Episode Transcript
Intro
Hi everyone, welcome to How to Live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I am your host Sharad Lal.This is episode 26.
Topic
I’ll begin with a short story. When I started personal development work 7-8 years back, I embraced spirituality, coaching, therapy, started practising mindfulness, meditation, yoga and many other related things in an effort to become the best version of myself. I thought doing so many good things will make me a good person. But despite all this, I’d still find myself getting nasty to others, angry, out of control.
Many negative parts of me would still be around. I would think to myself, damn, after so much work, sacrifices and efforts, I am still not good. I still have all these ugly things in me. Then I would console myself saying that I’ve made some progress. My previous self would have gotten angry more times than I do now. That was true and helped a bit. But the darkness inside me didn’t show signs of disappearing. So I would question, “Is all this hard work worth it? Why go through all this, when it doesn’t take away all the bad stuff inside?”
Then I came across the concept of the shadow. It puts things in perspective. We all have a shadow. Shadow consists of all the negativity, ugliness inside us that we’re ashamed about. Personal development work does not mean removing the shadow, removing all the darkness. Instead, it’s being aware of all the darkness inside us.
Growth is not becoming good. It’s becoming whole. By becoming whole, we can integrate the negative with the positive. This allows us to control our negative impulses from harming ourselves and others. As I studied the shadow in more detail I realised, integrating shadow work not only helps keep our monster in check, but it also gives us access to tremendous energy. Unleashing this energy can help us unlock parts of ourselves we didn’t know existed. This paves the way for brilliance and greatness that all of us have inside us.
That’s the focus of today’s episode. The Shadow. We will cover, what is the shadow? How’s it formed? How can we see our shadow? What power can the shadow unleash? And how can we integrate the shadow into ourselves?
Before getting into the episode
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A note on today's episode, earlier when I was using words like monster, ugliness, hate etc, I felt uncomfortable and weird. But given that we’re talking about the shadow, it's important to use the right words and not euphemisms. As we will see, the shadow gets created because we mask undesirable things and repress them. So we won’t do it in today’s episode.
Background
Back to the episode. In 1885, the great writer Robert Louee Stevenson had a terrible dream. In his dream he saw a meek man with a monster inside him. This inspired one of the greatest novels in history. The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The idea was so strong that Robert wrote the novel in just 6 weeks. This theme is popular even today. Seen across Movies, TV shows, Books. Why did such a bizarre concept? - That’s how his wife described it when she read the first draft. Rumour has it that she burnt that first draft.
So why did such a bizarre concept capture our attention so strongly? Because the lead character is disturbingly similar to most of us. All of us. However virtuous we might be on the outside, we have something troublesome and monstrous inside us. Both good and evil live within us. This thought, however, isn’t new. It’s existed since ancient times. Whether it’s spiritual text from the Bhagavad Gita, which is the spiritual guide of the Hindus that describes the fight between good and evil inside us or Western Philosophy from Plato.
Great thinkers have always been fascinated by the evil inside us. The term shadow, however, was coined in recent times by a renowned psychologist, Carl Jung. He believed that where there is light, there must be a shadow.
What is the shadow?
So how does the shadow get developed in all of us? Carl Jung believed that for every positive trait we have there is a negative corresponding one. Where there’s love, there’s always hate. Where there’s passion, there’s always anger. As we grow up, the good traits get applauded. The bad ones get shunned. As a result, we repress the bad ones. They however don’t disappear. Instead they go onto the unconscious. All these repressed traits become our shadow.
According to Jung, shadow consists of repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts, and shortcomings. A good way to visualise the shadow is how the great poet Robert Bly put it. He referred to the shadow as the long black bag that all of us carry everywhere. Whenever we don’t like something either because of ourselves or society, we throw it in the bag. As we grow older, the bag gets longer and longer. It becomes pretty heavy to carry around. That’s why all our issues that weigh us down are often referred to as baggage.
We take our baggage into work, into friendship, into relationships. But we never look into that bag. With this shadow hidden away, on the surface we can become whatever ideal version we like or other people like. This is the metaphorical mask we wear. This mask was referred to by Jung as a persona. So we have our public visible self - that’s the persona. And the dark hidden self - the shadow. Another way to think about the shadow is through the lens of the ego. Our ego has an ideal view of ourselves. Anything that comes in the way of the ideal self the ego constructs is discarded into the shadow. The shadow is created in an effort to preserve our goodness.
