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 depend upon the goodwill of others to survive. So if we hear we're too much trouble, or our poop stinks, or we're too lively or too clingy or too clumsy or too stupid, we stuff those parts down into our shadows. 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. Some parts of the psyche are like the bad sisters in fairy tales: extremely selfish. "Letting it all hang out" just won't work among intelligent mammals who've been honing their warfare skills for thousands of years.

So some 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).

However, once we grow up, we have a responsibiity to get curious about what happened to all that juicy emotional energy we've been actively repressing since we were children. Otherwise, we're liable to end up becoming a danger to society anyway — but a nice, sneaky, civilized danger. As Robert Bly said once, "If we want to pretend we're always nice, then our creeps have to sneak around to get out."

Yeah. If 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's lurking 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 the Victorian age, you know — Jekyll created an alternate ego, Mr. Hyde, to act out the shadowy urges in his soul. Bad idea. Because when Hyde slipped out the laboratory door at night he headed straight for the seediest parts of London. 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, committed murder. The "hidden" Hyde grew ever more warped, ever more bestial, ever harder for Jekyll to control. Eventually? You know it. Jekyll became all Hyde, all the time.

There's a recurring theme in literature about soothing the savage soul. But for that to happen, someone in the story has got to pay attention to the poor beast. Conscious, direct attention. It's the same in the inner world as in the outer world: no critter likes to be caged.

Which means: any archetypal character prowling around in your psyche — and we all have hundreds of them — will perform better and be easier to handle if you can (1) look right at it, admit that it exists, that it's yours; and (2) find out what it wants. Then you can open negotiations with it. Then you can figure out how to handle it without harming others.