Romancing the Shadow

by Connie Zweig

  Who do you see in your partner’s shadow? What is required of you to accept this character and empathize with its deeper needs?

  POWER SHADOWS: ANGER AND DEPRESSION, WITHHOLDING AND WITCHINESS

  Power struggles often erupt in the arena of home decor. But, psychologically, they are more complicated than they appear to be. Although Gordon, fifty-nine, worked as a designer, Kathy, fifty-five, his wife of twenty-two years, designed their home. She kept tightfisted control over the choice and placement of furniture and art. The long-term consequences of this division of labor were disastrous for Gordon, who kept tight-lipped control over his feelings. Having nowhere to hang his own paintings, he stopped creating them. Eventually, he began to suffer from depression, his self-expression blocked.

  Kathy, controlled and abused as a child by her widowed mother, who suffered from depression, had developed an uncompromising, perfectionistic character who took the seat of power at her table in order to compensate for her feelings of low self-worth. Like this character, her home had to look just right, or she felt unworthy of being Gordon’s wife. If the environment seems under control, she can defend against her chaotic feelings and instead complain about Gordon, Kathy has no emotional rheostat, only an on-off switch: She is either happy and in control or depressed, out of control, and terrified.

  Gordon responds to feeling controlled by becoming depressed. In Turkish, he punishes Kathy with his dark moods, getting even through a passive-aggressive character. Because his authentic rage is in the shadow and he remains unwilling to express it, he blames her for controlling him, while he holds himself as an emotional hostage by giving up his own voice. Gordon also has no emotional rheostat: He cannot discriminate between constructive assertiveness and destructive rage, so both get banished together. Depression is the result of his silenced voice, and the aliveness of their relationship is sacrificed.

  Through the process of projective identification, Kathy expels her unwanted depression into Gordon, who unconsciously manifests it for her. He acts out in depression those feelings that she cannot face in herself. As a result, she cannot stand them in him. In fact, she is repulsed by his depressed moods and feels guilty for not being more empathetic. Her self-esteem plummets, and her worst fear comes true: She feels as if she is living with her depressed mother.

  Conversely, Kathy manifests Gordon’s disowned anger and his unexpressed power struggle. He hates himself for compromising around their home decor and refusing to take a stand concerning his painings. He feels ashamed for failing to act like a man with his wife.

  With the help of the therapist, Gordon finally spoke about his frustration to Kathy. In response, she suggested that he paint a green and yellow canvas of a certain size for a specific wall. He balked at her imposed limitations, his creativity stifled, his anger rising.

  The therapist then suggested that Gordon take possession of one wall in the house to display his own work. When Kathy, sensing the importance of the issue, agreed to the plan, he began to paint hungrily again. Not surprisingly, his mood brightened, his self-expression increased, and the feelings between him and his wife warmed as well. When Gordon again felt resistance to painting at a later time, he could not blame Kathy for his inability to create. He had to face his own internal resistances, which initiated shadow-work on his power and rage.

  As a result of this process, Kathy also began to look within, facing her lifelong denial of depression. At first, fearful of being overwhelmed, she could permit herself to feel only the slightest disappointments. Gradually, she could explore the meaning of her mother’s depression and its impact on her own life, as well as her role in colluding with her husband’s depression.

  Jon and Jeannette also get caught in power struggles. Married for ten years, they live in a large home with their six-year-old son and enjoy an intimate family life with fairly open communication. Still, from time to time, they spiral out of control—and it’s always for the same reasons.

  Driving together recently on the freeway, Jon drove way over the speed limit, and Jeannette asked him to slow down. Lights and sirens followed. As a policeman asked Jon to sign a speeding ticket, Jeannette declared, “I told you so. If you’d just listen to me, you wouldn’t have to waste that money on a ticket.”

