fails, driven back by the flames; when the mother tries, she fails, driven back by the flames. But the maiden jumps right into the fire, pulls out the lizard, and brings it back alive. The youth, too, springs back to life. Then he faces a dilemma: According to the hunter, if the young man kills the lizard, his mother will die. If he does not kill the lizard, the maiden will die. He must choose.
As Meade points out, the youth faces a ritual moment: He moves between mother and maiden. If he sacrifices the maiden and maintains his relationship to his mother, he continues to live as his mother’s son; even if he weds, he refuses the call of manhood. In that case, he cannot see the authentic maiden but will unconsciously project his mother-complex demands and disappointments on her. On the other hand, if he sacrifices the mother and begins a relationship with the maiden, the spell of childhood will be broken. And he may be welcomed into the community as a man.
These tales of initiation always require sacrifice: When the boy and the maiden disobey the father, the older man’s authority gets sacrificed. When the father and mother cannot save their son from the fires of life, their parental power gets sacrificed. When the maiden leaps into the fire, her helplessness burns away. If the youth kills the lizard, he sacrifices his attachment to his mother; if he does not, he sacrifices his independence. This is a more mythological restatement of our law of relationship: We must be willing to let go of it as it is in order to allow it to become something more.
Graham, forty, a real estate investor, faced this archetypal dilemma when he considered becoming engaged to a woman for the first time. When he had begun therapy two years earlier, Graham saw himself as an attractive, Porsche-driving, womanizing man who simply had not yet found the right woman to appreciate him. But he suffered secretly with the lack of intimacy that resulted from his insensitivity. With shadow-work, he began to recover some of his more vulnerable, tender feelings and to relate more authentically to women. When he met Molly, he felt prepared for a more conscious relationship.
One day, a woman who had been Graham’s lover a year earlier called to reconnect with him. Graham, however, did not tell her that he was in a committed relationship and felt ashamed of the omission. In addition, he admitted that he felt guilty and angry at himself for not telling his closest buddy that Molly was more than just another woman, that he was feeling deeply involved with her. Finally, with his head down, he confessed that he had not yet told his mother about the importance of this relationship. “It would upset her that I made a decision without her input. She would be hurt because it would me
an that she’s not the most important woman in my life. And I feel so responsible for how she feels. On the other hand, I let down Molly for not speaking about my feelings for her. I let them both down.”
When asked what keeps him from telling his mother about Molly, Graham explained that he was embarrassed to reveal his new persona, to expose himself as a caring, loving man. “I’m stepping out of character and revealing myself as more vulnerable. So far, only Molly knows me in this way.”
For Graham to give up his identity as his mother’s son and caretaker and become Molly’s partner, he will need to face the required sacrifice: to break his identification with the character of the protective son and his obligatory behavior toward his mother. He will need to feel the fear of abandoning her and accept the guilt about her emotional response, trusting that he will not become overwhelmed as he did as a child. Finally, he will need to honor the relationship with Molly by disclosing his love and their decision to marry to his loved ones.
Women who are father’s daughters face the converse dilemma: to shift allegiance from a father to a husband. One woman, whose father told her that men will try to use her and dominate her life, believed in some secret part of herself that she would die if she married, just as the fairy tale said. So, for many years, she dated men who were not potential partners, permitting herself to feel free. But when, in her late thirties, she felt her own desire to become engaged to a man she loved deeply, she finally faced her father’s message. In Turkish, he had told his daughter that no one would love her as he did. Eventually, she realized that this father complex had to be sacrificed for her to become a partner in an authentic marriage. In effect, she had to risk the fear of dying, trusting that she would in fact survive.
What shadow character sabotages your intentions to commit more deeply? What old loyalties need to be questioned for the new alliance to be formed?
THE EX-SPOUSE COMPLEX
Just as our formative relationships with parents shape our choice of partners and our style of shadow-boxing, so do our long-term intimate adult relationships. In fact, we suggest that a first marriage may create deep loyalties and unconscious patterns that influence subsequent relationships because of what we call an ex-spouse complex. For example, Brent, a pediatrician who is currently married to Ginger, still pays one-third of his salary in alimony to his ex-wife, Joy, and still speaks with her every day. Allegedly, the conversations center around their four children and joint custody issues. However, Joy was Brent’s first love. They shared their first sexual experiences, and they remained married for fifteen years.
Like Brent’s mother, Joy was a full-time wife whose attentive and nurturing qualities made Brent feel right at home. And, like his mother, when Joy became depressed, a blaming and belittling character attacked Brent. Again like his mother, she unconsciously believed that if she kept him in his place, always doubting himself just a little, he would not become vain and leave her for another woman.
Although legally divorced for two years, Brent and Joy are not emotionally divorced. Like a pair of tuning forks, they react to each other’s mood changes, even though they may not see each other for several weeks. And they continue to feel sentimental toward one another, expressing regret about losing their dream of lifelong marriage and breaking their mutual promises of fidelity.
Brent tells the therapist: “Joy is still there for me. She would give me anything I want. When I left, I was feeling so claustrophobic. But now I’m not sure that divorce was the right decision. With Ginger, it’s totally different. She’s so independent that now I have to take care of myself. And I often feel lonely and neglected.”
