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

by Connie Zweig

But the dark side appears in many guises. My confrontation with it at midlife was shocking, uprooting, and terribly disillusioning. Intimate friendships of many years seemed to turn brittle and crack, bereft of lifeblood and its elasticity. My strengths began to feel like weaknesses, standing in the way of growth rather than promoting it.

Life seemed bankrupt. All that I had “known” as a fierce reality crumpled like a papier-mâché tiger in the wind. I felt as if I were becoming all that I was not. All that I had worked to develop, strived to create, came undone. The thread of my life pulled; the story unraveled. And the ones I had despised and disdained were born in me—like another life, yet my life, its mirror image, its invisible twin.

Goethe said that he had never heard of a crime of which he did not believe himself capable.

The shadow by nature is difficult to apprehend. It is dangerous, disorderly, and forever in hiding, as if the light of consciousness would steal its very life.

we see the shadow mostly indirectly, in the distasteful traits and actions of other people, out there where it is safer to observe it.

John Sanford points out that people who lack a sense of humor probably have a very repressed shadow. It’s usually the shadow self who laughs at jokes.

Jung understated the case when he said, “We have in all naiveté forgotten that beneath our world of reason another lies buried. I do not know what humanity will still have to undergo before it dares to admit this.”

The shadow is both the awful thing that needs redemption, and the suffering redeemer who can provide it.”

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions. C. G. JUNG

It’s an old Gnostic tradition that we don’t invent things, we just remember.

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.

When we refuse to face the shadow or try to fight it with willpower alone, saying, “Get thee beind me, Satan,” we merely relegate this energy to the unconscious, and from there it exerts its power in a negative, compulsive, projected form.

We imagine ourselves so long pursued by ill will that ill will is eventually produced by others in response to our vitriolic defensiveness. Our fellow men see this as unprovoked hostility; this arouses their defensiveness and their shadow projections upon us, to which we in turn react with our defensiveness, thereby causing more ill will.

Even though we are not responsible for the way we are and feel, we have to take responsibility for the way we act. Therefore we have to learn to discipline ourselves. And discipline rests on the ability to act in a manner that is contrary to our feelings when necessary.

If you study Christian history, you see the development quite clearly. Those people who professed to be doing very good things were leading the Inquisition,

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.

successful psychotherapy, and any genuine religious conversion, requires absolute honesty about oneself.

Honesty is the great defense against genuine evil. When we stop lying to ourselves about ourselves, that’s the greatest protection we can have against evil.

The Shadow, as we have seen, includes the unlived life, and to touch upon the shadow personality is to receive an infusion of new, that is, youthful energy.

Hyde’s lack of conscience, described by Jekyll as a “solution of the bonds of obligation,” is also characteristic of the shadow personality.

This is why living out the darkest impulses of the Shadow cannot be a solution to the shadow problem, for we can easily become possessed by or absorbed into evil if we try such a thing.

Jekyll’s careless disregard for the powers of evil, together with his desire to escape the tension of his dual nature, paves the way for his ultimate destruction.

The problem of our duality can never be resolved on the level of the ego; it permits no rational solution.

It is exactly this feeling function, which enables a human being to react with horror at the depths of evil, that was weak in Jekyll and totally lacking in Hyde.

The shadow usually contains values that are needed by consciousness, but that exist in a form that makes it difficult to integrate them into one’s life.

[Jung] told me that he once met a distinguished man, a Quaker, who could not imagine that he had ever done anything wrong in his life. “And do you know what happened to his children?” Jung asked. “The son became a thief, and the daughter a prostitute. Because the father would not take on his shadow, his share in the imperfection of human nature, his children were compelled to live out the dark side which he had ignored.”