Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark: Breaking Free from the Hidden Forces That Drive You

by Robert Augustus Masters

Katherine is magnetically drawn to emotionally distant men. She knows this but can’t seem to resist the pull. She’s trying to get her current partner, who tends toward emotional numbness, to go to couple’s counseling with her, but he refuses. She doesn’t realize

it yet, but she’s having a relationship not so much with him as with his potential.

Our shadow is our internal storehouse for anything in us we’ve disowned or rejected, or are otherwise keeping in the dark—things such as anger, shame, empathy, grief, vulnerability, and unresolved wounding.

Everyone has a shadow, but not everyone knows their shadow. And the degree to which we don’t know our shadow is the degree to which it influences, controls, runs us. But when we turn toward our shadow, and explore and work with what we find there, we start to break free from the hidden forces that have been secretly controlling, driving, and binding us.

Far more freedom from our conditioning (our ingrained programming). Working with our shadow doesn’t rid us of our conditioning but rather changes how we relate to it, to the point where it ceases to run us.

A strongly enhanced capacity for intimacy and healthy relationships. The better we know our shadow, the less likely it is to sabotage or obstruct our relationships.

OUR SHADOW is the place within each of us that contains what we don’t know, don’t like, or deny about ourselves.

Things we may find in our shadow include: • Fear, especially in the form of core-level anxiety • Anger, including anger that’s been converted into aggression • Shame, particularly when we associate it with humiliation and rejection • Empathy, especially when we equate it with being too soft

Again, consider anger. When it has been long suppressed, muted, muzzled, locked up in darkness, it will likely show up in far-from-healthy forms once it breaks out of its confinement. This doesn’t mean that anger itself is a bad or unwholesome thing; its overcontainment and mistreatment is the problem. Meeting and exploring our anger—or any other emotion—in a compassionately contained, well-lit space allows us to see it more clearly, deepening our capacity to express it in ways that serve our well-being and the well-being of others. There’s no true escape from our shadow elements, for they are parts of us, no matter how removed from us they may seem to be.

As our conditioning establishes itself in us, it so dominates our psychological and emotional landscape that we normalize it. One result of this is that our core self, our essential individuality, may become alien or lost to us. Such is the trance we’re in until we begin to awaken to our actual condition.

Our shadow-bound conditioning shows itself most often through reactivity. When we’re reactive, we’re automatically reverting to and acting out conditioned behavior, usually in ways that are emotionally disproportionate to what’s warranted in a given situation.

Reactivity is the knee-jerk dramatization of activated shadow material. Self-justifying and far from self-reflective, reactivity features a very predictable take on what’s going on, which we proceed with even if we know better. The signs of reactivity include: An exaggerated attachment to being right. If someone points out this attachment to us when we’re being reactive, it usually only amplifies our righteousness.

For the overly independent self, dependence is in the shadows, along with the bare vulnerability of taking oneself to be a solo agent in the face of overwhelmingly vast and mysterious forces. Here we cling not to our wanting to be taken care of but to our separateness, associating going beyond it with danger, with losing our sense of self. Destiny here isn’t preset. Also, our shadow here is packed with many of the very needs upon which we depend, so we’re outwardly not only far from needy but we’re also in varying degrees of denial of those needs that make us feel especially vulnerable and, yes, dependent.

For more, please read the chapter on fear in my book Emotional Intimacy and do the exercises described there.

Keep your anger on tap. Take advantage of the fact that fear and anger are very closely related, being basically the same biochemically.

Practice courage. Courage doesn’t mean we’re fearless but that we’re going ahead regardless of whatever fear we’re feeling. Start with small acts of courage, doing things that are a bit scary, a bit daunting. This could mean having a cold shower when you’re feeling overly sluggish, or saying no to a lunch date with a friend who you know you’ll find draining to be around

Remember that practicing courage helps immensely in facing and entering your shadow.

When expressing anger in our childhood was dangerous. If showing anger could further inflame an already abusive parent or sibling, we learned, for reasons of pure survival, to suppress it, to show no signs of it. Leaving this early conditioning unexplored in our adult years keeps us associating our expressed anger with danger, so that when things anger us we shut down our anger so quickly that we appear not to be angry.

