Owning Your Own Shadow: A Jungian Approach to Transformative Self-Acceptance, Exploring the Unlit Part of the Ego and Finding Balance Through Spiritual Self-Discovery

by Robert A. Johnson

we sort out our God-given characteristics into those that are acceptable to our society and those that have to be put away.

If it accumulates more energy than our ego, it erupts as an overpowering rage or some indiscretion that slips past us; or we have a depression or an accident that seems to have its own purpose. The shadow gone autonomous is a terrible monster in our psychic house.

Some of the pure gold of our personality is relegated to the shadow because it can find no place in that great leveling process that is culture.

Generally, the first half of life is devoted to the cultural process—gaining one’s skills, raising a family, disciplining one’s self in a hundred different ways; the second half of life is devoted to restoring the wholeness (making holy) of life.

personal effectiveness—consists in standing at the center of the seesaw and producing only that which can be counterweighted with its opposite. This is far from the sentimental view of goodness that has been set up as our ideal.

India has three terms describing this place of sainthood: sat, chit, ananda. Sat is the existential stuff of life (mostly the left side of the balance); chit is the ideal capacity (mostly the right side of the balance); ananda is the bliss, joy, ecstasy of enlightenment—the fulcrum of the seesaw. When sat and chit are paired together, and sufficiently conscious, then ananda, the joy of life, is created. This is won by owning one’s own shadow.

a full-blooded embracing of our own humanity, not a one-sided goodness that has no vitality or life.

make a work of art, to say something kind, to help others, to beautify the house, to protect the family—all these acts will have an equal weight on the opposite side of the scale and can lead us into sin.

Many a woman is burdened by paying out the dark side of a creative man; many a man is drained by carrying the dark side of a woman that is the byproduct of her creativity. Worst of all, children often have to carry the dark side of creative parents. It is proverbial that the minister’s child will be difficult and the wealthy man’s child is in danger of leading a meaningless life.

Researchers estimate that in an average family household, twenty-eight servants would be needed to accomplish only one part of the work that is taken care of by our mechanical aids. What a wonderful age! But its shadow appears, inevitably, as boredom and loneliness—the exact opposites of the efficient society we have made. On a global level, we have escalated war and political strife to equal our visions

It is possible to live one’s ideals, do one’s best, be courteous, do well at work, and live a decent civilized life if we ritually acknowledge this other dimension of reality.

This means that we can aspire to beauty and goodness—and pay out that darkness in a symbolic way.

The shadow must be paid

Example: If I do my shadow upkeep after having difficult guests, I will not land my shadow on some unsuspecting stranger. I have to honor my shadow, for it is an integral part of me; but I don’t have to push it onto someone else. A five-minute ceremony or acknowledgment of my shadow accumulation after my guests depart will have satisfied it and safeguarded my environment from darkness.

If I do not redress that imbalance quickly, I will soon be rude to someone, turn up a thoroughly nasty side of my character, or fall into a depression. The shadow will claim its dues in some form, intelligent or stupid.

To refuse the dark side of one’s nature is to store up or accumulate the darkness; this is later expressed as a black mood, psychosomatic illness, or unconsciously inspired accidents.

Unless we do conscious work on it, the shadow is almost always projected; that is, it is neatly laid on someone or something else so we do not have to take responsibility for it.

Newspapers offer us a daily allotment of disasters, crimes, and horrors to feed our shadow nature outwardly when it should be incorporated into each of us as a integral part of his own personality. We are left as less than whole personalities when we invest our own darkness into something outside ourselves. Projection is always easier than assimilation.

every group unconsciously designates one of its members as the black sheep and makes him or her carry the darkness for the community.

The term bogey man has an interesting origin: in old India each community chose a man to be the “bogey.” He was to be slaughtered at the end of the year and to take the evil deeds of the community with him.

Origins of the bogeyman

If you wish to give your children the best possible gift, the best possible entree into life, remove your shadow from them. To give them a clean heritage, psychologically speaking, is the greatest legacy.

