The enchantments and bewitchments which occur over and over again in fairy tales are reminders. Warnings. Because we're all enchanted at one time or another. We mis-understand the stories. We glorify one type of role to the extent that we think we’re supposed to be Beauty, or be a hero, then we stick ourselves into that role and try not to be anything else.

We just flat get stuck. In the process of trying to fit into our appointed role—athlete or honor student or family man or class clown or skinny woman or powerful businessman or laidback dude or hardened gang member or devoted disciple—we deny the very existence of any part of ourselves that doesn’t fit neatly into that role. We deny we have any desire to skip class, or eat the whole bag of cookies, or blow off work today, or hop into bed with a total stranger.

And we usually can manage to cram all those contrary desires way down into our shadows. {What contrary desires? I don’t see any.} That is, until we wake up one day and find ourselves doing something really stupid and totally “out of character.” Out of character… out of the role we’ve chosen—or were told—to play. Which was probably a fairy tale character’s role, from a fairy tale family, in a fairy tale setting, and not humanly possible in the first place. It’s sad and poignant—as well as poisonous and highly paradoxical—that despite the evil increasing exponentially around the world, most of us are trying so hard to be good.

Denying parts of your psyche on a daily basis is called repression, and it creates another ongoing problem called regression. If I can’t even admit I have certain feelings—if they shame me, or they scare me, or if they’re not permitted in my culture—those feelings will not look the same when they slip past my conscious guard years later. Those feelings will have regressed.

Re-gress is the opposite of pro-gress. To regress is “to go backwards.” The parts of myself I just can’t stand to think about will get less human the longer I refuse to acknowledge them. The longer I pretend not to know anything at all about some part of myself, about some basic instinctual impulse of mine, the grosser and coarser and hairier and wilder that abandoned part of myself is going to get — like a troll living under a bridge, or a castaway all alone on an island.

What makes a bunch of good ole boys who usually hang out down at the café go out and lynch a black man? Or beat a gay man to death and leave his body dangling from a barbed wire fence? What makes one commuter pull out a gun and shoot another commuter over an insignificant driving mistake? Who does the actual torturing in a torturous regime? Were these people all born evil?

No. No one is born evil. However, we are all capable of a distinct downward slide as we move through life… from re-pression to re-gression to ag-gression.

Whenever we try to appear angelic on the surface, the devil inside dances.

As soon as we get really certain that our way is the only way, imps start to grin.

If we can’t admit being wrong… can’t calmly discuss important issues… simply won’t tolerate other points of view, much less change our minds faced with new evidence… when we are obviously much cooler and smarter, and other people are obviously much lamer and dumber… we are bewitched, folks. Self-enchanted. Firmly stuck in a fairy tale role.

And there's only one way to break such a spell: to take off the mask. To face the fact that every person on earth—you, me, and the guy in the corner booth over there—is just as much Court Jester as Wise King, just as much Wicked Witch as Snow White.

To go ahead and admit we're not always perfect, so we can start to do something toward mending our mistakes.

–from Shadow in the USA, p 62-63