Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature

by Connie Zweig

The personal shadow develops naturally in every young child. As we identify with ideal personality characteristics such as politeness and generosity, which are reinforced in our environments, we shape what W. Brugh Joy calls the New Year’s Resolution Self. At the same time, we bury in the shadow those qualities that don’t fit our self-image, such as rudeness and selfishness. The ego and the shadow, then, develop in tandem, creating each other out of the same life experience.

Ask someone to give a description of the personality type which he finds most despicable, most unbearable and hateful, and most impossible to get along with, and he will produce a description of his own repressed characteristics—a self-description which is utterly unconscious and which therefore always and everywhere tortures him as he receives its effect from the other person. These very qualities are so unacceptable to him precisely because they represent his own repressed side; only that which we cannot accept within ourselves do we find impossible to live with in others.

By being removed from view they are also removed from supervision and can thereby continue their existence unchecked and in a disruptive way.

In most instances they are readily observable by others. Only we ourselves cannot see them. The shadow qualities are usually in glaring contrast to the ego’s ideals and wishful efforts.

This brings us to the fundamental fact that the shadow is the door to our individuality.

Only when we realize that part of ourselves which we have not hitherto seen or preferred not to see can we proceed to question and find the sources from which it feeds and the basis on which it rests. Hence no progress or growth is possible until the shadow is adequately confronted—and confronting means more than merely knowing about it. It is not until we have truly been shocked into seeing ourselves as we really are, instead of as we wish or hopefully assume we are, that we can take the first step toward individual reality.

Jung said the truth of the matter is that the shadow is ninety percent pure gold. Whatever has been repressed holds a tremendous amount of energy, with a great positive potential. So the shadow, no matter how troublesome it may be, is not intrinsically evil. The ego, in its refusal of insight and its refusal to accept the entire personality, contributes much more to evil than the shadow.

Take the example of a high school boy who has the egocentric defense of a turtle—he just wants to be left alone. He becomes the target of a gang of toughs whose egocentric propensity is to torment him, precisely because he’s a loner. They harass the hell out of him, until one day his egocentric shell of withdrawal explodes and bang—out comes the shadow. Now he may just get into a fistfight, and even though he gets beat up, he comes out okay—and probably more integrated. On the other hand, he may go get his father’s gun and shoot his tormenters, and a terrible thing has happened. If the energy has been too long and too deeply repressed, something of regrettable consequence can occur.

Hence, it would be much better if the boy discovered his hostility in therapy, or some other caretaking situation where his shadow can come out gradually.

If you feel an overwhelming rage coming up in you when a friend reproaches you about a fault, you can be fairly sure that at this point you will find a part of your shadow, of which you are unconscious.

There are at least five effective pathways for traveling inward to gain insight into the composition of our shadow: (1) soliciting feedback from others as to how they perceive us; (2) uncovering the content of our projections; (3) examining our “slips” of tongue and behavior, and investigating what is really occurring when we are perceived other than we intended to be perceived; (4) considering our humor and our identifications; and (5) studying our dreams, daydreams, and fantasies.

any time our response to another person involves excessive emotion or overreaction, we can be sure that something unconscious has been prodded and is being activated.

We also project our positive shadow qualities onto others: We see in others those positive traits which are our very own, but which, for whatever reason, we refuse to allow entry into our consciousness and are undiscernible to us.

The black sheep in a family is the designated recipient and carrier of the family shadow. According to psychoanalyst Sylvia Brinton Perera in The Scapegoat Complex, the scapegoat-identified adult is usually by nature especially sensitive to unconscious and emotional currents. This was the child who picked up and carried the family shadow.

Eventually the child comes to the conclusion that some thoughts and feelings are so unacceptable that they should be eliminated, so he constructs an imaginary parent in his head to police his thoughts and activities, a part of the mind that psychologists call the “superego.” Now, whenever the child has a forbidden thought or indulges in an “unacceptable” behavior, he experiences a self-administered jolt of anxiety. This is so unpleasant that the child puts to sleep some of those forbidden parts of himself—in Freudian terms, he represses them. The ultimate price of his obedience is a loss of wholeness.

