The story of the human being and the human psyche has been examined, studied, and written about since the beginning of our existence. Although it’s been researched and dissected by brilliant thinkers, explored and explained by the greatest intellects of all time, most of us are still living in the dark, perplexed by the behavior of our friends, our family members, our idols, and—more often than not—ourselves. Disappointed by the condition of our own lives, we forge ahead each day hoping that our darker impulses and bad behaviors will miraculously disappear.
Hurt time and again by the flaws that we can’t seem to shake free of, we silently pray that we will find the courage to give up our procrastination, our overspending, our chocolate, our resentments, or our sharp tongues. Yet we continue to succumb to our lower impulses, sabotage our own desires, and neglect our future. In an attempt to hide our discontent, we put on a happy face, muster our best “everything is fine” look, and continue acting out in ways that undermine our self-esteem and defeat our best-laid plans.
In the course of raising our children, chasing success, and struggling to put enough away for vacation or retirement, answers to the very questions that will help us grow elude us. Our deeper yearning for self-understanding gets buried beneath the daily news, family issues, a health crisis, or a common cold. An indignant neighbor, a disgruntled ex, or a child who has lost their way will literally suck the hours out of our days and the money out of our bank accounts while twisting our minds into believing that we can’t and won’t ever have everything we want. Sometimes, we even forget that we ever wanted anything different from what we have. The repetitiveness of our toxic memory can lure us into years of accepting more of the same and wasting away in a mediocre existence that fails to meet even our own expectations.
Unfortunately, this method of survival strips us of the ability to live the life that we were meant to live. The emotional pain that surfaces as part of everyday life has us wish away our past and become resigned about our future. If we feel we have been deceived or conned or that we have acted out of character, we become victims of the past and hopeless about what’s to come. Cynical and skeptical, we fall prey to judgment, opting to point our finger at others rather than look inside ourselves for the answers to our woes. The robotic nature of our egocentric self rises up to help us overcome our feelings of insecurity and shame by protesting our innocence and proclaiming our differences. We think that if only we could just get that one person or thing to change, we would feel better. We believe that if we handle the one issue that we keep complaining about or get that one thing that we’ve been striving for, we will be happy. Rather than taking the time to pierce the veil between who we think we are and who we really want to be, we allow the illusional life of a self that exists in our minds to be in control.
The problem with this approach to life is that it prevents us from discovering our true self, and it endangers the areas of our lives that are most important to us. When we are busy protecting ourselves from the demons that lurk in the dark, we miss out on feeling joyful, fulfilled, and deeply connected with those we love. Intent on hiding the darker half of our human nature, we fail to reach our full potential and experience the depth and richness of our lives.
We were born whole, and yet most of us are living as partial human beings. We each have the capacity to be an important part of a grander whole. We have the capacity to leave this world a better place than we found it. We are meant to discover our authentic nature—the state of being in which we are inspired by ourselves, turned on, lit up, and excited about who we are. We are meant to overcome adversity and manifest the greatest version of our own individual soul, not a version of a self that is birthed out of a fantasy. Big, blown-out fantasies about our lives stem from the pain of our unrealized potential, but true dreams are a reality we are willing to work for, fight for, stay up late for—this is a future that is within our reach. And there is only one thing that can rob us of that future, and that is our shadow—our dark side, our secrets, our repressed feelings, and our hidden impulses.
The great Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung tells us that our shadow is the person we would rather not be. The shadow can be seen in the person in our family whom we judge the most, the public official whose behavior we condemn, the celebrity who causes us to shake our head in disgust. If we understand this correctly, we come to the startling and sometimes sobering realization that our shadow is everything that annoys, horrifies, or disgusts us about other people or about ourselves. With that wisdom in hand, we begin to see that our shadow is all that we try to hide from those we love and all that we don’t want other people to find out about us.
Our shadow is made up of the thoughts, emotions, and impulses that we find too painful, embarrassing, or distasteful to accept. So instead of dealing with them, we repress them—seal them away in some part of our psyche, so we won’t have to feel the burden and shame they carry with them. Poet and author Robert Bly describes the shadow as an invisible bag that each of us carries around on our back. As we’re growing up, we put in the bag every aspect of ourselves that is not acceptable to our families and friends. Bly believes we spend the first few decades of our life filling up our bag, and then the rest of our life trying to retrieve everything we’ve hidden away.
Our shadow, filled with rhetoric and a hypocritical set of rules that we can never adhere to, leads us to glorify some and demonize others. It began with the teacher who called us stupid, the bully who taunted us, or the first love who ever abandoned us. We have all hidden away and repressed pain-filled, shame-filled moments, and, over time, these emotions harden into our shadow. These are the unexpressed fears, the horrifying shame, the gnawing guilt. These are all the issues of the past that we have never faced. Our shadow might stem from one defining moment, and most do, or it can accumulate over years of denial. As the shadow takes shape, we begin to lose access to a fundamental part of our true nature. Our greatness, our compassion, and our authenticity get buried beneath the parts of ourselves that we’ve disconnected from. Then our shadow gains the upper hand. It can trick us into believing that we are too unworthy, incapable, undeserving, unlovable, or stupid to be the superstar of our own life.
It is our dark side, the repressed and disowned aspects of our personality, that cuts us off our true self. The fact is that whatever we have hidden away in shame or denied out of fear holds the key to unlock a self that we feel proud of, a self that inspires us, a self that is propelled into action by great vision and purpose rather than one that is created out of our limitations and the unhealed wounds of our past. This is why we must explore our shadow. This is why we must unveil and reclaim our whole self, our true nature. This is why we must look within to examine the underpinnings of our life. Hidden here is the blueprint, a template, a vision of our authentic self.
My own study of the shadow began as I made the transition from a clumsy preadolescent to a pretty young teen. Confused and alone, I set off on a journey to fit in. I worked hard to feel good about myself, despite the fact that I was riddled with insecurities about everything from being a friend and girlfriend to being a sister and daughter. I fought to understand why I felt so bad about who I was. The voices in my head that seemed to overtake me—even at the young age of twelve—filled me with endless loops of dark thoughts and negative feedback: “Why did you say that?” “Don’t be silly; he will never like you,” “You’re an idiot,” “Don’t stand too tall; people will be jealous of you,” and on and on and on. I found it odd and confusing listening to these voices inside my head, because one minute they were telling me that I was nothing but a spoiled, rotten brat and the next they were convincing me that I was better, prettier, smarter, and more talented than everyone else.
An internal war raged inside my psyche. First it was, “You’re great!” and then, “You’re nothing but a little liar.” “Everyone likes you because you are kind and warm,” and a few minutes later, “You are a cold-hearted bitch who doesn’t deserve to have any friends.” These voices left me utterly confused about who I was. The coexistence of the positive messages and the negative warnings created so much havoc within me that I was either crying hysterically or going out of my way to spread good feelings to anyone who was willing to receive my love. They called it hormones at the time. Erratic behavior was expected of a girl my age, but mine was a bit more melodramatic, which earned me the title of the neighborhood drama queen. At last I had finally won a pageant, except this crown came with many negative projections from my family and lots of laughs from family friends who were privy to my private shame. I began to feel more and more powerless over my internal chattering, until I came to the conclusion that there was definitely something wrong with me and there was nothing that I could do to fix it. I tried with all my might to silence these voices, to make them shut up, by trying to convince myself that I was really okay. My moments of peace and happiness became less and less frequent, unless I was fortunate enough to be caught up in listening to a great song or playing with my friends. But in the quietness of a shower or an early morning rush to school, it became harder and harder to break free of the stranglehold of my internal demons, whose voices sounded like a church choir singing out of tune. Instead of feeling compassionate, kind, and gentle toward myself, I felt hopeless, hostile, and angry.
