“It takes nerve not to flinch from or be crushed by the sight of one’s own shadow. It takes courage to accept responsibility for one’s own worst qualities.”  –Edward C. Whitmont, from “The Evolution of the Shadow,” in Meeting the Shadow

 

It’s not easy to look at your own shadow. 

In order to make our parents happy we started covering up parts of ourselves before we could walk. And we definitely knew the difference between approval and disapproval before we could talk. It’s a basic survival skill. We can’t make it on our own as infants. We have to depend on the goodwill of others. So if we hear we’re too much trouble, or our poop stinks, or we’re too lively or too clingy or too stupid, we learn to stuff those parts down into our shadows very quickly. By second grade, hiding parts of ourselves in order to please other people has become second nature.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. In order to become a thinking human being who can cooperate with other thinking human beings, some of that old animal instinctual nature needs to be controlled. “Letting it all hang out” just won’t work among intelligent mammals who’ve been honing their warfare skills in dominator societies for thousands of years.

So a bit of repression serves a useful purpose. It allows children to become functioning, cooperative members of society. We learn not to drown our baby sister, or hit our brother over the head with a baseball bat. We learn how to sit still and pay attention to others. We figure out that we are not the center of the universe. (Hopefully.)

But once we grow up, we have a responsibility to get curious about what happened to all that juicy emotional energy we’ve been repressing since childhood. Otherwise, we’re liable to end up becoming a danger to society anyway. For when we refuse to admit that we even have certain feelings, we exclude the possibility of dealing with those feelings rationally. If we don’t take any notice of—or responsibility for—whatever lurks in our shadow, then we set other people up for ambush by our unsupervised inner demons.

In the famous book by Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll was a perfect gentleman, a widely respected, highly cultured, upper class, sterling citizen who spent most of his daylight hours ministering to the poor and needy. Afraid to mar his perfect image, but full of unappeased desires—this was back in the Victorian age, you know—Jekyll created an alternate ego, Mr. Hyde, to act out the less respectable urges in his soul. Bad idea. Because when Hyde slipped out the laboratory door at night and headed straight for the seediest parts of London, Jekyll had no control over him. As time went on and Jekyll kept denying his influence, Hyde’s desires took ranker and ranker forms. He persecuted prostitutes, preyed on the weak, even committed murder. Disavowed by Jekyll’s civilized side, Hyde grew ever more warped, ever more bestial, ever harder for Jekyll to manage. Eventually?  You know it. Hyde took over. Jekyll became all Hyde, all the time.

There’s a recurring theme in movies and literature about taming the Beast, about soothing the savage soul. But for that to happen, someone in the story has got to pay attention to the poor old Beast. Conscious, thinking attention. And as in the outer world, so in the inner world: no creature thrives on neglect. No critter likes to be caged.

There’s a basic psychological rule that any instinctual character prowling around in your psyche will act better and be easier to handle if you can  (1) admit that it exists, and  (2) figure out what it wants. Then you can open negotiations with it. Then you can manage it without harming others. What’s the first step in AA’s famous 12-step program? Admitting you have a problem.

Let’s use selfishness as an example. We have a good strong symbol for selfishness in Western folklore—a dragon hunched over his hoard. Now dragons never actually use the treasure they steal. They just hoard it. Take it from other people, pile it up in a cave somewhere, and lie around on it. Fly out and terrorize the countryside occasionally. Breath fire. Eat whole cows and coy maidens.

Can we better manage our internal dragon of selfishness by pretending not to be selfish, I’m not being selfish! I deserve a bigger piece than you do! Or by keeping an eye out for our selfishness, so that, when we catch ourselves being selfish, we can just admit it, maybe even laugh at ourselves as we see it happening? Geez, look at that! Cut my piece of pie a lot bigger than yours, didn’t I? I’m such a rascal. Here, let me divvy this up better.

That might work. But if we go around trying to pretend that we’re not selfish, then we’re never going to be able to stop being selfish. We’re never going to have an accurate picture of who we are or what we’re doing. Plus, we’ll have a lousy sense of humor. Where it starts to get ugly is: we’ll have to keep other people distracted, probably by accusing them of being selfish first, so they’ll be too busy defending themselves to notice how much bigger we just cut our own piece of pie.