  Jon clamped up in a silent rage. Certainly, on one level, his wife was right. But Jon heard more than Jeannette’s words; he heard her hidden meaning in Turkish telling him that he was wrong, inadequate, inferior. He heard her saying that he can’t do anything right. And this unspoken message was only the most recent in a long series of many such messages. He blew a fuse, telling the policeman: “I’d take a traffic ticket from you any time before signing up for her lecture series.” The cop looked at him with a compassionate, sheepish smile and walked away.

  Then Jon, a father’s son who cannot easily express his feelings, withdrew into a dark, silent, punishing mood. When they arrived home, he felt withdrawn and unable to communicate. In fact, Jon closed down emotionally for several days. Initially, he liked the feeling of withholding affection from his wife; he had a powerful sense of being in control that way. Within his own cocoon, he also felt safe, immune to her reproach. This allowed him some temporary relief.

  Jeannette was confused by the intensity of her husband’s reaction to her. Whereas for her the communication was “just sharing feelings,” a simple statement in French, for him it rang loudly in Turkish as criticism and attack by an outright witch. She felt that his response required her to stuff her feelings away. She wondered how the relationship could work if she could never express disapproval or disagreement because of his hypersensitivity and his short fuse. She told the therapist, “He seems so unwilling to hear me or to change his behavior that, no matter what I say, he will feel mistreated.”

  Jon’s withholding behavior was not simply ego resistance. It served to protect his soul when he felt vulnerable to his wife’s “witchiness.” We all reach a point at which we are no longer able to stay open in the face of strong emotions. We shut down and disappear in those moments, whether into alcohol, depression, or a six-hundred-page book, delivering a return blow with the withdrawal itself.

  With her therapist’s help, Jeannette saw her part in the conflict and apologized for the eruption of the witch character. She gently held her husband in bed at night, even though he did not respond. She just held him and waited. Jon, in turn, still felt it unsafe to love again and needed to wait, allowing himself to open to her at his own pace. The healing process seemed out of his control. He sensed his ego saying, “No. I won’t give her that. She’s got to suffer a while longer for what she did.” But with the passage of time and his positive intent, he was able to override his ego, allowing his heart and his arms to open again. In this way, they broke the pattern and strengthened the soul of the relationship.

  Jeannette learned to express her feelings more directly (“I feel unsafe when you drive so fast; I don’t like it”). She also began to recognize the impersonal or archetypal aspect of her rage at men, which stems from generations of women’s oppression. She saw how this resentment gets aimed at Jon, which activates the roller-coaster ride. She felt embarrassed and humbled by this realization and began to befriend this attacking shadow character, which they called the witch. As a result, Jon found Jeannette to be more empathetic and became emotionally available to her again. At last, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, their love returned and the Third Body hummed again.

  Who carries the anger? Who carries the depression? How does the witch emerge to wound the Third Body?

  SEXUAL SHADOWS: COMPULSIONS, AFFAIRS, AND DEMON LOVERS

  Compulsive sexual habits—pornography, phone sex, or electronic liaisons—act like real extramarital affairs in a key way: They camouflage shadow issues in the primary relationship. Like Hermes, who chases nymph after nymph, Donald, thirty-five, remained with a woman until he felt her becoming dependent on him. Then he quickly found a new lover, told the first about her, and, eventually, left for the
new relationship. In this way he could avoid their so-called dependency on him and feel like a stud, which is the nickname that he gave to his seductive shadow character. But when he met Michelle, he felt deeply touched. After a few months she asked him for a commitment to monogamy and, to his own surprise, he agreed. They moved in together but, within six months, Donald had two sexual interludes. When Michelle discovered them, she felt outraged and kicked him out of the house. In turn, he promised to keep his agreement and returned home.

  During the next month, Donald became involved in phone sex as a fantasy outlet. Michelle felt betrayed and, inflamed with jealousy, forbade it. Again, they faced a crisis of commitment around sexual fidelity, and Donald reluctantly agreed to her demands.