The shadow isn’t just personal. It’s collective as well. A group of people could have a common shadow, one country fighting with another country is an example, or one race hating another. All of humanity could also have a collective shadow. All of us fear ghosts, villains, monsters etc. Side note. Jung and Frued were popular during the same time. Both studied the repressed parts of our personality. However one major difference between them was Yung’s focus on the collective beyond the individual.
Positive traits in the shadow
There’s some good news about shadows. Shadows are not all bad. In that dark dingy bag, there are some nuggets of brilliance. However surprising it might sound but often, we are scared of our own superpowers. So we hide them in our shadow. Jung mentioned we can get skeletons out of the closet but it’s more difficult to get gold out of the closet. We are scared of our own powers.
Interestingly we project our brilliance on others. Sometimes we might meet this really inspirational person. We want to be like him or her. In reality, we already are like that person. We’re projecting and falling in love with our brilliance. The same phenomena explains hero worship to celebs, sports stars etc.
Why should we bother about the shadow?
Why should we pay attention to the shadow? Why should we do shadow work? First, it gets blind spots in the open. In life, our shadow can suddenly show up in any form. Ranging from sudden anger on small things, over-reactions, immoral acts, to ghastly acts of violence.This can often ruin relationships and cause irreparable harm. With shadow work, we learn to be careful of ourselves. Controversial clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson often says, “Be careful of yourself. You’re a ticking time bomb.”
Second, finding depth. Without the shadow we are just our masks. Meandering along trying to please people changing ourselves to fit in. We live a shallow existence. Third, getting less triggered. Getting triggered has become a thing in modern times. We seem to be constantly triggered and irritated. We think it’s because of what someone said or did. Instead, it’s things we are doing to ourselves.The shadow is projecting here. We’ll explain this in more detail shortly.
Fourth, unlocking trapped energy ready for release. The shadow contains tremendous energy. Especially creative energy. We’ve seen Adele creating platinum hits tapping into her sadness. Writers and artists, taking that rage, putting it on a page and creating masterpieces. The creative energy in our shadow has more power than our normal peak energy. This can help us to do extraordinary things.
Fifth, becoming authentic and whole. When the masks are off, we can breathe, access our full personality and become who we truly are. Important sidenote. Being whole does not mean we can now be nasty to others or behave badly. It means accepting and integrating good and bad within ourselves so we can control ourselves from harming others and harness the energy from the shadow.
How do we sense our shadow?
So, to do all the good work described earlier, we first need to be able to see our shadow.
Shadow is hidden from us. So we need to find a way to open that long black bag. How do we do that?
Before getting into it, another short story. This time about you. Imagine your partner and you are invited to a party at night. You know the hosts, but there will be many others you won’t know. COVID restrictions have recently been removed so people are making an extra effort to invite as many people as they can. At night, you put the kids to bed and are ready to go out.
Quite excited and nervous to meet so many people As you enter the lobby of the building, you can already hear murmurings. It sounds fun. You go in and see everyone having a good time. Shortly after, someone enters. Seems like a nice guy. But very soon, he’s talking loudly to everyone. He starts showing off. Talk about his businesses. How much money he’s making. Travelling in first class, wearing only certain brands, you get the picture. He takes over the party and there ends all the fun. You go home and complain to your partner. Your partner thought he was a show-off but isn’t really too angry. But you’re very angry. Almost fuming.
What a wanker? What a jerk? Spoilt everyone’s evening. You keep thinking about him and getting irritated weeks after meeting him. You are disgusted by him. Well if you’ve experienced this you’ve met your shadow. We all have different shadows.
The guy in the story was showing off and bragging. Showing off could be your shadow. However in this story, showing off wasn’t your partner’s shadow. Maybe her shadow is laziness, stupidity, sensuality, or spirituality. She could have had a disproportionate reaction to this. Not reacting very strongly, over reactions to someone or something is an indication of our shadow. In reality, however, we are not disgusted by this person or thing. Instead we are disgusted by parts of ourselves we see in this person. Parts of ourselves which were nicely hidden in the big black bag. Are now out in the open. That disgusts us and we can’t understand why.