As my internal discomfort rose, I began to search for what might silence my ugly little mind and make me feel better about myself. My search for feel-good moments began with certain foods: Sara Lee brownies and a liter of Coke seemed to do the trick. I learned how to silently slip into my parents’ room during dinner, go into their wallets, and steal the change I needed to get my daily fix. It started off quite easily, because the 7-Eleven was right across the street from our home on Forty-sixth Avenue in Hollywood, Florida.
As months went by, that fix was just not enough. The noisy, dark voices from inside somehow learned to slip through my sugar-induced feel-good moments. I had to find something else to manage these unwanted break-ins and put a smile back on my face—even if those smiles were met with the occasional internal voice threatening to “wipe that smile off your face.”
My inner hunger to feel good soon became greater than my need to be liked or to be perceived as a good or “decent young lady.” I was overcome with the impulse to change the way I felt. My sugar addiction quickly turned into something greater, as I picked up my first cigarette and a sampling of drugs. Pot, which was never my thing, turned into pills, placidillies, or downers, as they were called in those days. These escalated into psychedelics that led me to a plethora of other substances. As I succeeded in using drugs to create moments of complete peace—the mantra of almost every popular song back then—I ingrained into my young psyche a way of thinking and behaving that said to feel good I needed to look outside myself for something to make me feel better.
Over time I learned that the scary impulses that often came out in my behavior were not meant to be examined or expressed, but rather should be hidden and repressed, no matter what the cost. Slowly I slipped away from any semblance of the innocent child I once was and created an outer persona that exuded confidence and success. The more I played in the darkness of my own human demons, the stronger the impulse to hide my feelings of shame and unworthiness. I began to overcompensate for my weaknesses by becoming charming, friendly, street-smart, and savvy in the outer world. Although I struggled desperately in school, because I was too busy listening to the craziness in my mind rather than the teacher in the room, I wrapped myself up in a package that looked somewhat smart and pretended to be an opinionated know-it-all, hoping that I could fool everyone, including myself, into believing that I wasn’t the dumb little sister of Linda and Michael Ford.
I watched what the rich girls were wearing, and either I begged my parents to buy me the knock-offs or I met with a group of kids at the mall on Saturday mornings to steal what I didn’t have, so no one would find out that I was from a middle-class Jewish family. I didn’t think being a Jewish girl was cool and had heard more than my share of nasty Jewish-girl jokes, so I studied how the town shiksas (the pretty non-Jewish girls—usually blonde) were behaving and took on some of their characteristics and behaviors as part of my carefully designed mask to hide my inner flaws and imperfections.
It was a game I didn’t even know I was playing at the time. If I discovered something about myself that was not acceptable to my ego ideal, I would search the outer world to see who was acceptable, and with the sensibilities of a true artist I sculpted the new me, giving the illusion that I was the person I wanted to be rather than the person I feared I was. The problem was that no matter how much I over-compensated for the parts of myself that I feared or was ashamed of, in the silence of my own mind I knew the truth about who I was underneath my public mask. Although some could see through the glorious act that I had created, for the most part I had become a successful human being because I could fool those around me.
I tricked people into believing my smoke-and-mirrors act. I was able to enroll people in my happy life by smiling and spouting my many accomplishments of the day. Or I could invite them into one of my other favorite narratives—“Woe is me”—where I played the part of the damsel in distress. Either way, I became a master at hiding not just from others, but also, and most of all, from myself. I didn’t know who I was or what I really wanted. I didn’t know what truly made me happy or what left me feeling empty and devoid of emotions. My shadow was in control, even though, in all my arrogance, I believed I was the one in charge. Truly the dark side had won, until my persona came crumbling down.
Just like Humpty Dumpty, who fell to the ground, by the time I was twenty-seven I was stripped of my “I have it all together,” know-it-all persona and left wailing on the floor of a drug treatment center. It was there that I came face-to-face with the real Debbie Ford—with all of her flaws, weakness, and disowned qualities as well as her gifts, strengths, and deeply hidden inner needs. It was there that I knew I was more than I could ever even imagine and that I was nothing but one of six billion human beings struggling to make peace with their dark side and their human vulnerabilities.
It was during this very humbling meeting with myself that I committed to learning about who and what I was and why I felt compelled to do the things I did. It was at this pivotal time in my life that I began to understand the human shadow and the effect it had on my life and the lives of those around me—not as a theory in a textbook, but as a woman struggling to deal with her own unwanted feelings and deep insecurities.
Driven by deep feelings of loneliness that came from not understanding who I was or why I was here, I began my journey of becoming intimate with my dark side, my shadow self. This moment of reckoning became a catalyst for living a life beyond my wildest dreams. It has led me to study, grapple with, and dwell in not only my own human behavior, but the behavior of hundreds of thousands of people whom I have been privileged to guide into the territory of their unclaimed self and the glorious discovery of a life yet to be lived.
It is not my light that has led me to the wisdom I have shared in my last seven books, but my battle with my dark side (and the ultimate surrender in the war within) that has been my guide and continued inspiration. It is the very darkness that I spent the first part of my life running away from that is now my passion and my fuel to help lead others in this magical journey through the human psyche into living in the light of their greatest expression. It is a spiritual call, a higher voice that asks me to ask you: Are you ready to embark on this journey of reclaiming all of yourself, the light and the dark, your good self and your evil twin? Are you ready to return to the love of your true, total, authentic self rather than stay trapped in the judgmental angst of a disjointed human ego?
Becoming intimate with your shadow is one of the most fascinating and fruitful inquiries you can ever embark upon. It is a mysterious journey that will lead you to find your most authentic self—a place where you feel at home with who you are, where you recognize your weaknesses and your strengths, where you can bask in your gifts, admit to your imperfections, and admire your greatness. This self that is hidden beneath the mask of your human persona is the self that you are thrilled to be, a self that knows who it is and who honors the human journey. This self that you will discover as you embrace more and more of your hidden and disowned aspects is a self that offers you the confidence to speak your truth and pursue what’s truly important to you. It’s ironic that to find the courage to lead an authentic life, you will have to go into the dark rooms of your most inauthentic self. You have to confront the very parts of yourself that you fear most to find what you have been looking for, because the mechanism that drives you to conceal your darkness is the same mechanism that has you hide your light. What you’ve been hiding from can actually give you what you’ve been trying hard to achieve.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE SHADOW
From its invisible home deep within our psyche, the shadow wields enormous power over our life. It determines what we can and cannot do, what we will be irresistibly drawn toward, and what we will do almost anything to avoid. It explains the mystery of our attractions and our repulsions and determines what we will love and what we will judge and criticize. Our shadow influences what race or class of people we will approve of or relate to, whether we will be religious or an atheist, what party we will vote with, and which causes we will support and which we will ignore. It tells us how much money we are entitled to earn and determines whether we spend it wisely or piss it away. It is our shadow, our hidden self, that dictates how much success we’re entitled to create or how much failure we’re doomed to experience. The shadow determines the degree of care or neglect we give our body, the amount of extra weight we carry around our belly, and the level of pleasure we allow ourselves to feel, give, and receive. The shadow casts us into preassigned roles that we blindly follow in everything from work to love. Unbeknownst to us, the shadow is the author of a prewritten script that springs into action in times of fear, pain, or conflict or when we are just going about our business on autopilot. If left unexamined, our shadow will emerge from the darkness to sabotage our life when we least expect and want it.
Our shadow determines whether we will respect our children and trust that they will grow up to be independent, capable adults or whether we will try to mold them into everything that we are not. When backed into a corner, will we lash out in rage or will we withdraw into venomous silence? The shadow is an oracle that can predict all of our behaviors and reveal what makes us the people we are today. It decides whether we will be productive, inspiring members of society or invisible lost souls. When we expose our dark side, we understand how our personal history dictates the way we treat those around us—and how we treat ourselves. This is why it’s imperative that we unmask it and understand it. To do this, we must uncover what we’ve hidden and befriend the very impulses and characteristics that we abhor.
