Robert Bly uses the image of a long black bag to describe the human shadow.

 

Imagine that we each have a long black bag dragging behind us, and anything that we don’t know how to deal with, or can’t deal with, gets stuffed down into this bag as we go along through life.

 

It starts with childhood fears, the utter helplessness a small child feels in the hands of huge, inexplicably demanding adults. Then maybe we stuff a fear of the dark down into our bag, or abusive parents, or a bruising sibling rivalry. Maybe we stuff the feeling that we’re just not good enough or smart enough down into our bag. Maybe we stuff in a hatred of how we look. Maybe later on we stuff in despair over soul-killing jobs, or abusive situations, or grueling poverty, or life-long discrimination…

 

‘The long black bag we drag behind us’ is a great image. We can feel how heavy those bags would get as the years went on and on… We can sense how much damage projecting whole bags full of stuff this heavy onto other people would do to the other people.

 

Growing up, really, finally growing up, as James Hollis calls it in Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, involves reaching way down into that long black bag and then dealing thoughtfully with whatever you can manage to pull back up out of it.

 

In other words, if we ever mature, we do so by thinking about what we’ve stuffed down into our shadows.