Confront
Your Shadow
“I
am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become. Knowing your own
darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will
call it fate.”
Carl
G. Jung
This is
a quote about what Jung termed, The Shadow. I have written extensively about
this, but it bears repeating. What we humans, myself included, do is operate as if
we have no shadow, and see ourselves in our persona form only. The image
of this that comes to mind is someone standing in bright sunlight. The sun shines
on their face and the front side of their body, and casts behind them a dark
shadow. The brighter the light on the front, the darker and closer the shadow
behind. If I think of myself as “good” only—I’m helpful and gracious, I live to
serve other people, I am always looking out for you, I am a devout Christian—then I
cast behind me the shadow side of all that. Usually, that involves constant attempts to control the behavior of others so that their lives fall in line with my own
goals and values. The shadow side of being oh-so-helpful, is being controlling
and dogmatic. When we only see the light side of us—the one that always tries
to do good—we are highly likely to miss the shadow that stands behind us. That
is a recipe for disaster.
If this
all sounds fanciful, and like psyco-babble, think of the times we are living
in. We are in a world of Us and Them thinking—democrats vs republicans, conservatives
vs progressives, autocrats vs socialists, rural vs urban and so on—and depending
on which camp aligns with our values, we find the other side reprehensible.
Which is to say, we cast our shadow onto them. If I am an environmentalist confronting
an oil fracking company, I will say all manner of derogatory rhetoric about
that company. And if I am CEO of an oil company, I will call environmentalists
blood sucking liberals. We dehumanize the other so that we don’t have to
recognize ourselves in their mirror.
We have
created this adversarial world by refusing to confront our own shadow—individually
and collectively. And, until we do, we will continue to be adversaries and
refuse to work together to solve the very real problems that we face
collectively. Until we contemplate our own shadow and make it conscious, as
Jung said, we will continue to operate from it and blame others for the
problems it causes. Until we recognize that every human being has the capacity
for both good and evil, including ourselves, we will huddle in our camps and
throw stones. If we don’t like what we see in the world, we should look inside
ourselves. This is true for me, and for you.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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