Our shadow determines whether we will live a happy, successful, and stress-free existence or whether we will struggle with our finances, our relationships, our career, our temper, our integrity, our self-image, or an addiction. The I Ching tells us, “It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized.” Only in the presence of an unwavering commitment to facing our demons does the doorway to self-discovery open.
We cannot journey into the dark side for a quick dip or an afternoon liaison. To understand our shadow completely takes a willingness to let go of what we think we know. It takes the force of a caged lion to break open the cellar doors that we ourselves chained closed many moons ago. The great news is that we were born with a burning desire to evolve and grow, to open up, to expand and be whole. And I am going to assert that we all have at least one place where we secretly desire to be more, to have more, to experience more. It is here that our shadow is waiting patiently for us to come retrieve our power from the dark recesses of our unconscious mind.
When we first come in contact with our dark side, our initial instinct is to turn away and our second is to bargain with it to leave us alone. Many of us have spent vast amounts of time and money in an effort to do just that. Ironically, it’s these hidden aspects and rejected feelings that need the most attention. When we locked away those parts of ourselves we didn’t like, we unknowingly sealed away our most valuable gifts. The reason for doing shadow work is to become whole, to end our suffering, to stop hiding from ourselves. Once we do this, we can stop hiding from the rest of the world.
We must embrace our shadow in order to know the freedom of living a transparent life, so that we feel free enough to invite others into our life—to let others know the truth about our finances, our pastimes, and our relationships—without being gripped by the fear that our public persona will come unraveled, exposing the person we’ve been trying hard not to be. When our precious energy isn’t tied up in hiding from or overcompensating for our self-destructive impulses, we are gifted with the clarity and the motivation we need to build an unshakable foundation for an inspiring future.
OUR DUALISTIC SELF
The shadow lurks, deceives, hides, and cons us into believing what we can and cannot do. It drives us to smoke, gamble, drink, and eat that which makes us feel bad the next day. Our shadow gives rise to the hypocritical behaviors that cause us to violate our personal boundaries and our own integrity. It is a force that can only be reckoned with by bringing it into the light of our awareness and examining what we are made of. We possess every human characteristic and emotion, whether active or dormant, whether conscious or unconscious. There is nothing we can conceive of that we are not. We are everything—that which we consider good and that which we consider bad. How could we know courage if we have never known fear? How could we know happiness if we never experienced sadness? How could we know light if we never knew dark?
All these pairs of opposites exist within us because we are dualistic beings made up of opposing forces. This means that every quality we can see in another exists within ourselves. We are the microcosm of the macrocosm, meaning within our DNA structure we have the imprint of every characteristic. We are capable of both the greatest acts of selflessness and the most destructive, self-punishing crimes. When viewed in the full light of our awareness, our shadow exposes the duality and the truth of both our human self and our divine self, as they both prove to be essential ingredients of a whole authentic human being.
We have to uncover, own, and embrace all of who we are—the good and bad, the light and the dark, the selfless and the selfish, and the honest and dishonest parts of our personality. It is our birthright to be whole, to have it all. But to do this, we must be willing to take an honest look at ourselves and step out beyond our judgmental mind. It is here that we will have a life-altering shift in perception, an opening of our heart.
The good news is that every aspect of ourselves comes bearing gifts. Every emotion and every trait we possess helps show us the way back to oneness. Our dark side exists to point out where we are still incomplete, to teach us love, compassion, and forgiveness—not just for others, but also for ourselves. And when the shadow is embraced, it will heal our heart and open us up to new opportunities, new behaviors, and a new future. When we bring our shadow, our hidden emotions and our life-draining beliefs, into the light of our conscious awareness, it will transform the way we see ourselves, others, and the world. Then we are free.
Dealing with our shadow is a complex but guaranteed journey back to love. Not just love of another, but love for each and every characteristic that lives within you and within me—a love that allows us to embrace the richness of our humanity and the holiness of our divinity. Having faced our own internal demons, we are filled with peace and compassion in the presence of other people’s dark side. We can forgive and let go of our demeaning judgments and our resentful heart. We can tap into the humility of Gandhi and the tolerance of Martin Luther King, Jr., and draw forth the strength and the courage to deal with the issues that haunt us. “There but for the grace of God go I” takes on a whole new meaning when we can view evil through the universal lens of our humanity. Exploring our dark side is the gateway to understanding why we do what we do, why we sometimes act in ways that are contrary to the desires of our conscious mind, and why we spend countless hours, days, months, or years judging others and holding on to grudges that only bring us headache, heartache, and dis-ease.
All of us have moments from the past when our emotional pain was too much for us to bear, so we repressed it within the darkness of our shadow. This is an unavoidable part of life. We can run, but we can’t hide. Our shadow is always linked back to one traumatic event or a combination of painful moments. When we truly understand our shadow and its gifts, there are no fingers to point or blame to cast on our parents, our teachers, or our past, because our shadow is a delivery system for an extraordinary future. Understanding how our shadow was formed unlocks the door to enormous personal power and profound wisdom.
THE BIRTH OF THE SHADOW
The birth of our shadow occurred when we were young, before our logical thinking mind was developed enough to filter the messages we received from parents, caregivers, and the world at large. Even with the best of caregivers, we inevitably were shamed for displaying certain qualities. We received the message that something about us was wrong or that in some way we were bad. As children, we might have been told that we were too loud. Instead of softening our voice, knowing there would again come a time to be loud, our fragile, unformed ego may have taken this comment to mean that our unabashed self-expression was wrong and should be hidden from others. Or maybe we were called selfish, because we took more than our fair share of cookies from the plate. Instead of understanding the cookies were to be shared, we made it mean that our selfishness was bad and should be destroyed. Or we got excited and yelled out an answer in elementary school, and suddenly all the kids were staring at us, laughing. Instead of laughing with them, we made it mean that we were stupid and we should never take a risk again. These negative messages got ingrained into our subconscious like a computer virus, altering our perception of ourselves and causing us to shut down those aspects of our personality that we or others deemed unacceptable.
Each time a behavior of ours was met with harsh criticism or senseless punishment, we unconsciously separated from our authentic self, our true self. And once these negative filters were firmly in place, we were separated from our joy, our passion, and our ever-loving heart. To ensure our emotional survival, we began the process of trying to cover up our true self in order to become who we believed would be an acceptable version of a self that would belong. With each rejection, we created more and more internal separation, building thicker and thicker invisible walls to protect our tender and sensitive heart. Day by day, experience after experience, we unknowingly constructed an invisible fortress that became our false self. This fortress of limited expression obscured our essence, hiding our vulnerabilities, our sensitivities, and often our ability to know and see the truth of who we are.
Before our malleable self hardened into a more rigid ego ideal, we had the freedom to express every aspect of our humanity. We had multiple emotional responses to any event in our life. Unburdened by shame or judgment, we had access to all parts of ourselves. This freedom meant that we could be anything we wanted to be at any given moment. There were no internal restraints to prevent us from stepping into the role of the sought-after object of attention or the jealous, wicked stepsister. Before we learned to judge one quality as better than another, we had unrestricted access to the full range of expression that resides within us. We could tap into elegance, grace, courage, creativity, honesty, integrity, assertiveness, sexiness, power, brilliance, greed, frugalness, laziness, arrogance, and incompetence as easily as we could change our clothes.
Life was a play when we granted all parts of ourselves the permission to exist. Each day was an opportunity for complete self-expression. And best of all, if we didn’t like the way our story was turning out, all we had to do is go into our room, wrap a cape around our shoulders, bring forth a different character, and—voilà—we could rewrite the script and create a great new ending or even an entirely different story. We could turn a drama into a comedy or a boring epic into a fabulous adventure. There were countless possibilities, and we were curious to explore them all.
