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Personality
Get to Know Your Shadow
What kind of relationship do you have with your dark side?
Posted April 25, 2020 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Perception is more powerful than reality. I am influenced by that which I perceive to be true, whether it is actually true or merely imagined. As a therapist, I have a responsibility to notice and, at times, confront perception. I would do well to proceed respectfully, empathically, and without unnecessary provocation. Those real or imagined perceptions infuse every relationship and often stand between people. Unacknowledged, they have ways of impeding growth in relationships.
Sigmund Freud believed that we are forcefully determined by underlying inclinations. He believed that such inclinations maintain their power by our oblivion to them. There is a force to my perception of you. As my emotions about you interact with your emotions about me, the reality of us takes on a third identity that is quite a thing to behold. And as we scan further out into the layers of human development from family to culture to society, it is as if I am not only a system of emotions and perception but that I am embedded within increasingly complex systems of emotion and perception.
Experiences feed our perceptions and, in turn, our perceptions influence experiencing. Along the way, we collect bits and pieces of emotion and reaction, image and symbol, and store them away within the unconscious. We experience others, and so much of life, through their innuendo.
The mind holds a vast collection of imagery and symbolism. Most of those images and symbols lie dormant in the dark confines of shadow, a term Carl Jung coined to appreciate that aspect of memory and personality that we disown. The shadow is a dangerous place of storage. To the extent it is vigilantly guarded, the task of protection ever more becomes the threat of projection. We inflate our shadow by repressing experiential images and symbols, and we become defensive to the same degree. The pretentious pomp and circumstance of some colorful personality may betray the insecurities and fear of vulnerability that lie within.
In the tradition of great literature across time and culture, shadows have symbolized the past, dark and ill-understood reflections of unexpected reminders or else lingering memories. The writer, J.M. Barrie developed with such complexity the figure of Peter Pan's shadow that it was a distinct character in the story. Peter had no natural attachment to his shadow and–not coincidentally–no memory of his childhood, without which he could not learn from early experiences and, therefore, could not grow up.
While the burden of such memory created for Peter a degree of weightlessness permitting him the freedom to fly about, he wanted to be in relationship with his shadow and tried again and again to re-attach it, even to dance with it. Interestingly, Peter's shadow from time to time exhibited, or else evoked, emotions aligned with Peter's own courage of conviction, even joy and sadness.
I love a particular vignette from the story occurring at a point in conversation between Wendy and Peter when he begins to cry.
"O Peter, no wonder you were crying," she said, and got out of bed and ran to him.
"I wasn't crying about mothers," he said rather indignantly. "I was crying because I can't get my shadow to stick on. Besides, I wasn't crying."
"It has come off?"
"Yes."
(Barrie, 1911)
In a sense, Peter's shadow had functioned as a mother figure, and Peter lost his shadow the same way he lost his mother: by leaving through the window of a nursery. When he returned to his mother, the window was locked, but when he returned to his shadow, the window was open. The shadow functioned as a constant for Peter, a role similar to that of a mother. The prospect of losing his shadow overcame him with sadness and reminded of the threat of loss and other suffering experienced in childhood.
We live in constant risk of projecting the threats of childhood: the way a coach cursed and slung us into the mud by the sidebar of a face mask; the way two friends mocked or betrayed, leaving us in silence and agony; the way a role model listened to our vulnerable disclosures with quick darting glances to the business and files of his office, uncharmed by the grace of the moment; the way the lunch lady screeched at our clumsiness with such fire and terror that our hearts pulsed with anxiety.
Let's be clear: we're also at risk of projecting the threats of traumatic experiences from adulthood.
Certain stimuli naturally affect certain responses: the smell of appetizing food induces salivation, touching a hot frying pan causes a reflexive jerk of pain. Pavlov taught us that these natural physiological responses can be corrupted. Every time we encounter an intense situation that produces anxiety, unconscious memory bytes associated with the original stimuli (e.g. food, frying pan) surface. These are the emotionally-loaded experience-laden images and symbols that we so often project onto our world.
During critical years of development, we unknowingly work to consolidate our view of the world and the general predispositions of our personality. Upon individuating from our families, such experiential fragments continue to unknowingly influence our thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Could our lives be more unconsciously determined than we imagined?
In the best of cases, we have opportunity to be attached to and in relatively healthy relationship with our shadow, resulting in a more thoroughly valid self-concept and, consequently, a groundedness which limits flying about but leads to better living wherever we happen to be.
Jung (1959) wrote that "no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspect of the personality as present and real" (p. 8). And by "dark," Jung referenced the metaphor of darkness and light, with light being what is visible and dark being what is not clearly visible. In other words, the shadow is integrally threaded into the moral arc of your, as well as–I'm sure Jung would have me say–our collective, universe.
Facebook image: Bricolage/Shutterstock
References
Barrie, J. M. (1911). Chapter 3: Come Away, Come Away!. Peter Pan (Lit2Go Edition). Retrieved February 13, 2020, from https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/86/peter-pan/1537/chapter-3-come-away-come-a…
Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self. In Read, H., Fordham, M., & Adler, G. (Eds.), Collected works (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XX.
