To know yourself, know your Shadow

What happens in our world is a part of us

There are times when a good hard look at oneself may be a far more effective cure to what is not working than trying to change what is happening “out there”.

When we encounter difficulties in life, we may blame other people, events or the environment for what is happening. This might be OK. However, it is worth taking a second look. Often the problem may be a familiar one, which keeps cropping up in one’s life. It is only after some major incident occurs that the sufferer finally comes to the point of asking, “might anything of this be due to me?” And so it turns out that in fact it is caused by oneself, by characteristics within one that that he or she has not till now been aware of.

Each of us has a part of us, aspects of our character, that we are unaware of, that are hidden from view. This is our shadow, a term derived from Carl Jung. The discovery of the Shadow by psychoanalytic psychology is one of the big contributions of the 20th Century to human understanding.

Think of people you have known who make comments about others, usually negative. Have you not thought, “But you are like that too”? I frequently find it fascinating to see this in others - and also in me. In fact this is one of the great tools of understanding the shadow. When something bugs me about another person, or paradoxically also when I admire someone, I find it instructive to examine myself, to enquire within. What is so important is to acknowledge the grain of truth in that enquiry. “That too is a part of me”. It is not to beat myself up, to blame myself, or to make myself wrong. It is just to acknowledge.

When we turn our light on our shadow it goes away, not necessarily straight away, but it does go. The important thing is to take ownership: “I am responsible for my life and therefore what I create”. You might need to spend time seeing in what way this part of your shadow is showing up in your life, to really get to know it, to get a handle on how it operates. You might need to ask other people what their experience of you is, those people whom you really trust to be straight with you. But with ownership, it does go. Or to put it another way, it integrates itself into you conscious life, where you can look after it and manage it.

Let me give an example from my own experience. I spent a lot of my life being Mr Nice Guy, as far as I presented myself to the world. This was my creative adjustment to my discovery that people could be nasty to me. It seemed that the only way to manage that was to deflect it by a strategy of trying to get people to like me. Of course, the bottom line was that I thought I was unlikeable. But that was my belief: if I was nice people would like me, I thought. It didn’t work, of course, but that’s part of the learning of life. As a result, I projected out on to other people a part of me that I disowned. So I met lots of people who were angry. It took me plenty of personal growth to find that that angry part was also me. Once I expressed and owned that part, the angry people started to go away. Now I get nice people! But I had to learn to integrate the anger. That’s the big learning: to express my anger appropriately, non-judgementally, not at others’ expense, and in ownership. So I experimented with my irritability, vented my anger every now and again, was bad-tempered – and then let it go. Anger is an emotion that passes through the body and out. Where we do harm is where we hold on to it, internalise it and make ourselves sick, or throw it out at others and harm them. Learning to accept and release our less “nice” sides is a skill that takes practice. But it can be done.

Acknowledging the shadow means accepting ourselves and learning to let go. If we look hard at our shadow, we may fear we are going to become something we don’t like, something unpleasant and unlikeable. This is not what happens if we get the right handle on it. When we accept all of us, we learn to love all of us. Integrating the shadow brings us to a point of peace with ourselves. Then we can love ourselves.

I have often coached people who have needed to make this step, to integrate different parts of them, to take ownership of characteristics in them that they were projecting on to the world around them. I have found it a lot in people in business, who have had difficulties in managing others, handling colleagues, people in their teams or people they report to. It also crops up in relationships too. Often they experienced a lot of stress and conflict - and illness. Others found them hard to live with. They often found it difficult to live with themselves too. Yet, when this is turned round, when the shadow is integrated, the transformation in their lives is great.

Correspondingly, we can learn to heal that which goes on around us. What we do not like that goes on around us is part of our shadow. When we learn to integrate, accept and heal it, it goes away. Thus this poses a whole new possibility of our relations with our fellow humans.

“If you don’t go within, you go without” is a powerful maxim. If we don’t acknowledge our shadows we will continue to harm ourselves and others around us, communities, whole nations, belief systems, and forces that could destroy us. If we look within and heal that, we take responsibility for what we create in the world and change it for the better.

That is the great potential of healing the Shadow.

(c) The Empowering Partnership Ltd 2007. All rights reserved