Once the shadow was born, however, our self-expression became stifled and more serious. We learned from our parents, teachers, friends, and society that to win love and acceptance we had to adhere to certain prewritten scripts. As we went to school, were exposed to media, and interacted with a wider circle of people, we observed that certain behavioral traits were demonized, criticized, or denied love and acceptance while others were idolized and showered with attention. From this time on, we distanced ourselves from any part of ourselves that did not fit into society’s standards or our own ego ideals. We rejected more and more aspects of ourselves for all kinds of reasons—some because they seemed too bold, others because they were too silly or foolish.
We tried to figure out ways to get rid of these unwanted aspects of our persona until one day we got so distracted that we forgot they existed at all. With everyone giving us different messages about which of our many faces we should show the world, it became safer to listen to the voices of authority rather than trust in our authentic nature. Soon we found ourselves with only a limited range of emotions. Our self-expression was stifled; the endless possibilities that were once in front of us narrowed to just the few. We learned how to shut off life and actually became comfortable doing it. Eventually we identified with the internal character we believed to be most acceptable to those around us—and chances are we are still playing some version of that role to this day. We may make little changes here and there, but when we take an honest look, we may see that we’ve never really reinvented ourselves completely. Chances are we’re like most people—we fix ourselves up a bit, put a patch over the parts of our lives that aren’t working, and create a slightly new version of who we’ve been. By the time we move through our thirties, most of our choices are already predetermined in one or more areas of our life. Even the clothes we wear, the foods we eat, the types of entertainment we seek. The things we fantasize about are even repetitive and monotonous.
As we become more present and aware, we begin to see how robotic and trapped we really are inside the personas we’ve created. And we can choose to take proactive measures to deal with the shadows that are keeping us bound and try to break free. If we don’t deal with these shadows, make no mistake—they will deal with us. They will show up in our relationships and separate us from those we love, keep us tied to a job or lifestyle that we outgrew years ago, or lead us to an addiction or habits that undermine our success and happiness. They will blind us from seeing the warning signs of an abusive relationship or a bad business deal. They will keep us in a state of perpetual denial, and in that state we fail to help those we love when they most need us, when they are faced with their own demons.
Every one of us has constructed an ego-based identity in which we have assigned ourselves an acceptable role that eventually smothers our full self-expression. Rather than being who we really are, we become a characterization of the person we think we “should” be. Over time, our stifled self-perception becomes the perfect breeding ground for our shadows to take root. Whether this role was created to compensate for some inadequacy that we believed existed within ourselves or as a strategy to meet the expectations of our parents, caregivers, or friends—if we strive to fulfill our ego’s role to the exclusion of all other roles that we could potentially enjoy, we end up creating a life devoid of depth, adventure, meaning, and flavor. As we begin taking our assigned roles too seriously, they get sealed into our ego structure. Rarely do we deviate from the identity we’ve created, because we fall into the illusional state of denial and start to believe we are that identity. Looking around our own lives, most of us can recognize the limitations and repetitiveness of the roles we play.
Of course, it’s much easier to spot the roles that our friends and family members are playing than it is to spot our own. We can identify the martyr who will volunteer at the PTA and take on more than her fair share of the workload (and then complain about it later), or the neighborhood charmer who is pretending to be super-dad while secretly cheating on his wife. We know who likes to play the part of the gossip whore, who knows the dirt about everyone and everything (and looks for every opportunity to share it). We are familiar with the local drama queen, who is always being victimized in one way or another (whether it’s by getting in a fender bender or because her husband didn’t bring home enough money last month). It’s easy to spot the eternal optimist who is always the life of the party or the wallflower who always sits passively on the sidelines. What’s incredible is that even if the role we’ve assigned ourselves is boring, miserable, repetitive, or joyless, we cling to it for dear life, all the while rationalizing why we can’t be more than we already are or have more than we currently do. Unknowingly we are the ones who have typecast ourselves to play some version of the same character year after year and rarely—if ever—do we allow ourselves to venture into a role that we aren’t familiar with or a level of self-expression we don’t yet know.
If we operate inside the myth that we must squelch, kill off, lock up, and hide all of the qualities that make us interesting and unique, we forsake our right to experience passion and peace. The quest for the perfect life, the perfect role, and the perfect persona will always leave us unfulfilled—even if we attain it—for the simple reason that we are much more than the small handful of qualities that fit neatly into our ego ideal. In the process of trying to express only those aspects of ourselves that we believe will guarantee us the acceptance of others, we suppress some of our most valuable and interesting features and sentence ourselves to a life of reenacting the same drama with the same outworn script.
In this quest for safety and predictability, our range of self-expression shrinks and, with it, our choices. Who and what we will be tomorrow is usually some form of who we were yesterday, because we can only access the resources and behaviors of the self that has consented to be seen. In shutting out the darkness we fear lurks within us because we fear the destruction it might cause, we also shut off the competent, powerful, successful, sexy, funny, and brilliant parts of ourselves that are yearning for expression. This is the root cause of the boredom we often feel in some or many areas of our life.
As we sever our relationship with certain aspects of our personality, we deny ourselves access to stimulation, excitement, passion, and creativity. One of the most exciting aspects of being human is that there are literally hundreds of inspiring, useful, and powerful parts of ourselves lying dormant, aching to come out of the shadow and be integrated into the whole of the self. There is a whole array of wonderful feelings waiting for an opportunity to move through our body, bringing us new sensations and new levels of happiness, joy, and pleasure. We can’t really enjoy the enormity of who we are, because we have forgotten who we are beyond the borders of our own restricted internal barriers and the constraints we have imposed on our emotional world.
To be reinspired in any area of our life, we just have to look to see which of our shadow aspects or characters have been driven out of sight, find safe and appropriate ways for them to express themselves, and invite them once again onto the stage. We must challenge ourselves to accept all the faces of our humanity; otherwise the characters that got booted off stage and are now repressed will become the silent orchestrators of our secret life. Only in the presence of our entire, uncensored self can we fully understand and appreciate our totality and our uniqueness. We must find a good use for every character, or we will remain at war within ourselves.
BEFRIENDING OUR SHADOW
To begin to grasp how essential the shadow is, try to imagine a story without any conflict or a hero whose virtue is never put to the test by a worthy adversary. The hero of any story could not exist if it were not for the villains that challenge the hero along the way. If what the Eastern wisdom traditions say is indeed true, that “the sinner and the saint are merely exchanging notes,” then the conflict between our higher and lower natures creates the tension necessary to propel our evolution as human beings. The same concept that guides good literature applies equally in real life: heroes are only as strong as their villains.
In the drama of our evolution, the shadow is the character of greatest interest. The shadow is only dangerous when we keep it locked away in the dark cellar of repression. That’s when we run the risk that it will blow up in our face, derailing our diets, sabotaging our relationships, and killing our dreams. But if we allow our shadow characters to serve as integrated parts of our whole self—as colorful, powerful forces for the good—they will lead us to richer experiences, more genuine connections, more laughter, more authenticity, and honest self-expression. The battle with our dark side will never be won through hatred and repression; we can’t fight darkness with darkness. We have to find compassion and embrace the darkness inside us in order to understand it and, ultimately, to transcend it.
In his influential book The Art of War, Sun Tzu suggests that “to know your enemy, you must become your enemy.” In this case, the enemy is usually an impulse inside ourselves that we don’t understand or don’t know how to deal with. As long as we’re denying, repressing, or minimizing the importance of this and other hidden urges, as long as we believe that our own dark impulses will never catch up with us or be exposed, their wisdom will continue to elude us. By actively finding the gifts and receiving the contribution our shadow is trying to make, we redirect its once destructive power into a force that can benefit our life. More than that, we become a role model for others to find healthy outlets for the parts of themselves that don’t conform to society’s script or to their ego ideal.