  A few months later, he began masturbating to pornography, finding another innovative way to wander from the relationship. Again, Michelle became upset and forbade the activity. Don’s sexual attraction for Michelle dwindled at this point. He found that if the stud could secretly watch pornographic movies and thereby assert his independence from her, he could become aroused and have sex with her without feeling a threat to his own identity. But when he obeyed her and put on a “good boy” character by cutting down his other outlets, his sexual desire for Michelle decreased. Furthermore, when Don felt that his particular form of voyeuristic eroticism was unacceptable to his lover and he was judged by her as “a degenerate creep,” he felt unacceptable to himself. Then a passive-aggressive character emerged: He grew less willing to be aroused with Michelle because their eroticism, combined with emotional intimacy, forced him to face his own self-hatred. So he shut down and retreated into the safety of the stud with anonymous sex in the form of X-rated films, perpetuating his distancing and self-loathing.

  Michelle did not judge Don as a “degenerate creep.” Like Hera, the archetypal wife, she felt extremely jealous of Don’s other objects of desire. In the past, when men had told her that they desired her alone, she had felt wanted. Now, she felt hurt and undesirable, a replication of her early family experience. When she faced her fear of being undesirable in order to sexually approach Don, she anticipated rejection. In effect, Michelle’s constant expectation of rejection caused her to give up trying to meet her sexual needs with Don.

  Eventually, Donald uncovered a monstrous mother complex within the history of his relationships and his compulsive sexual acting out. He needs to feel connected to Michelle in order to feel alive, as if she serves as an electrical ground wire. Without this connection to a woman, he feels lost and anxious. But then he resents that he needs her because his vulnerability and dependency needs are so shadowy to him.

  If he has no psychological affair, via phone sex or pornography, he fears that he will lose himself and feel overwhelmed by her. In reality, it was he who was the dependent partner, and it was his fear of dependency that caused him to reject previous lovers. The stud was a shield, a cover-up for the horror of his own neediness and, ultimately, the terror of nonexistence.

  Before living with Michelle, Donald enjoyed taking hikes and going to the theater, but he had given up those activities after they moved in together. Caught in his mother complex, he could not act on his own behalf, which increased his fear of losing his identity with her. As a result, his soul was being nourished only by the relationship, increasing his sense of dependency. The struggle over sex served as a camouflage for his lack of connection to his own creative life. He relied on her and rebelled against it instead of connecting to his own soul. When he began to explore his independence via creativity, his anxiety about dependency decreased and he could risk a bit more vulnerability with Michelle.

  Eventually, Don recognized that, whether Michelle judged him or not, he was a dutiful mother’s son, judging and condemning himself and thereby carrying on his family sins. As a result, he allowed his unconscious need to suppress his shame and dependency to destroy their intimate life. When he turned to his own soul to find his creative well-spring again, he struggled with his own resistances to tending to his own needs. But he also began to find a natural boundary for himself, and his fear of dissolution in the relationship lessened. A year later, he no longer needed to use affairs or compulsive sexual activities to escape his fears of intimacy. He had found the gold in the dark side.

  The sexual shadow also appears in the form of a fantasized or actual affair, which is like a direct blow delivered in Turkish. It can trigger a crisis of commitment for either partner. Affairs reflect an imbalance in the primary relationship and can be used to compensate for a missing element: freedom, passion, spirituality, creative inspiration, masculine or feminine energies. Thus a god—Eros, Aphrodite, Dionysus, Artemis—who has been sacrificed in the marriage reappears in the affair, bringing feelings of expansion and delight.

  Affairs are not a world apart from primary relationships but an intimate part of them. When a coupled partner has an affair with another coupled partner, there are four people involved, not two. And each remains aware of the invisible spouse who, like a ghost, haunts the lovers’ interludes. In many cases, the lover and the invisible spouse carry shadow projections—“the other woman”—perpetuating negative fantasies of one another.

  Recognizing that affairs serve a function in primary relationships in these ways, we typically encourage partners to end affairs, at least temporarily, in order to address the issues of their committed relationships. An affair in general, and sex in particular, can obscure the primary relationship’s deeper problems, acting as camouflage by becoming the apparent problem so that the underlying root issues go unnoticed. Like an addiction that appears to be the problem while camouflaging the shadow’s deeper needs, an affair may divert the attention from the less-visible developmental crisis in the relationship.