So this is the most common way to see our shadow. It’s through Projection. We project by attributing a negative quality to someone else in an unconscious effort to banish it from ourselves, so as to keep us away from it. According to English psychoanalyst Molly Tuby, here are some statements that indicate projection by our shadow, “I just can’t believe he would do that!” “Oops, I didn’t mean to say that.” “This is the third time you did this. I’m so ashamed about how he treats me. “He really let his weight get out of control!”
At moments like these, when we are possessed by strong feelings of shame or anger, or we find that our behavior is off the mark in some way, the shadow is erupting unexpectedly. Projection is not just on other people. We could project onto characters in movies, TV shows, celebs or novels. Other ways to notice our shadow is through our humour. What darkness do we conceal in our jokes? Are they gory, slapstick, dirty?
We can also see our shadow in our dreams. Dreams are a symbolic language. Interpreting them can be difficult. For more details, we’ll be discussing dreams and shadow-work with acclaimed and award winning author Toko-pa Turner in the next episode that releases on October 25th.
How do we integrate our shadow?
Once we see our shadow, how do we integrate it into ourselves? Jung calls this process individuation. It’s combining the persona and shadow. This is a very very difficult process. Please indulge me in yet another short story, this time it’s not about you or me but someone else. This story shows how difficult and painful this process of confronting one’s shadow is. A woman in her early forties, doing really well in her career, was looking at her next move to a Sr Management role. The feedback she kept getting was to be more assertive, more commanding. She needed to be able to drive her team towards tough goals set by the company. But she didn’t want to become this person. She hated her last two bosses. Both dominant bosses with no empathy. They were almost bullies. She always had a strong reaction to these people. Absolutely abhorred them. Luckily she’d been working with a psychologist on shadow work.
She realised that this trigger dominant male energy was her shadow. She’d discarded it in her childhood. Now she will need to reclaim it. When she first came face to face with that masculine energy, this is how she described it. Imagine a caveman, who’s been in hiding for the last 30 years. Now out in the open. Not only is the man frustrated of being held captive for so long. The world has changed, men have changed dramatically, manhood has changed. But this person in the shadow has not. He’s still stuck in the 1900s. Reconciling this person with oneself is not only difficult but tremendously scary.
That’s why one should use a specialist to do shadow work. One doesn’t know what skeletons lie in that dark dingy bag. In terms of the process of individuation, Carl Jung outlines 3 steps. First, accepting one’s shadow. Accepting one has negative, disturbing, immoral things in us. Letting go of the myth that we are all good. Second, see its qualities and intention in its raw form.
Third, do the long and difficult negotiation. Psychologist Ken Wilber describes these in practical terms. Accepting one’s shadow is reversing the direction of the projection. Instead of he’s hurting me or she’s triggering me, it's I’m hurting myself or triggering myself. Second, one can see the shadow in raw form by turning up the feeling. So if we feel guilty instead of trying to remove that guilt we can try to feel even more guilty.
This way we create the feelings of guilt in our conscious state,in our persona. Then the persona and the shadow will both wrestle with that feeling. That’s the difficult negotiation. If this sounds very theoretical. That’s fine. One needs to experience this with an expert. Shadow work is always long. Can take years. This involves living with duality, meditating with it, holding paradoxes. We will also be discussing holding paradoxes in our next episode with acclaimed author Toko-pa Turner.
Ultimately through the process, we let go of the myth that we are all good. Instead we become whole and complete.
Action Steps
If the concept of the shadow resonated with you, here is an action step you could consider. What’s something that irritates us immensely, more than it should? It could be a person or a thing. What is it about this that irritates us? At the core is it despair, arrogance, stupidity, or something else? This will give us a hint about a part of our shadow. From this point on, we can be on the look out for this trait showing up. And notice what it does to us. We can write about it or simply observe ourselves.
Just figuring this out, and accepting it, is a huge step. We then have some awareness of our shadow. Best of luck.
That’s it for today’s episode. I hope you enjoyed it. We will be back with another episode 2 weeks from now with acclaimed author Toko-pa turner, On October 25th. In that episode we talk about our need for fitting in and belonging, how this sometimes forces us to play low. We also discuss shadow work, and how to interpret dreams. I hope you join me for that. Till next time. Have a wonderful day ahead. Bye bye.