We can be saints by providing the sinners that reside within us the freedom of self-expression—not by indulging bad behavior, but by seeing how this impulse or quality could serve us or society as a whole. The more acceptance and safe expression we find for our darker impulses, the less we will have to worry about being blindsided by them. I know you might be wondering how a part of you that you fear and loathe could actually serve you, but I promise you as you go through the process, you will see that there are gifts to be mined in every quality, feeling, and experience.
Reclaiming the parts of ourselves that we have relegated to the shadow is the most reliable path to actualizing all of our human potential. Once befriended, our shadow becomes a divine map that—when properly read and followed—reconnects us to the life we were meant to live, the people we were meant to be, and the contributions we were meant to give. Embracing our inner beast is the ticket to freedom. It is the conduit for tapping into all our greatness. It makes our inner life rich and meaningful and our outer life more enjoyable. It allows us to bask in wholeness rather than be constrained by the limitations of a self that was created by smoke and mirrors. Why smoke and mirrors? Because if we have created our public image or persona out of only those qualities we have deemed acceptable, we will have left out some of the most important, potent, and flavorful parts of ourselves.
OUR SHADOW MASK
Uncovering the parts of ourselves that we learned to repress is the key to understanding why we enjoy freedom in some areas of our life and behave like a robot in others. It is fear that convinces us to wear one of an infinite number of masks to hide behind and to construct a persona—a costume, so to speak—to conceal all of who we really are. We work tirelessly to create an outer façade, so that no one will find out about our dark thoughts, desires, impulses, and history. It is the shadow of our past that drove us to create the face—the mask—that we show the world. Will we be a people pleaser, or will we seek relief from the world by being isolated, distant, and alone? Will we work tirelessly to be perceived as an overachiever, or will we be content to lie in front of the TV or spend hours searching Internet gossip sites? Our persona was not created by accident; it was created in order to camouflage the parts of ourselves we deemed the most undesirable and to overcompensate for what we believe to be our deepest flaws.
This false self is charged with one mission only: to hide all of the unwanted and unacceptable parts of ourselves. If we were wounded from having been raised by emotionally unpredictable parents, we may work very hard to portray an image that we are calm and in control. If we had a learning disability growing up, we might create a warm, overly loving personality, so others won’t notice what we perceive to be our handicap. If we are ashamed of the fact that we were raised by a welfare mom, we might become a highly motivated worker who is always impeccably dressed and well-spoken. The public image we create is contrived by the parts of us that were hurt, confused, or full of pain. Although it may fool others and even us for a while, eventually we will be faced with the wounds that this mask was constructed to hide.
As a way to ensure that our flawed and imperfect self would not be discovered or exposed, we cleverly began to develop qualities opposite from those we were trying to hide. We worked hard to overcompensate for the parts of ourselves we believed were unacceptable, hoping to throw others off the scent or to rid ourselves of the bad feelings that were associated with them. If we were riddled with insecurities, we may have developed an arrogant, know-it-all persona to convince others that we have enormous confidence. If we felt like a failure, we may have surrounded ourselves with people who have achieved great things or exaggerated the scope of our own endeavors to appear more successful than we actually are. If we felt powerless over our life, we might have chosen a career or partner that would have allowed us to appear more powerful.
Our personas convince us that there is nothing that we don’t know about ourselves—that we are in fact the person we see in the mirror and believe ourselves to be. But the issue with this is that once we have bought into the story of “this is who I am,” we shut the door on any other possibility and deny ourselves access to all of who we can be. We lose our ability to choose, because we can’t do anything outside the confines of the character we’re playing. The predictable persona we’ve constructed is now in control. We become blind to the immense possibilities for our life. Only when we stop pretending to be something we are not—when we no longer feel the need to hide or overcompensate for either our weaknesses or our gifts—will we know the freedom of expressing our authentic self and have the ability to make choices that are based on the life we truly desire to live. When we break out of this trance and are no longer preoccupied with fitting in, with what other people think of us or what we think about ourselves, we can open up and take advantage of opportunities that might just pass us by when we are trapped inside our story line or behind the mask we wear.
We are driven to the point of exhaustion by our ego ideal to be different than we are. We fight to be bigger, stronger, tougher, and more secure. Without realizing it, we position ourselves to prove that we are more, better, or different than the rest of the crowd or try to stay invisible by fitting in and not being seen. We scramble to create the exact persona we believe will bring us the approval and recognition we desperately need or, alternatively, give us an excuse for not playing full out and having a life we love. And then we begin to act and behave in ways, consciously or unconsciously, that will leave others with the thoughts, feelings, and impressions we believe will bring us their love, respect, or pity—until that one day when the walls come crumbling down.
Amanda was deeply ashamed of the fact that she never graduated from college and mortified that most of the relatives on her mother’s side of the family were from the wrong side of the tracks and uneducated. She worked hard to create a persona to hide her embarrassment and make her look good to those she wanted to impress. She found a niche for herself in a specialized field where she was regarded as smart, helpful, and indispensable, but no matter how much she read or how much she contributed at work, Amanda ended most days feeling “less than.” In an attempt to resolve her pain, she decided to go back to school, hoping that earning a degree would transform her from an uneducated girl from a trailer park into a sophisticated, worldly woman.
One evening she walked into her psychology class suited up inside her professional persona. She felt proud, because she had already created a reputation for being the smart girl in the class. As the professor detailed their assignment for the week, Amanda began to cringe as her shame-filled shadow took over. She could feel her whole body tightening up as she learned that the project was to create a very detailed family tree showing the educational backgrounds and careers of all her family members. As she began working on the assignment, noting all the members of her family who were drug-addicted, financially unstable, and uneducated, she was confronted with the pain and embarrassment of her family history. Her overwhelming sense of not being good enough suddenly felt too big to be hidden by any persona. Later in the week, as she read her report and looked over her comprehensive family tree, instead of feeling proud of the work she had done, she was riddled with shame. After years of trying to outrun her shadow and cover it up, it took only one assignment for Amanda’s persona to crack open.
Like Amanda, some of us were aware, even at a young age, that we were trying to be someone we were not. Instead of ourselves, we wanted to be like someone we looked up to, so we unconsciously took on another person’s façade, not even realizing that it was not an authentic self we were seeing. But either way, in our search for freedom, safety, and authenticity, it is imperative to recognize that we are wearing some version of a mask that we put on twenty, thirty, or even forty years ago. And now our authentic self, which is screaming to get our attention, is deeply hidden behind a mask, and our false self is masquerading as our true nature.
Imagine this. When you were a small child, you received a little gift—a magic penny, perhaps—from your grandmother. Wanting to keep it safe, you hid it somewhere so no one would find it. Would you be able to remember all these decades later where you had hidden it? Would you remember that you had hidden it at all? The same is true for your unscathed authentic self. You’ve kept it hidden for such a long time, you have forgotten that this part of you ever existed in the first place.
The nature of the façade we chose varies based on our background, our parents, our surroundings, and what was considered good and bad behavior, yet the masks that are commonly seen in our society today are no different from those of a hundred years ago. Today we see updated versions of the seductress, the charmer, the people pleaser, the eternal optimist, the “cool” one, the martyr, the good girl, the nice guy, the tough guy, the abuser, the bully, the quiet snake, the intellect, the savior, the depressive, the jokester, the loner, the victim, and the overachiever. They are repetitive, archetypal expressions appearing in the modern age. The problem with living inside these masks, these personas, is that eventually we lose sight of who we really are and what is possible for our life. In canceling out our darkness, we unconsciously extinguish our authentic power, creativity, and dreams.