  From our point of view, an affair should not be called a relationship if a person leaves the shadow behind in the mate, splitting the projection so that the mate carries only darkness and the new lover carries only light. The new encounter, in this case, is a bit like traveling in a hot-air balloon, while the ballast is left back at home in the primary relationship.

  Elaine, a nurse, discovered this principle when she met a man through work during a dry spell in her marriage. Soon after she arrived for therapy, she began sobbing deeply about her inner turmoil. Slowly, the story emerged. She had lived with Stan for seven years in a comfortable kind of homeostasis, drifting toward a numbing indifference. To some extent Elaine was satisfied with their arrangement. Like Stan, her father had been distant and unavailable, so as a child she became used to yearning for intimacy, though not really expecting it. Unknowingly, Elaine had turned her partner into a parent, so that she lived in familiar territory, even though as an adult she felt a gnawing lack of fulfillment.

  In addition, Elaine had grown up on a large family farm and was highly influenced in early life by the virgin goddess Artemis. When she married Stan, she unknowingly made a Faustian bargain, exchanging her independent spirit for a traditional married persona. Together, they appeared to others to carry an ideal couple persona: They looked attractive and amiable.

  But when Dave, a medical supplies salesman, showed up at the office for the first time, Elaine felt as if she were awakening from a deep sleep. Her body tingled; she began to feel self-conscious about how she looked; she laughed, more readily and looked forward to seeing him again. The attraction was so strong that Elaine got frightened and suggested to Dave that they speak only via e-mail. She hoped that such limited contact would keep her from violating her marriage vows.

  A month later Elaine succlimbed to Dave’s invitation to go out for lunch. They discovered that they held deep religious and social values in common and shared their life dreams with one another. Elaine felt a spiritual bond that she had not felt before with a man. But she made it clear to Dave that she would not be sexually intimate with him. So, although she felt a kind of emotional and spiritual disloyalty, she could convince herself that, by avoiding sex, she was not having an affair; she was not an unfaithful wife
.

  In fact, that part of her which remained in the eggshell with Stan felt a terrible guilt about betraying him even in her fantasies; she felt worthy of contempt and punishment. So she worked harder to please him for a while, condemned to the prison of dutiful wifehood and trying to learn to live with her feelings of entrapment. But that part of her which was beginning to step into the chicken yard felt attractive, excited, and free for the first time in seven years.

  As Elaine began to compare the two men in her own imagination, she grew increasingly depressed and hopeless about her options. In therapy, we named the split that was taking place in her projections between the spiritual man and the mundane man, between freedom and responsibility. Elaine was leaving her shadow projections—an absence of passion, authenticity, and honesty—behind with her husband, Stan, while she soared in the spirit with Dave.

  This marital crisis was part of a natural developmental process. Elaine and Stan’s marriage had been successful because they entered it at a young age to meet their dependency needs with each other and, after seven years, those needs had been met. At that point, Elaine was ready for more, which triggered the crisis of commitment. When she met Dave, she met her next challenge: the call to shadow-work with Stan. So, even though the tactics of Elaine’s shadow seem self-defeating, its drives are essential.

  Elaine also came to see that, while the mechanism of splitting the projection between the two men relieved the pressure from her marriage, lowering her pain and disappointment with Stan, it also maintained her image of him as a distant, punishing father who, she assumed, would reject her authentic feelings. By decreasing the pain in her marriage via the spiritual affair, she could continue life with Stan but without spirit.

  Using an analogy from science, the therapist explained to her that this is not how breakthroughs happen. In physical systems, internal pressure must rise to a specific threshold for the system to change form. For instance, it takes one calorie of heat to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree Centigrade. It takes 540 calories of heat to transform one gram of water at 99 degrees into one gram of steam at 100 degrees. In other words, a qualitative shift from one state to another, known as a phase transition, requires a buildup of heat or pressure.