Part 1: What is the shadow?
You may have heard of “the shadow”, a concept taken from psychology to describe the dark side of human personality. If you haven’t, it doesn’t matter, because you have definitely encountered it not only in your own life, but in the lives of others, in culture, in art and in entertainment. It erupts in war and in random acts of violence. It allures and intrigues us in film and TV (think of the success of something like Game of Thrones), and it surprises us personally when we act “out of character”.
Understanding and integrating your own personal shadow can be some of the most important psychological work you will ever do. But in order to do that, you have to understand what to look for, and what to do when you find it.
The concept of the shadow was developed by the great psychologist Carl Jung, who was himself building on the work of Sigmund Freud. The idea is relatively simple: there are parts of our minds which are unconscious, yet influence us. Those parts are termed the shadow. The term itself is meant to invoke the darkness of that psychological material, in that it escapes the light of consciousness, or awareness.
Even though it is hidden, Jung maintained that it is nevertheless part of us, and that the extent to which we try to ignore or suppress it is the extent to which it has undue influence over our lives. In Jung’s model of the mind, the shadow is the shadow of the ego. What he means by that the shadow constitutes the opposite of everything you consciously identify with.
This has significant implications. If we tend to identify as generous, our shadow is greedy; if we see ourselves as good, our shadow is evil; and so on. This is not necessarily bad or wrong, because as Jung made clear, we all have a shadow.
The shadow forms initially during childhood. The poet Robert Bly calls it “the long bag we drag behind us”. A child exudes a vitality and zest for life which seems to radiate at 360 degrees. However, that child inevitably runs into the constraints, rules, expectations and disappointments of both their parents and their culture. You may have seen a child stop dead in their tracks after being scolded or told off by their parents. That vitality is for a time reduced to smoldering ashes.
The child realises that there are parts of themselves that their parents dont like. So what to do with those parts? They can’t express them, because they fear losing their parents love and protection. They can’t explain themselves, because they are not yet mature enough.
Bly says that behind us is an invisible bag, and it’s into that long bag that we put our “stuff”. As we develop, that bag grows longer and heavier. By the time we get to school the bag has grown considerably. And then the teachers have their say, and so do our friends.
That is the shadow. All of the parts of ourselves that are disowned, unacceptable, uncool, embarrassing, alienated, “not allowed”, repressed etc.