EXPOSING OUR SECRET LIFE
Our shadow thrives when we have secrets. The moment we close the door on one or more aspects of ourselves, we set into motion a secret life. There’s an adage in twelve-step programs: “Your secrets keep you sick.” And in my years of working with people, I can confirm that this is, in fact, true. It is nothing to be ashamed of, because most of us have a public life and a secret life. We have a public persona we show the world and a secret life we keep hidden. We construct a secret life in order to hide the parts of ourselves that we’re most ashamed to face. It could be an area of our life that holds some shame or where we are behaving in a way we fear will be unacceptable to those we love. Maybe it’s an area of our life that’s out of control, a habit or addiction we are struggling with, or a fantasy that we’re afraid to speak out loud. When our behaviors are incongruent with the masks we wear, we will work hard to hide them. We might be really sweet and caring to everyone we come in contact with during the day and then go home at night and yell at our kids. Maybe we position ourselves as a brilliant intellectual while we’re with our colleagues, only to go home and spend hours watching mindless TV and playing video games. Perhaps we’re in a committed relationship but are secretly cheating, or we act like a self-made success when the fact is we are secretly living off our parents.
Our unresolved shame causes us to act out; it eventually gets expressed as an outer behavior that blows the cover off the parts of our life we’ve been trying to conceal. We can work day and night trying to control our hidden impulses from ever coming to the surface, but we are only a moment away from acting in ways that undermine our self-respect. If we’ve been hiding a part of our life in which we act without integrity, it will eventually be exposed as we write bad checks or cheat on our tax returns. If we routinely cover over feelings of loneliness, they may surface in the quiet of the night as an insatiable hunger for sugar, alcohol, or sedatives to fill the emptiness we feel. If the rage we were subjected to decades ago is not addressed and released, it may seek expression by turning us in to a nagging parent or a bickering spouse. Maybe our distaste for our cheating parent causes us to keep attracting partners who can’t be trusted and are emotionally abusive. It could be that our normal sexual curiosity was shut down at a young age, giving rise to an insatiable fascination with illegal pornography or dangerous sex. However, to free ourselves from the unmanageable compulsions that cause us to live a secret life, we must find healthy ways to express our repressed aspects so that we can be safe from behaviors that can sabotage our life.
Matthew was the chief of staff at a prestigious medical university. He was admired by his colleagues and had a loving wife and three healthy children. Although to the outer world he looked like a pillar of society, he found himself bored with his intellect and all the accolades that came with success. One night Matthew returned home after making rounds and started watching late-night TV. He became fascinated by a young actress who was starring in a movie and decided to go online and check her out. One thing led to another and, while visiting a porn site, he clicked on an ad for a local strip club. The images he saw filled him with excitement. His mind began to wander, and he fantasized about stopping by the club on his next day off. Feeling a bit of excitement and fear, he rationalized his decision, reasoning that since the club was located on the other side of town, he could just put on a baseball cap and avoid being recognized by anyone he knew.
Soon visits to this strip club became Matthew’s regular pattern. He found himself growing overly attracted to one of the women and eventually made a date to get together. The stories he told his wife became more and more complicated, with deeper and deeper layers of deception. He began looking for medical conferences to attend in obscure parts of the country, so he could enjoy a weekend of debauchery without worrying about being caught. As sex with his wife became less frequent and less exciting, he became more adventurous and started taking bigger risks. He even got into the habit of buying sexy lingerie and outfits he could take with him on his outings to ensure that his women could turn him on.
One weekend, Matthew’s wife, Maria, took his car to drop their kids off at a tennis lesson, and when she opened the trunk to take out their equipment, she noticed a medical bag she had never seen before. After getting her kids to their lesson, she returned to the parking lot and—on an instinct—opened the bag. She was shocked to find sheer lingerie, condoms, and an assortment of other sexual paraphernalia stuffed in this small bag. Wanting to understand the extent of her husband’s infidelity, she began looking through the credit-card bills, the Internet history on their computers, and his cell-phone bills. After studying his behavior for a number of weeks, she discovered just how big a secret life Matthew had been leading, which revolved around strip clubs, escorts, and countless one-night stands.
After several weeks of silent suffering, Maria decided to confront Matthew with all the evidence she had uncovered. With nothing to say and his hidden behaviors now out in the open, Matthew was faced with the task of unveiling the unfulfilled urges that had led him to create such a gap between his public persona and his private life. As the shock of the consequences of his secret life came into clear view, he was disgusted that his shadow had lured him into behaviors he never dreamed he would have been capable of. Like most sex addicts, Matthew needed help and soon discovered that it wasn’t just sex he was seeking, but attention, admiration, and excitement. If he had been able to see and acknowledge these secret desires, he could have sought the support he needed before his behavior escalated out of control. Instead, his shadow caused him to lose his marriage and his dignity.
I have heard countless people in my seminars over the years share similar stories. Without thinking, they became somebody they never wanted to be. The bottom line is if we don’t deal with our shadow aspects, our impulses and our repressed feelings, they will deal with us. As my friend Dr. Charles Richards tells us in The Shadow Effect movie, “Ignoring our repressed shadow is like locking somebody in the basement until they have to do something dramatic to get our attention.” If we refuse to uncover them willingly, we put ourselves at risk of being in the line of fire of what I call the Shadow Effect. With no relief in sight for these repressed parts of ourselves, they take on a life of their own. By releasing the guilt and shame we carry when a part of our life is housed in the dark, we can instead open the cellar doors and exchange our secret life for an authentic life.
When we deny ourselves a safe outlet to express our dark side—or refuse to even acknowledge its existence—it builds up and becomes a powerful force capable of destroying our life as well as the lives of those around us. The more we try to suppress the aspects of our personality that we deem unacceptable, the more they find mischievous ways of expressing themselves. The Shadow Effect occurs when our own repressed darkness makes its presence known by driving us to act out in unconscious and unexpected ways. It occurs when something in the outer world forces our inner darkness out of hiding, and we suddenly come face-to-face with the character traits, behaviors, and feelings that we’ve kept hidden in our secret life. The Shadow Effect is not something we plan. In fact, it’s something that most of us have invested a lot of time and energy in trying to avoid. But when we understand this phenomenon, we can unravel the mystery of our own self-sabotage.
THE SHADOW EFFECT
Imagine that every quality, every emotion, every dark thought that you try to ignore, hide, or disown is like a beach ball you are holding underwater. You take your selfish self, you take your angry self, your too-good self, your not-good-enough self, your foolish self, your conceited self, all the selves. And suddenly you’re overwhelmed with all these beach balls you’re trying to manage. When you’re young, you have lots of energy, so you can manage a lot of beach balls—you can suppress a lot of your unwanted qualities. But then when you’re tired, heartbroken, or sick; when you no longer believe in the possibility of an exciting future; when your defenses are down; when your attention is on your family or some big promotion you’re going to win; when you’ve had one too many drinks—all of a sudden, boom! You or someone around you does something without thinking and one or more of your submerged beach balls pops up and hits you in the face. This is the Shadow Effect.
What is road rage? Is it anything more than a beach ball of suppressed anger forcing its way to the surface? We see it in the media all the time. A filmmaker making deep Christian films all of a sudden gets drunk and shouts anti-Semitic comments in a drunken rage. A radio star who makes his living being a great communicator in one second makes a racial slur that destroys his career and reputation. An ambitious young teacher throws away her future by having sex with a fourteen-year-old student. A movie star, with the means to afford almost anything, gets caught shoplifting. All of the suppressed impulses and hidden urges we have tried to manage are like ticking time bombs waiting to go off.
And what we can expect is that the Shadow Effect will arise at the least opportune time—when we’re on the verge of financial success or in the midst of romancing a desirable new partner; when we’re days away from retirement or about to close a deal that could change our life forever. These are the times when we consciously or unconsciously sabotage our own success; when one choice, made in the haze of unconsciousness, undermines the progress we’ve worked years to make. All self-sabotage is an externalization of the internal shame hidden in the dark recesses of our unconscious minds. Because we have not had the wisdom, courage, or wherewithal to make peace with what we have suppressed out of guilt, fear, or shame, it gets forced out into the open so that we can reclaim and embrace our lost self and return to the transparent state of our whole self.
