Podcast link:
https://anchor.fm/boscom/episodes/2-50-Psyche--Soul--107-e12iaqg
In this edition I shall talk about the redemption of the Shadow at Midlife.
Midlife is the time when the shadow makes its presence felt. Carl Jung
used the term “shadow” to describe
that part of our personality that is repressed because it conflicts with the
way we wish to see ourselves and be seen by others. It is that part of our personality
we are now unaware of because it was deemed incompatible with our ideal personality
and has been conveniently forgotten.
Shadow Formation
Our real self consists of both light and shadow, goodness and ugliness. We have our “angels and demons” –aspects that we admire and appreciate and feel good about and their opposites. Goodness and evil are both residents of our psyche and soul. As writer Henry Nouwen loved to remark, “Where God appears, the evil one is also present.”
However, we tend
to hide our demons and would like to appear all angel. So, we create our “persona.” In our effort to conform to
social expectations, we try to present ourselves to the world in the way the
world wants us to be. To live up to an idealistic self-image we suppress
aspects of our personality that do not fit the self-image. This image of
ourselves that we consciously cultivate and project in order to be and seen in
a particular way is our persona.
For example, we and others may have an idealistic image of who a good priest or religious needs to be. We may discover that there are characteristics in us, such as our anger, lust for power, tendency to gossip or our sexual desires that do not fit that image. We suppress these consciously; after a while we forget we suppressed them (Tell a lie over and over and after a while we ourselves will begin to believe it to be the truth!) and they become part of our unconscious. They get swept under the veneer of our proper self. The proper self that we present to the world becomes our persona. In creating the persona, many aspects of our lives get repressed, split off from our conscious self and awareness. These repressed aspects become the “shadow.”
The persona, that
masks our real self (Persona originally referred to the mask worn by actors in
Greek theatre to represent a character), is not all bad; it does serve a useful
purpose. It helps us to adapt to the demands of our social and cultural
circumstances. We cannot always say what we really feel, or act on every impulse
regardless of circumstances. However, problems arise when we identify with the
persona and begin to believe that we are
the front or the mask that we present to the outer world, and we lose awareness
of our true reality, especially the unacceptable aspects of our personality.
The more we identify with an overly good or righteous persona, the darker will be our shadow. Those of us who are religious or priests are especially vulnerable to shadow formation because our vocation involves commitment to very high spiritual values and standards of moral conduct. Understanding of religious life as a call to “perfection” or the priesthood as becoming another Christ, makes us supress anything in us that prevents us from appearing perfect or Christlike. Thus, we can easily supress our angry feelings or our sexual feelings and longings and send these into the deepest basements of our psyche and soul, to become part of our shadow world.
Destructiveness of Shadow
What is destructive about unrecognised shadows is that they continue to
be operative in our lives even though we are unaware of their existence. They
drive our conscious behaviour, often in dysfunctional and even destructive
ways.
When we are surprised by some of our unexpected unbecoming behaviours, it could be a pointer to a shadow. We might have cultivated the image of a gentle, sensitive, patient, understanding and compassionate human being. But during a conversation with someone whose behaviour we are disapproving, we suddenly burst into rage and begin to castigate the person using pretty strong language. In our sober moment, we ask, “What was that? How could I behave like that?” Well, that was our shadow, our repressed anger and resentment breaking through, embarrassing us and shocking others.
Shadow Integration
In midlife we experience the call to live life authentically, to be who
we really are, to break out of the tyranny of social expectations. In midlife
we hear the invitation from our “soul”— our deep, authentic self --, to recognize
our unlived life, our deepest longings that we had repressed.
As the American poet Robert Bly observed, we spend the first half of our lives dissociating the unacceptable parts of ourselves and packing them into the invisible “shadow bag” that we carry on our back. In the second half of life we are invited to collect them back and make them part of our conscious self, and empty that heavy bag that slows down our journey toward wholeness.
Openness to the experience of intimacy helps us to process many aspects of
our self that reside in the shadow. In genuine intimacy we have the freedom to
be ourselves, to be “psychologically naked” before the other. We can bare our
heart and soul to the other without fear or embarrassment. In that kind of
freedom and openness, many aspects of our self that were suppressed rise to the
surface of consciousness. We can then process them with our friend and
integrate them.
Thomas Keating, Trappist monk and psychologist, highlights this aspect of intimacy: “One characteristic of love,” he wrote, “is that it reduces our defences. When our defences go down, the dark side of our personality emerges. One important aspect of true friendship is the willingness to help each other process that material.” (Intimacy with God, p. 72)
Shadow and Spiritual
Life
Acceptance and
integration of the shadow can have profound impact on our spiritual life. Jung
considered shadow-work so important to the health of the soul that he
considered it a religious undertaking. In
his psychology, getting to know the shadow is a way of redeeming all the
rejected and lost parts of the soul.
With the acceptance of the darkness within ourselves, we can become more accepting of others’ weakness and become more compassionate. We also become more free to be ourselves, with genuine self-acceptance based on a more realistic sense of self. We recognise that we need not be perfect for God to love us; we could be who we are, with our angels and demons. The result is a quantum leap on the spiritual path. Jungian analysts Wilkie Au and Noreen Cannon describe the process as follows in the book Urgings of the Heart (p. 41)
For as we look at what
frightens and shames us and come to know the pain that made us reject ourselves
in the first place, we become newly receptive to God’s healing grace…. As God’s
love for those wounded parts of us sinks in, we are able, perhaps for the first
time, to love ourselves, dark side and all. We also find ourselves more able to
reach out in love and compassion to others because we are less self-righteous
and judgmental.
As another Jungian analyst, Robert Johnson, has pointed out, “To honour and accept the shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime” (Owning Your Own Shadow, p. x).
Reclaiming what
has been lost in the shadow is an essential aspect of the inner journey we need
to undertake at midlife. To do so we need to listen to the inner voices that
have been silenced, feel the feelings that have been deadened, and sense their
yearnings. This necessitates slowing down the pace of life and creating
solitude in which what is hidden away in the unconscious can slowly emerge into
consciousness and being brave enough to acknowledge their presence and
integrate them into our conscious persona.
Introspection
Honest answers to
the following questions can point to our shadow:
- What unacceptable
desires and impulses rise to consciousness unexpectedly in our solitudes?
- What are the
embarrassing “slips of the tongue” we make?
- Who are the ugly or
disreputable characters that appear in our dreams?
- What is it that we
intensely dislike or hate in another person or provoke our self-righteous
indignation?
When Jesus speaks about the log in our eyes (Mathew 7, 3-5), he was essentially referring to our shadow- something we are not aware of. You could read that passage and stay a while in the presence of God or Jesus himself and ask them to help you recognize and redeem your shadows. And then sit quietly attending to whatever emerges into awareness. End the prayer thanking God for what you have been able to recognise.
May your weekend be happy and
safe. Be blessed.
Thank you for listening/reading.
Pictures: Google Images
Jose Parappully SDB, PhD
sumedhacentre@gmail.com
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