When any expression of anger threatens our relationship. If we’re with a partner who—because of past negative experiences with unhealthy anger—pulls away from us when we show any anger, we may try to keep all our anger in, doing our best to push it as far into our shadow as we can. What’s needed here, for starters, is a mutual exploration of both partners’ history with anger. The more that we bring our anger out of our shadow,

By keeping our anger in our shadow—muzzled, locked up, chained—and denying it any care and light, we only increase the odds that it will misbehave when it breaks out. The more we repress it, the more poorly it gets expressed. The answer, however, isn’t to simply let

We’re Angry When our anger isn’t in our shadow, unrepressed and very much alive, we can’t yet say that we have it handled; it may be aggressive, blaming, pushy, shaming, devoid of caring. What we need to do is identify the qualities and phenomena that may be obscured or pushed into our shadow by what we’re doing with our out-front anger. These elements may include the following:

Vulnerability. Vulnerability—transparent, undefended openness—very commonly gets driven into our shadow when our anger arises. Anger is a vulnerable emotion, and if we’re uncomfortable with being vulnerable or with showing vulnerability while we’re angry, we’ll keep our vulnerability well back in our shadow, out of sight.

hardens our heart, making it more likely that we’ll turn our anger into aggression, using it as a weapon rather than as a means of cleanly but emphatically under...

Hurt, sadness, grief. These elements can become hidden, denied, buried, camouflaged, or reduced to only superficial consideration by the way in which we’re expressing or holding our anger. Anger often—but not always—is a defense against feeling or showing our hurt.

Anger can suppress grief, and it also can be a portal to it. Raging about a loss can suddenly mutate into fully expressed grief; our deep, intense anger can transform into an equally deep, intense crying.

Recognizing how we, in our anger, may have pushed our hurt, sadness, or grief into our shadow is a big step in developing our capacity for healthy anger.

There’s such a thing as healthy shame. Such shame, which is directed at our behavior, catalyzes our conscience. In stark contrast, unhealthy shame, which is directed

at our being, catalyzes our inner critic, which commonly masquerades as our conscience.

Vulnerability. Shame infiltrates us in an instant, bringing our defenses down. We’re then like a snail stripped of its shell—naked, soft, and suddenly so, so vulnerable. Our common reaction to this vulnerability is to quickly reassemble and refortify ourselves, to retreat into something harder, darker—not only to armor ourselves but also to have a place to hide our vulnerability and any other sign of apparent weakness. Once we become aggressive or emotionally withdrawn, we’re far from vulnerability and the transparency and heart that are central to it. Essential to working skillfully with shame is to stay vulnerable but not collapse when you’re feeling it. Vulnerability may seem to be weakness, but actually it’s

very valuable source of strength. Why? Because it makes more of you—especially more of your depths—available for what needs to be considered or done.

Our attachment to viewing ourselves as unworthy of love and protection. We may unquestioningly believe that we’re unworthy, especially when our relationships go awry, and we may also keep our attachment to this belief out of sight. Not addressing this attachment keeps us disempowered, small, stuck. We’re then just like a child facing shame-infused parenting: we find a certain security in going along with the assertion that we’re unworthy; devaluing ourselves becomes a survival strategy.

Hidden in his shadow was his desperate wanting to be wanted; eroticizing this yearning actually camouflaged it, wrapping him up in the compelling chemistry of sexual attraction.

and intimate relational communion. Needing to use fantasy during sex. If we have to fantasize in order to have “good” sex, we’re then not so much interested in sex as we are in generating mind games that mostly aim to maximize erotic sensation. It’s easy to normalize sexual fantasies that aren’t really expressions of our sexuality but rather expressions of our unresolved wounding. When we’re caught up in fantasy during sex, we maroon ourselves from intimate connection. And when we strip such fantasies of their erotic elements, the storyline that remains features the psychological and emotional underpinnings—the nonsexual factors—that first drove us into “needing to” fantasize during sex.