It’s not until our self-destructive behaviors are no longer a secret and we see through objective eyes the damage we’re doing to ourselves and those around us that we find the motivation to change. It’s not until our children come home from school to find the electricity cut off that we’re willing to face our gambling addiction. It takes a DUI arrest to wake us up to the fact that our drinking has spiraled out of control. When we’re out to dinner with friends and the waiter announces that our credit card has been declined, we might finally have to face the fact that our spending is out of control. When we get caught dipping into the company expense account, we finally realize that we must deal with our entitlement issues. We can fool ourselves that we are doing all right at work or on our diet—until we get our yearly review or step on the scale. The Shadow Effect arises as a potent outer reflection that our inner world is dangerously out of balance. But as painful as these moments of truth can be, they can serve to begin a process of involuntary evolution. When we are confronted with our shadow and it is seen by those whose opinions matter to us, we snap out of denial and hopefully recognize that we must do something about it.
If we were able to see ourselves accurately, it would be an easier task. But we can’t, and because of this, it is so easy to fall into the trance of denial, otherwise known as “Don’t Even Notice I Am Lying.” The lie begins with ourselves. If we were intimate with our darker impulses—if we knew that selfishness, hatred, greed, and intolerance have an important message to deliver—we would heed their presence in our life, like a trusted friend knocking at the door. But when we alienate our shadow, when out of fear we refuse to acknowledge or receive the messages it is trying to send, we can be certain that we will do something or become involved in something that brings our hidden darkness to the surface. At these times, the proverbial knock on the door feels more like a knock in the head; yet the moments we meet our own disowned darkness are not only some of the most painful, but also the most fertile times of our life.
If we wish to avoid the wrath of the Shadow Effect, we must do a reality check with ourselves every day to see if we are acting in ways that could shame, embarrass, or destroy our family, career, health, or self-esteem. We must wake up and consider whether we are hiding and denying a secret life; we must become aware of habits, behaviors, or ways of being we are keeping from others. If we fear what would happen if our families, coworkers, or friends looked through our e-mails, checked the history of our most recently viewed sites on our computers, or read the judgmental, mean thoughts in our minds, we must recognize these as signs—as flashing red lights. Denial is the culprit that keeps our secret life intact and out of sight—and keeps us focused on anything but our own indiscretions.
To embrace our shadow and derail the possibility of the Shadow Effect taking us down, we must open up to a greater truth about our humanness and what lurks beneath the surface of the person we believe ourselves to be. When we engage our minds in investigating the hypocrisy of our human behavior, we open up to a deeper, more meaningful truth—that all parts of ourselves deserve to be seen, heard, and embraced, that every aspect holds a greater gift than we can see and every feeling deserves healthy expression. When they are taken out of the darkness and exposed to the light, they will support us in creating healthy relationships, regaining good mental health, and achieving our potential.
The Shadow Effect shatters our perfectly constructed persona so that we can reinvent ourselves as somebody other than who we’ve been. Self-sabotage is nothing more than an unwillingness on the part of our higher self to continue playing the role we have assigned to ourselves. Ideally, we embrace our disowned aspects willingly; when we insist on clinging to our personas, the fallout can be painful and messy. There are examples of this everywhere. Britney Spears, the all-American Mouseketeer who wore the good-girl mask, spirals into self-destruction and becomes a notorious bad girl. Tiger Woods, the all-star golfer with the nice-guy overachiever mask, acts out and in one day goes from a superhero to a self-sabotaging cheater. When the mask of our human persona gets too tight, when there is no more room to grow or breathe, it blows itself up, so that it can re-create itself anew. There are literally millions of examples throughout time that clearly demonstrate the phenomenon of the Shadow Effect. Yet when these little or massive indiscretions of others are brought to light, we are left shaking our heads, perplexed at their behavior. We call it a fall from grace, but is it really a fall from grace? Is grace no more than a well-constructed act we show the world, while our secret life is hidden from those we love?
UNCOVERING OUR SHADOW
When we find ourselves obsessed with aspects of other people’s shadows, it is only because they have touched one of our own. We are used to thinking that we cannot see ourselves unless we are looking in a mirror—but this is true only on one level. The fact is we can see ourselves in living color by taking note of what we observe in other people. We are designed to project onto others the qualities we can’t see in ourselves. It’s not a bad thing. We all do it all the time. Projection is an involuntary defense mechanism of the ego; instead of acknowledging the qualities in us that we dislike, we project them onto someone else. We project them onto our mothers, our kids, our friends, or, even better, some famous public figure we have never even met. Whatever we judge or condemn in another is ultimately a disowned or rejected part of ourselves. When we are in the midst of projection, it appears as though we are seeing the other person, but in reality we are seeing a hidden aspect of ourselves. Those we project on hold pieces of our unclaimed darkness as well as pieces of our unclaimed light. Simultaneously afraid of our own unworthiness as well as our own greatness, we unconsciously transfer these qualities onto another rather than own them ourselves.
You have already experienced the power of projection thousands of times in your life. You walk into a room and feel suddenly enamored with someone. You begin a conversation, and then she starts telling you about her likes or dislikes that don’t mesh with your own. Suddenly that person looks different to you—the trance of projection has been broken and you see her in a completely different light. If a moment later she happens to mention that she can get you courtside tickets to a game you’ve been dying to see or that she knows someone who can help you get your latest project off the ground, you may again see her in a favorable light and she may seem more interesting. Finally, the conversation is back on track, but in the very next breath she starts dropping names, and when she suddenly reminds you of your bragging father-in-law, you feel repulsed. In reality, nothing about this person has changed except your perception of her. This is the power of projection. If you understand this phenomenon, you will understand why you can love someone one minute and in the very next moment find that person unbearably annoying.
Our unclaimed darkness continually shows itself on the screen of those around us. We might see our submissiveness in our mother, our greed in our father, our laziness in our husband, or our righteous ness in politicians. Projection sounds like this: “She’s so self-centered.” “He is so full of himself.” “What an idiot. He is such a loser.” Projection explains why five siblings can grow up in the same home, and each of them will recount a different story about their parents, assign them a different set of strengths and weaknesses, and remember them as possessing different characteristics.
It’s often hard to recognize our own bad behavior, because we are continually projecting it on others. The more convinced we are of other people’s wrongdoings, the more likely it is that we ourselves are guilty of the same indiscretions. A.J., who tends bar at a popular restaurant, was headed home after a long day’s work and looking forward to spending a quiet evening with his wife and family. A few short minutes into his drive, he suddenly heard the noise behind him that we all dread—the squeal of a siren. As he pulled over, he searched his memory to see what he could have done, but nothing came to mind. He rolled down his window, and the officer asked to see his license.
After he handed over his ID, the officer leaned in and asked him, “Young man, have you been drinking?”
A.J. replied, “No, sir, I was at work.”
“Young man, I believe you have been drinking, and it would serve your best interest to tell the truth. Maybe you’ve been somewhere besides work?” the officer asked sarcastically.
A.J., feeling agitated and slightly defensive, said, “No, sir, I haven’t been drinking. Actually, I was at the sports bar serving you drinks all afternoon.”
The officer, obviously stunned, handed A.J. his license back, got into his patrol car, and drove away. This is a perfect example of projection. When the officer, a little buzzed and maybe feeling a bit guilty about having a few drinks while on duty, went back to work after his “break,” he unconsciously began looking for himself.
