On Bringing Light to Your Shadow
The world’s peace seems more and more like a game of whack-a-mole. You just about cease to feel anxiety about one issue and another one pops up. Overwhelmed and despairing, we don’t know where to send our prayers. Is it to the oval-shaped tables in the White House, hosting another summit on ‘nuclear security’? Is it to the AI engineers in manufacturing plants building yet another ‘work of genius’? Is it to soldiers in Kherson, to families of Israeli hostages or to Palestinians in Gaza? And is there anything (apart from posting stories on Instagram about it), that we can do at all?
Well, I am writing today with an idea.
Over the last few months I have been falling in love with Jungian psychology. I studied him in university, but perhaps because of the way it was taught, perhaps because I wasn’t ready to receive the knowledge, I made little of him then.
An idea of his which I find particularly pertinent today is that of the personal shadow. The shadow is that part of us that is kept in the unconscious. It is our undesirable qualities, behaviours and characteristics that, because we don’t like them, we tend to shove into our shadow. Now, if they just stayed there quietly, padlocked safely in the squeaky cupboard of our subconscious, all would be nice and well, right? Alas, it’s one of the universal laws is psychology that everything which is repressed needs to find an outlet – in dreams, in dysfunctions, or as is the case with the shadow, in projections.
It is the unconscious things which we carry in ourselves that we project onto others. A reliable way to find out what these qualities might be is to notice what really tips you off and makes you angry. What is it that really gets under your skin? Is it other people’s laziness? Is it their ingratitude? Is it their inexcusable stupidity? Perhaps you have zero tolerance for that part of yourself that is a little foolish and even less patience for yourself when you ask an ignorant question. Perhaps it’s because it makes you feel weak and vulnerable, perhaps because once as a child you were made to face the wall for hours for bringing home a C-. Whatever the reason, chances are this quality is in your shadow.
This becomes a problem not only because it impacts your relationships and stands in the way of authentic connection (as you are not really relating to the other person as they are but as you project them to be) but also because the subconscious is a force beyond measure and in fact people might become a bit more lazy, ungrateful, stupid because of your projection.
Now, I know what you are thinking – Nora, you’ve gone off on a tangent. How is this relevant to anything happening in the world at all?!
Well it is, in two ways. First, because I believe it’s the hatred that people themselves feel and repress, the little villains and tyrants that exist in each one of us that we try to annihilate through denial that we project onto others, that then turn into fuel for wars and conflict.
Secondly, because apart from a personal shadow, there is such a thing as a national shadow: a sum of all the individual shadows, but also the product of that country’s history.
And just as individuals can project their shadows on each other, so countries can project their national shadows.
In her book, Knowing Woman, Irene De Castillejo gives an example of this with the Chinese. They are widely hated and criticised for their brutal restriction of personal freedom. And yet, do people in the west – chained to the rat race, with their uniform working days, identical materialistic urges, their manipulated press and puppets for politicians – really have much more autonomy? In many ways, De Castillejo argues, we use the Chinese as a punching bag, to rebel (albeit subconsciously) against our own lack of personal freedom.
And so how does one strip the shadow of its vicious power? By making it conscious. A lot of people fear that to accept their shadow means to enable it. ‘Why would I want to accept that there is a part of me that is capable of committing atrocities? Why would I want to accept that there is a part of me that is lazy and hypocritical if I don’t want to be those things?’ they ask. Because it’s actually the opposite. It’s only what you resist which persists.
I would like to make clear that I am not making the claim that our larger economic, political and ideological problems can be solved by being addressed solely on the individual level. I am saying though that by casting light on our shadow we allow ourselves and others to be who we really are and perhaps free a tiny little corner of the world of some of its darkness. Imagine if we all did that.