Avoiding being vulnerable during sex. Here, we’re avoiding seeing and admitting what’s really going on during sex besides erotic interplay. We’re keeping our heart in the shadows, compensating for our loss of real connection by losing ourselves in sexual sensation (and perhaps also amplifying such sensation through staying invulnerable and using arousal fantasies). What can help here, in part, is maintaining mutual eye contact

Don’t postpone what needs doing. Become more aware of where you are putting your life on hold and challenge the apparent necessity of doing this, including bringing to it the perspective of your own mortality. Consider what you would want to do, what you would want to complete, if you found out that you had only a year left to live.

movement of breath through our body. Imagine yourself on your deathbed. Imagine you’re taking your final ten or so breaths. Sense yourself letting go of your body, letting it settle into deep rest, even as you settle into boundless spaciousness, opening more and more to the core mystery of what’s happening. After sufficient time with this vision—a few minutes at the very least—say a prayer that affirms what kind of death you want. For example: May I die a peaceful and liberating death, and may I approach it with a clear mind and open heart. Say this prayer gently. Repeat it.

Meditate daily, in ways that keep you present and grounded. Begin with a practice that helps you concentrate your focus (such as counting your breaths on the exhale, one to five, always returning to one when you forget which number you’re on). Then, once your focus is relatively stable, let go of your

Sense how every letting go is a kind of dying. Feel into this realization, the grief and renewal of it, the many small deaths that make up a lifetime. So much letting go passes by unseen. Consider the letting go of each exhale; we usually do this quite automatically, taking for granted that an inhale will follow. We are, in a sense, always dying into more life, dying to live.

The more out of touch we are with our resistance, the more space it takes up in our shadow—along with our attachment to denying the existence of our resistance.

and these can’t be maintained without having our anger on tap. When our resistance is disowned and kept out of sight, our anger is dampened, muzzled, kept on a tight leash, and its fires are present only as a distant smoldering in the darkness. Not having our anger available disempowers us, leaving us with leaky, tattered, or nonexistent boundaries.

The Many Faces of Resistance Procrastination. This is the practice of avoiding and needlessly delaying making a decision or taking action.

What’s often at the heart of procrastination is our inner child/teen rebelling against being controlled or told what to do. Distraction. This is the practice of being elsewhere, of bypassing both the now and the here. Distraction is a getaway that leaves what we truly need to do in the background or out of sight. The work here is to stop distracting ourselves from our distractions and instead illuminate them and their pull on us as much as possible.

Addiction. This is compulsive overattachment to certain practices, substances, or beliefs. It’s desire gone awry. In addiction we’re resisting our true needs, keeping them in our shadow while we act out.

Defensiveness. This is the practice of aggressively blocking relational connection, usually in the name of being right. There’s an exaggerated hardening or thickening of boundaries, an in-your-face resistance that may be conveyed with a smile, snarl, or absence of facial expression.

Guilt. This emotion features the shadow-held decision to stay emotionally divided and small. Where shame exposes us, guilt splits us. Part of us, fixatedly childish, does the “bad” deed, and another part, fixatedly parental, punishes us, beating us up through the voice of our inner critic. The stalemate between the two is the essence of guilt.

When we’re caught up in suffering, we’re not available for healing and breakthrough; yes, we’re hurting, but we’re also resisting that hurt. Suffering keeps all too much of our pain in our shadow. To end our suffering, we need to enter our pain.

Name your resistance as soon as you become aware of it (perhaps saying “resistance,” “my resistance is here,” or “I’m feeling resistant”).

When another’s words don’t match their emotional state and degree of relational resonance with us, something else is being conveyed that remains largely in the dark—something that speaks of matters other than what’s being shared. To openly communicate our sense that this is happening, especially in our closest relationships, is a big, courageous step.

being run by our conditioning. We can reach the point where we’re able to speak about what’s driving us in certain circumstances, but we may use this capacity to camouflage what’s driving us at a deeper level. For example, we may give generously or be very attentive, and we may assume that we do so because we simply want to make a difference, “give back,” or be of service, when in fact we’re motivated by our desire to feel better about ourselves or to get a certain kind of recognition for our efforts.

(For more on eroticism and the shadow, see chapter 11, as well as my books Transformation Through Intimacy and To Be a Man.)