It is hard to overestimate the amount of suffering that is handed down from generation to generation. Harry Truman had a little sign on his desk while he was president: “The buck stops here.” We could give our children the most wonderful blessing if only we would stop passing the buck to them.

To be in the presence of another’s shadow and not reply is nothing short of genius.

Jung used to say that we can be grateful for our enemies, for their darkness allows us to escape our own.

Heaping abuse does great damage—not only to others but to us as well, for as we project our shadow we give away an essential ingredient of our own psychology. We need to connect with this dark side for our own development, and we have no business flinging it at others, trying to palm off these awkward and unwanted feelings. The difficulty is that most of us live in an intricate web of shadow exchange that robs both parties of their potential wholeness. The shadow also contains a good deal of energy, and it is the cornerstone of our vitality.

There is a wonderful story about this that shows what happens when we stand back and do nothing—and allow the projection to run its course. A young Japanese girl in a small fishing village became pregnant but was still living in her parent’s house. All the villagers pressed her to name the father, to point a finger at the renegade. After many angry words, she finally confessed. “It’s the priest,” she said. The villagers confronted the priest with this. “Ah so,” was all he said. For months afterward, the people were very down on this simple priest. Then a young man who had been away from the village for some time returned and asked to marry the girl. It turned out he was the father of the child, and the girl had made up an unlikely story to protect him. Then the villagers went to the priest and apologized. “Ah so,” he said. This story shows the power of waiting while others do their shadow work. The priest did the villagers a great service by his silence; by not protesting or denying the situation, he left enough room for the people to work the problem out among themselves. They later had to ask, “Why were we so ready to believe the girl? Why did we side against the priest? How do we face the discomfort and anxiety we feel within ourselves?”

Love is the one word in our Western tradition adequate to describe this synthesis of ego and shadow.*

it is possible to project from the shadow the very best of oneself onto another person or situation.

Our hero-worshiping capacity is pure shadow;

Development generally takes this means of introducing the next stage of its progress. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s character.

Profound idea. We are attracted to others in whom we see our own noble shadow self. We hero worship until we adopt the character trait.

All heroes need internalizing. Of course, the childish part of me resisted this development with all its power.

It is very puzzling to examine our capacity for projecting our best qualities. It is as if we fear that heaven might come too soon! From the point of view of our ego, the appearance of a sublime trait might upset our whole personality structure.

People are as frightened of their capacity for nobility as of their darkest sides.

If you find the gold in someone he will resist it to the last ounce of his strength. This is why we indulge in hero-worship so often. It is much easier to admire a Dr. Schweitzer from afar than to be my own (lesser) version of those qualities.

If you can touch your shadow—within form—and do something out of your ordinary pattern, a great deal of energy will flow from it. There is a curious fact based on this dynamic. Parrots learn profanity more easily than common phrases since we utter our curses with so much vigor. The parrot doesn’t know the meaning of these words, but he hears the energy invested in them. Even animals can pick up on the power we have hidden in the shadow!

The great visions of the religious world—such as we find in the Book of Revelation—are based on a sublime sense of symmetry and balance. They give us a picture of that middle place that is the product of honoring both extremes. Ancient China called this the Tao and said the middle way is not a compromise but a creative synthesis.

There are elements we had to leave behind, elements that had to be “unchosen” in order to produce a cultured life. By middle age, the cultural process is mostly complete—and very dry. It is as if we have wrung all the energy out of our character and at this point, the energy of the shadow is very great. We are suddenly subject to explosions that have the power to overturn the product we have worked so hard to create. We may fall in love, break up a marriage, storm out of a job in desperation as we try to relieve ourselves of this monotony. These are extremely dangerous moments, but they can set the stage for a whole new phase of life, if we learn how to take the energy of the shadow and use it correctly.

Heaven and skid row are separated only by an act of consciousness.

