04/29/2023
"The goal of shadow-work—to integrate the dark side—cannot be accomplished with a simple method or trick of the mind. Rather, it is a complex, ongoing struggle that calls for great commitment, vigilance, and the loving support of others who are traveling a similar road.
Owning your shadow does not mean gaining enlightenment by banishing the dark, as some Eastern traditions teach. Nor does it mean gaining endarkenment by embracing the dark, as some practitioners of black magic or Satanism teach.
Instead, it involves a deepening and widening of consciousness, an ongoing inclusion of that which was rejected. The late analyst Barbara Hannah tells us that Jung said our consciousness is like a boat that floats on the surface of the unconscious.
Each piece of the shadow that we realize has a weight, and our consciousness is lowered to that extent when we take it into our own boat. Therefore, one might say that the main art of dealing with the shadow consists in the right loading of our boat: if we take too little, we float away from reality and become, as it were, a fluffy white cloud without substance in the sky, and if we take too much we may sink our boat.
In this way, shadow-work forces us again and again to take another point of view, to respond to life with our undeveloped traits and our instinctual sides, and to live what Jung called the tension of the opposites— holding both good and evil, right and wrong, light and dark, in our own hearts.
Doing shadow-work means peering into the dark corners of our minds in which secret shames lie hidden and violent voices are silenced. Doing shadow-work means asking ourselves to examine closely and honestly what it is about a particular individual that irritates us or repels us; what it is about a racial or religious group that horrifies or captivates us; and what it is about a lover that charms us and leads us to idealize him or her. Doing shadow-work means making a gentleman’s agreement with one’s self to engage in an internal conversation that can, at some time down the road, result in an authentic self-acceptance and a real compassion for others.
In a personal letter written in 1937, Jung says that dealing with the shadow “consists solely in an attitude. First of all one has to accept and to take seriously into account the existence of the shadow. Secondly, it is necessary to be informed about its qualities and intentions. Thirdly, long and difficult negotiations will be unavoidable.”
Simply to take the first small step, to acknowledge the darkness lying inside every human heart, can be sobering and humbling. It may be initiated by a betrayal by a loved one; a lie by a trusted friend; a deceit by an honored teacher; a r**e or mugging by a total stranger. In every case, meeting the shadow robs us of our innocence.
If the mirror turns about and we see these behaviors in ourselves, recognizing the deeper truth that the lover and the liar, the saint and the sinner live in every one of us, we may be stunned, paralyzed at the gap between who we are and who we thought we were.
If we can allow this insight to pe*****te us deeply, we may no longer act like the person in the popular tale who loses his key in the darkness by a doorway but insists on looking for it by the lamppost, where the light is better. We may learn, slowly, inexorably, that the key lies in the dark, that if we could embrace that very thing we most despise in ourselves or others, it might make us whole.
Like Beauty embracing the Beast, our beauty is deepened as our beastliness is honored. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke realized this when he said he feared that if his devils left him, his angels would take flight.
So we begin, perhaps timidly, to take Jung’s second step—to discover the qualities of our own shadows by closely watching our reactions to other people and admitting that they are not the other, or the enemy, but that an impulse within ourselves makes them appear in this negative guise. In this way, we can learn to re-own our projections, to repossess the energy and power that, as Robert Bly puts it, belong in our own treasury.
In The Spectrum of Consciousness, transpersonal philosopher Ken Wilber also explores the projection of negative qualities onto others. In Chapter 58, he describes how to take responsibility for them by recognizing that “the shadow is not an affair between you and others, but between you and you.”
In Chapter 59, from A Little Book on the Human Shadow, poet Robert Bly suggests that in order to “eat the shadow” we need to do more than identify it; we need to ask others to give us back our disowned traits, as well as use creativity to integrate them.
Psychologist and author Nathaniel Branden, who popularized the term disowned self, tells stories of clients taking back their childhood feelings of pain and power.
Psychologists Hal Stone and Sidra Winkelman apply the Voice Dialogue Method to integrating disowned energies such as sensuality and demonic feelings. In this piece from Embracing Our Selves, they tell client stories that illustrate their method.
In a piece from Healing the Shame That Binds You, best-selling author/seminar leader John Bradshaw explores the inner voice that is shaming and critical. As Jungian analyst Gilda Frantz said, “Shame is the gristle we must chew on to integrate the shadow complex.”
Opening a short series of pieces on active imagination, analyst Barbara Hannah offers a general introduction to the practice as it was taught to her by Jung. Readers will gain practical advice on how to use creative energies for owning the shadow.
In two pieces written especially for this volume, Los Angeles artist Linda Jacobson teaches exercises that use visualization to evoke images for drawing the shadow; and psychotherapist/novelist Deena Metzger explores writing about the other as a self-revealing form of shadow-work.
Even with great effort to own the shadow involving prolonged internal negotiations, the outcome is uncertain. We have no vision of a complete or perfected human being who has made conscious all shame, greed, jealousy, rage, racism, and enemy-making tendencies. There is no human being who has stopped projecting onto others his dark inferiorities or his light heroic longings.
Instead, as each layer of shadow is uncovered, as each fear is faced, each revulsion repossessed, we continuously uncover yet another dirt-encrusted nugget. Mining the dark recesses of the human psyche is endless. But at a certain point, in some strange turnabout, those qualities that before seemed so alluring, so full of light, are cast into darkness—and those that seemed wicked or weak appear somehow attractive. When a woman’s sensuality and feminine wiles are in the shadow, voluptuous women seem gaudy and manipulative to her. But when her sensuality has been awakened, these same women seem to her like sisters.
Likewise, a man who abhors big business for its greedy, competitive, goal-oriented values and then achieves his own success will not so quickly judge his more materialistic brothers. In each case, our identities expand to include those characteristics that had been exiled onto others.
In this war between the opposites, there is only one battleground—the human heart. And somehow, in a compassionate embrace of the dark side of reality, we become bearers of the light. We open to the other—the strange, the weak, the sinful, the despised—and simply through including it, we transmute it. In so doing, we move ourselves toward wholeness."
~Connie Zweig & Jeremiah Abrams, Meeting the Shadow