Brent and Joy remained in the eggshell for the duration of their marriage. When he moved on developmentally, needing to cultivate his own independence, he did not have the tools to do so within the marriage, so the conventional form of their relationship broke down. Then he found Ginger, who forces him out of his mother complex and into a more autonomous life. But the familiarity of Joy’s caretaking still haunts him and, at times; he blames his new wife for not being more like his first wife. Unable to face his own wounds, he activates another round of shadow-boxing.
Brent struggles to maintain a higher order relationship in the chicken yard, to be responsible for satisfying more of his own needs and for romancing his projections. With further shadow-work, he began to feel more rooted in himself and could risk further emotional and psychic separation from Joy, thereby allowing the Third Body to form with Ginger. Until then, Ginger felt at times as if she were “the other woman,” standing outside of the Third Body of the previous marriage.
Brent’s move into the chicken yard is not simply about shifting loyalties or choosing another mate; he is learning to welcome the pain that he avoided in his earlier marriage, in which his partner became a parent. Slowly, he is learning to recognize when he is falling into an old groove—that is, when the historical patterns with Joy are influencing his current relationship with Ginger, such as when he anticipates caretaking from his new wife, which is not forthcoming.
Similarly, if one partner marries an addict in a first relationship, he may adapt to the excitement of feeling out of control. But if he chooses a sober partner the next time, he may miss the drama of addiction. When he is not needed as a caretaker, he may wonder how to relate intimately to his mate. If a woman chooses a tough male partner without much sensitivity to her feelings in a first marriage, and then a puer in her second, she may enjoy the enriched communication with a more sensitive partner but miss the polarity of masculine/feminine energies. She may find, to her chagrin, that she cannot access her own femininity in the new relationship.
Shadow-work, then, includes sorting through the layers of past relationships, like a geologist differentiating layers of sedimentation in rock. Each layer tells a different story, but together they shape the ground on which we stand.
CRISIS OF COMMITMENT: THE SHADOW MARRIAGE
Most people recognize three kinds of marriage: the legal marriage, which describes the partners’ standing under the law; the social marriage, which describes their partnership in the context of family and community; and the nuptials, which describes their spiritual intent. But we propose a fourth: the shadow marriage, in which the partners vow to accept and honor the full entourage of the Beloved’s shadow characters. And, with this internal commitment, they acknowledge that they are engaged in uncovering their own shadows and taking responsibility for their own projections, judgments, and fears.
For some couples, this inner marriage may be enacted in ritual or ceremony with family and friends. For example, one client struggled with her husband’s authoritarian, commanding side. She often felt, when confronted with this character, that she had to either react and rebel or to accommodate and disappear. Slowly, she began to empathize with this shadow figure, which she called the patriarch, and to uncover his deeper needs to be heard and to feel in control. Her husband, on the other hand, often experienced her as intrusive and unwilling to honor his boundaries.
In a small ceremony with her partner, this woman said: “I see the patriarch, I accept him, and I vow to empathize with his deeper needs. At the same time, I vow to try to take responsibility for my projections and reactions to your shadow character.” And the man said to her: “I see the intruder, I accept her, and I vow to empathize with her deeper needs. At the same time, I vow to try to take responsibility for my projections and reactions to your shadow character.”
Another woman, Kate, reported that her husband has a character that she calls the single guy. After ten years of marriage, from time to time he impulsively takes off for a few hours without letting her know his whereabouts. It’s as if his family disappears, and he becomes single and thirty again.
Her husband, Billy, agreed: “I especially feel like the single guy in my men’s group or at a poker game. I get to live an independent life for just a moment—in the context of being a couple.”
Early in their marriage Kate felt rejected and abandone
d by this behavior. She could not tolerate her own feelings of separation and judged Billy as incapable of behaving like a committed husband. Today, though, she acknowledges that he needs these times of separateness for his own soul and that she needs to be responsible for her reactions to them, without imposing her feelings on him. She reports that the idea of an actual separation from him is more difficult than facing his shadow parts, so she romances this character. “Welcoming all of him is more important than maintaining my idea of a marriage. So I look at the single guy as my teacher rather than as someone to battle.”
When Billy’s shadow character can be embraced in this way by Kate and given a place at the table, he will not have to hide out of fear of her reaction or slip into taking care of her hurt feelings. In other words, he will not fall into his mother complex by trying to please her or rebel against her. In this way, the shadow wedding frees the partners from serving as parents: A man can be freed of his mother complex because he can risk authenticity and feel known and accepted, rather than feeling trapped into hiding and behaving in a particular way to feel loved. A woman can be freed of her father complex because she can feel deeply known and accepted at the level of soul, rather than trapped into hiding and behaving in a particular way to feel loved.
With the shadow marriage, a partner no longer has to serve as a god: The longing for the romantic ideal, for the perfect image of the Other, which cannot be fulfilled by a mortal human being, becomes the longing for the Beloved who, like a mandala, carries both darkness and light. Then the marriage of the Beloveds can take place, evoking that aspect of the partners that transcends ego and shadow—the soul wedding.
Of course, even the most conscious commitment cannot save us from shadow suffering. At some point, difficult issues around commitment, autonomy, power, sex, and money will erupt. And then we will be grateful for the tools of shadow-work.