Medieval heroes had to slay their dragons; modern heroes have to take their dragons back home to integrate into their own personality.

symbolic or ceremonial experience is real and affects one as much as an actual event.

All healthy societies have a rich ceremonial life. Less healthy ones rely on unconscious expressions: war, violence, psychosomatic illness, neurotic suffering, and accidents are very low-grade ways of living out the shadow. Ceremony and ritual are a far more intelligent means of accomplishing the same thing.

The need for ritual and ceremony

Ceremonies the world over, and from every age, consist mostly of destruction: sacrifice, burning, ritual killing, bloodletting, fasting, and sexual abstention. Why? These are the ritual languages that safeguard the culture by paying out the shadow in a symbolic way. It is easy to fall into the error of thinking that we protect the culture by obliterating the destructive elements. But we will see that there is no way to energize a culture except by an incorporation of them. That is why a true religious ceremony has to contain as much darkness as light. Again, look at the Catholic Mass and you will see a perfect balance of destruction and creation, of evil and redemption.

We find a particularly touching example of an attempt to incorporate the shadow in the story of Marie Antoinette. The queen was bored with life in the most ostentatious palace in the world. One day she decided she wanted to touch something of the earth and ordered barns built on the palace grounds where she would keep some cows. She would be a milkmaid! The best architects of France were employed, the stables were built (they can still be seen at Versailles, where they are treasured for their beauty), and fine milk cows were imported from Switzerland. On the day when everything was ready, the queen prepared to sit on a three-legged stool and begin her career as a milkmaid. Yet at the last moment she found this distasteful and ordered her servants to do the milking. The queen’s original impulse was correct: she needed something to balance the formality of her court. If she had continued her ceremony of milking, her life—and the history of France—might have taken a different turn. Instead, she was beheaded.

Marie Antoinette rightly tried to balance her highly refined life with some peasant task. But she failed to see things through and was repelled by the literal act of milking. If she had found some way of honoring this earthy impulse and keeping the refinement of the court, this would have been sheer genius. Who knows how many outwardly destructive things might be averted if we gave voice to the shadow in a ceremonial way?

Our fate can truly be altered if we have the courage to embrace the opposites. In this case, milking was the gold in the shadow—the saving grace. While most rituals center on the dark side of the personality, it is important to remember that golden opportunities also come from the same source. And they can resist our efforts to incorporate them even more than the dark elements!

Light from this central place has no opposite. Like the Grail Castle, it is outside time and space.* And we find it in a moment of transcendence. In a flash, what looked like a gray compromise becomes a synthesis of dazzling brilliance. Our own Scripture tells us, “If thy eye be single, thy whole body shall be filled with light” (Matt. 6:22). The singleness of the eye, the center of the seesaw, is the place of enlightenment. This represents a whole new order of consciousness; the inscription on the dollar bill—“Novus Ordo Seclorum”—promises that new age.

To fall in love is to project that particularly golden part of one’s shadow, the image of God—whether masculine or feminine—onto another person. Instantly, that person is the carrier of everything sublime and holy.

Most marriages in the West begin with a projection, go through a period of disillusionment, and, God willing, become more human. That is to say, they come to be based on the profound reality that is the other person. While in-loveness is close proximity to God, love based on reality serves our humble condition far better.

One does a curious kind of insult to another by falling in love with him, for we are really looking at our own projection of God, not at the other person. If two people are in love, they tread on star dust for a time and live happily ever after—that is so long as this experience of divinity has obliterated time for them. Only when they come down to earth do they have to look at each other realistically and only then does the possibility of mature love exist. If one person is in love and the other not, the cooler one is likely to say, “We would have something better between us if you would look at me rather than at your image of me.”

The shadow is very important in marriage, and we can make or break a relationship depending on how conscious we are of this. We forget that in falling in love, we must also come to terms with what we find annoying and distasteful—even downright intolerable—in the other and also in ourselves. Yet it is precisely this confrontation that leads to our greatest growth.