[Hate] has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them and in fact the delegation of a piece of one’s own identity to them. . . . The hater longs for the object of his hatred.

It is a fact of marital reality, well known to experts in the field, that those qualities cited by intimate partners as having first attracted them to each other are usually the same ones that are identified as sources of conflict later on in the relationship.

most pervasive of marital problems: distinguishing which feelings, wishes, thoughts, etc., are within the self and which are within the intimate partner.

When something disturbing has happened to the never angry individual, and he is experiencing angry emotions, he will be consciously out of contact with them. He will not know that he is angry, but he will be wonderfully adept at triggering an explosion of hostility and anger in his spouse.

In a similar way, the never sad person may see his or her own depressed moods only as they exist in the partner (who can, in such a circumstance, be understood to be the person carrying the sadness and despair for them both).

Workaholism is now seen as an addiction, a behavior of repetition compulsion, like gambling or overeating.

The usual first reaction upon seeing one’s personal evil is to feel tremendous guilt and shame, and to identify with the shadow, feeling as though one had just been exposed as evil incarnate. This is a false idea, as useless as medieval beliefs about demons causing disease. Personal darkness is a type of illness or injury, caused primarily by accidentally cruel programming during childhood, and it should be treated as such. Everyone has a dark nature; it’s a condition of life in our world, not a “sin.” The goal of the practitioner must be to heal the illness and bring the injured area back into full operation. The modern esoteric student must apply treatment to his dark nature; self-recrimination and wallowing in guilt simply does no good.

Scapegoating works through a mechanism psychiatrists call projection. Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world’s fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world.

It is repression, then, that great discovery of psychoanalysis, that explains how well men can hide their basic motivations even from themselves.

I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not, my wrath did grow.

What is essential is that he be able to relinquish his attachment to his pathway—be able to say to himself, “I have wasted X years of my life in a painful and useless pursuit; this is sad, but I now have an opportunity to try another approach.” This is hard for people to do. There is a strong temptation either to rationalize our wrong turnings as a necessary part of our development (“it taught me discipline”), or to deny that we participated fully in them (“that was before I became enlightened”). Giving up these two evasions leads initially to despair, but as Alexander Lowen points out, despair is the only cure for illusion.

For example, a patient comes into therapy complaining that he does not get along well with other people; somehow he always says the wrong thing and hurts their feelings. He is really a nice guy, just has this uncontrollable, neurotic problem. What he does not want to know is that his “unconscious hostility” is not his problem, it’s his solution. He is really not a nice guy who wants to be good; he’s a bastard who wants to hurt other people while still thinking of himself as a nice guy. If the therapist can guide him into the pit of his own ugly soul, then there may be hope for him. Once this pilgrim can see how angry and vindictive he is, he can trace his story and bring it to the light, instead of being doomed to relive it without awareness.

According to the Taoists, yang and yin, light and shadow, useful and useless are all different aspects of the whole, and the minute we choose one side and block out the other, we upset nature’s balance.

The shadow needs to be acknowledged and given its place. You must invite it to the dinner table, this dubious guest, civilize it as best you can, and see what it has to offer.

“too much morality” strengthens evil in the inner world, and “too little morality” promotes a dissocation between good and evil.

Projection on the Ego Level is very easily identified: if a person or thing in the environment informs us, we probably aren’t projecting; on the other hand, if it affects us, chances are that we are a victim of our own projections.

If the first step in the “cure” of shadow projections is to take responsibility for the projections, then the second step is simply to reverse the direction of the projection itself and gently do unto others what we have heretofore been unmercifully doing unto ourselves.

Years later when the child leaves the parent, the fantasy bond is set up internally. It is maintained by means of the voice. What was once external, the parent’s screaming, scolding and punishing voice, now becomes internal.

When we examine our responses, we see that some aversions are based upon moral or ethical principles, but other disaffinities are charged with repugnance, contempt, loathing, revulsion, nausea. The latter live in the realm of the shadow.

I find that humor works wonders in supporting others to see their shadows. Any stand-up comedian knows intuitively that humor releases these confusing and potentially dangerous shadow contents in a harmless way.

If we don’t have a sense of humor, it probably means that we have little connection to our shadow, that we have a strong need to service the charade of appearances.