What a lot of work for a little more dessert! And of course—and most importantly—the chance to appear free from all flaws. In black/white, either/or cultures which are quick to judge and harsh to condemn, children learn that it is very important not to be caught in the wrong, at a very young age.

But, alas… our old dragon of selfishness will only get bigger and more demanding the longer we pretend not to know anything about him. Like a troll under a bridge. Like Hyde. In fact, left alone without supervision, our internal dragon of selfishness will eventually get loose and swoop out over the countryside, torching people and grabbing whatever he wants. And if caught, he will always have good, solid reasons for his behavior. The Dragon of Selfishness can morph into The Victim of Circumstance in an eye blink.

The trick is to look within once in a while and admit that our internal dragon really is selfish, and that he really is a member of our psychic zoo. If we can do that, if we can even manage to say something directly to him occasionally like, “Oh, there you are. I see you, you greedy old thing,” maybe throw him a juicy steak or buy him a new toy, then the dragon of selfishness will settle down and go back to sleep. If we just allow him a little conscious space once in a while—not let him get away with anything, just acknowledge that he’s there—then he won’t have to torch or hoard or get 50 feet long or max out the credit card or have an affair or cheat on exams or embezzle company funds to get our attention.

“Medieval heroes had to slay their dragons; modern heroes have to take their dragons back home to integrate into their own personalities.”–Robert Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow

“Don’t Look Up,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Rob Morgan, Kid Cudi, Timothee Chalamet, and a host of other fine actors and actresses, is wonderful.

It’s an intelligent and entertaining look (pun intended) at what happens when power hungry narcissists hold positions of power in governments funded by uber-wealthy donors.

Even when there’s an enormous comet hurtling toward the earth –certain destruction imminent, a mass extinction level event– those who can’t see a way to profit from it simply refuse to listen to the scientists.

Even when the comet has gotten so close that earthlings can see it with their own eyes, the powers that be refuse to listen to scientists. That’s when Streep’s party starts pushing the slogan, “Don’t look up!”

Instead they back a hair-brained idea by the third richest man ever –and Streep’s major donor– for dealing with the comet, and any scientist who disagrees with the plan is simply thrown off the project.

Perfect.

And just as dangerous whether it’s a huge comet coming toward us or a covid outbreak among us.

When I turned the TV off last night I felt hopeful for the first time in a long time. Really hopeful. We do have the stupids outnumbered, folks. We can pull ourselves out of the calamities hurtling towards us.

I love it when dire warnings are entertaining.

And this is your chance to get to see Meryl Streep playing Donald Trump. Look up if you want to, but don’t miss it.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how the Shadow operates in adults. But as a mother, grandmother, and frequent caretaker of other people’s children, I’ve actually dealt with how the Shadow operates in children more often than I have in adults.

Poor dears. They hate to be wrong. Hate to be caught in the wrong, that is. The most loving child will lie shamelessly to cover up a petty error that no one cares about anyway. Cannot stand to lose at games. Thinks nothing of cheating. And it takes a power of parenting to even make a dent in this apparently innate human outlook.

Then there are those of us who grow up in fundamental religious families, as I did. Where everything is black and white. Where your parents know all, their world view is iron clad and unassailable — divine no less — and no matter how ridiculous they act or how absurd they sound, you must honor and obey them on pain of corporal punishment and fear of eternal damnation. Where a child cannot afford to be caught making a mistake… Fertile breeding ground for the human shadow, indeed. If I’m not a good girl even God won’t love me. It takes children raised like I was a long time to be able to admit their own mistakes or to see a bit of their own Shadow. I will always struggle with an unconscious desire to be right, to know it all.

Here’s what I wish someone had said to me when I was a kid:

The best and brightest of us still make at least 3 or 4 mistakes every day. The very worst of us operate from a continual state of error. But most of us lie somewhere in between. We do a lot of things we can be proud of, we do a lot of things we can’t be proud of — that’s just the way it is.

Trying to pretend you haven’t made a mistake when you have made a mistake, trying to cover it up, merely adds another mistake to your running total. It adds telling a lie to what would have otherwise been just another routine slip-up.

Besides, we actually have to make mistakes. Human beings learn by trial and error.

So, give it up. You don’t know it all. You’re not always going to win. You’re not perfect.

Let go of being “right.”

You’ll be happier. You’ll develop a sense of humor about yourself. You’ll become less judgmental about others.

And you’ll be a lot more fun to be around.