The parts of ourselves we try to avoid may be hidden from our view, but they exist as part of our energy field regardless. The behaviors and feelings we are not at peace with will always find a screen to project themselves on, and we can be sure this is happening when we feel an emotional charge in the presence of someone else. Imagine having a hundred different electrical outlets on your chest. Each outlet represents a different quality. The qualities you acknowledge and embrace have cover plates over them. They are safe—no electricity runs through them. But the qualities you’re not okay with, the ones you have not yet owned, do have a charge. So when others come along and reflect back to you an image of a self you don’t want to be, you become reactive.
Here’s an example. I once dated a man I considered to be a bit chubby and out of shape. After a few months of dating, I noticed that, no matter where we went, he would point out the guy who was overweight, who had a pot belly, or whose pants hung too low. One day, as we were walking through the airport on our way out of town for a romantic getaway, he pointed his finger at another man he didn’t even know and would never see again and said, “What a slob. Why do you think that guy doesn’t take care of himself?”
I finally couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer, and I mustered up the courage to tell him that he was just projecting his own weight concerns on various poor overweight men he didn’t even know. I suggested that instead of pointing his finger at them, he should just look down. I thought he was going to trip getting off the escalator as he spotted, as if for the first time, his own bulging belly. His face dropped as he realized that he too was carrying an extra twenty-five pounds of unwanted weight. Embarrassed, he sheepishly asked me if he really looked like the other men. Scared that I would ruin my fun weekend away, I lied and told him that maybe he wasn’t as bad as the others, but that there were many other places his eye could be going when we were out in public, so it must mean that, at some level, he really wanted to take on his own body and alter the way he appeared in the world or he wouldn’t be so plugged in.
There were literally hundreds of other traits he could have focused on—somebody’s hair, smile, beautiful eyes, or big nose. But he didn’t. He only focused on other men’s bellies. Our projections always shock us. When we are judging another, we never really think we are talking about ourselves. But once we understand our finger-pointing, we can start to untangle ourselves from our perceptions and fierce judgments of others. We must remember the old saying, “You spot it, you got it.”
If we deny or are uncomfortable with our anger, our eye will automatically search and find all the angry people. If we are secretly lying or judging ourselves for lying in the past, we will be righteously upset about the dishonesty of others. In my years of leading workshops, I’ve had some incredibly funny moments when people got mad at me for suggesting this very concept of projection and telling them that they too possessed the qualities they dislike in others. One of my favorites was when a beautiful Hispanic woman in her late twenties came up to me on one of the breaks insisting that she wasn’t anything like her father, who didn’t approve of the men she went out with. When I asked her if she knew why, she said it was because he is a racist. She said she only went out with Asian men, and he didn’t approve of them. When I jokingly asked her what kind of Hispanic woman only goes out with Asian men, the anger drained out of her face, and she meekly suggested, “Someone who’s a racist?” She realized in that moment that she was a bit of a racist, just like her father, because she would never go out with men of her own background.
Another woman protested that she wasn’t anything like her judgmental father, who always pointed out what was wrong with her. She told me he was angry, hypocritical, nasty, critical, and so on. When I asked her what she just did to her father in the course of this conversation, she realized she was demonstrating the same judgmental behavior that she saw in him. Another time, a man stood up to tell me how much he hated closed-minded people and how he seemed to be surrounded by them at work and in his own neighborhood. Then one day, his beloved son came home from college and announced that he was gay. This man was filled with disgust. When his wife tried to settle him down, he realized that he was the closed-minded person he always despised, which led him to “The Shadow Process” workshop. Owning our projections is a courageous and yet humbling experience we all must go through to find peace. It forces us to acknowledge that we are capable of and often do the very things we dislike in others.
There are many famous examples of projection. The former governor of New York Eliot Spitzer spent his career trying to clean up prostitution, because he deemed it so unacceptable, and then got caught in a call-girl scandal. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who continually pointed his finger in outrage and led the charge to impeach President Bill Clinton for sexual indiscretions, was later found having an affair outside his marriage. The famous preacher Reverend Ted Haggard, who railed about the immorality of homosexuality, was later caught having a drug-fueled homosexual relationship. And the radio phenomenon Rush Limbaugh, who on his radio show openly shamed and derided drug addicts, later admitted his own addiction to prescription medicine. I could literally give thousands of examples of people publicly demonizing and putting down behavior they are currently displaying. Do you think these people really set out to destroy their lives and careers, to publicly humiliate themselves and shame their families? Was this really their intention? Or were they in fact caught by surprise and deeply disappointed in their own behavior? Is “The Devil made me do it” really the shadow in disguise?
As Shakespeare so brilliantly said, “The lady doth protest too much.” Whatever quality, behavior, or feeling we find ourselves righteously denying, we can be certain that is the one we are harboring deep within our own psyche. We don’t have to look far to discover that we are usually doing the exact thing we are judging others for. It may show up in a completely different way, yet the driving force behind our behavior is, in fact, the same. It can sometimes be challenging to identify the driving force in ourselves, because we may not be displaying the exact behavior as the person we are projecting onto, but it is there within us. When we have a trait that doesn’t have a cover plate over it (to use the earlier image of multiple electrical outlets), we draw people and incidents into our life to help us acknowledge, heal, and embrace that denied aspect.
If we embrace the qualities that disturb us in others, we will no longer be upset by them. We might notice them, but they won’t affect us. Those outlets will have cover plates over them, so they will no longer carry a charge. It is only when we are lying to ourselves or hating some aspect of ourselves that we become emotionally charged from someone else’s behavior. Revered philosopher and psychologist Ken Wilber makes a great distinction. He says if a person or thing in the environment informs us, if we receive what is happening as information or a point of interest, we probably aren’t projecting. If it affects us, if we’re pointing our finger in judgment, if we’re plugged in, chances are we are a victim of our own projections.
Until we take back all the parts of ourselves we have projected away, whatever we refuse to accept will keep showing up in our life, either in our own behavior or in the behavior of someone close to us. When we don’t deal with our shadow, it will negatively affect our relationships. It will rob us of being present to the gifts of those around us, because we will have put up a defensive wall of judgment that blinds us from truly seeing who others are. It will distract us from the relationship as a whole and, instead, force our eye and our attention to what we believe is wrong about others.
Pilar’s behavior is a perfect example of the phenomenon of projection. A woman in her early forties who prides herself on being a good daughter, Pilar is constantly upset at her father for being a hoarder. As she drives over to his house each Sunday to visit him, she begins to feel anxious and annoyed. By the time she walks into his living room to settle in for their afternoon father-daughter time, instead of asking him how he is doing or updating him on her own life, she starts barking at him about all the piles of newspapers on the floor and the hundreds of little items of memorabilia scattered around his small living space. Frustrated by her father’s inability to throw things out and listen to her direction to dump everything into the trash, Pilar engages in a belittling conversation in which she points out his inability to let go of useless items. Sitting in such an atmosphere of judgment, they both feel sad, and their visits end up being monotonous and life-draining for both of them. Pilar always drives away feeling bad about herself, and her father secretly wishes she would just stop coming, although he’s too kind and lonely to say so.
One day while working in the home office she shares with her husband, Emilio, Pilar realized something about herself. Emilio asked her if she could empty one of the drawers she was using, so he could have more room for his papers. Annoyed, she quickly responded that she needed six of the eight drawers for all of her important papers and that he could rent a storage unit if he needed more room. Agitated at his wife’s inability to share, Emilio began to yank open one after another of her cabinet drawers, revealing hundreds of files stuffed with newspaper and magazine clippings. She heard Emilio ranting, even though she was no longer listening to the content of what he was saying. She was stunned. Here it was right in front of her—her father’s bad habit. She could see that to Emilio all these clippings were useless junk. She had saved some of these clippings for a long time, even coupons from when she was in college over twenty years earlier!
Suddenly, when she brought her mind back into the room where her husband was still arguing that she didn’t need half of what was in the drawers, she began laughing out loud. In just a few moments, she went from feeling nauseous when her own shadow was exposed to being set free when she broke the trance of her projection. She saw how she displayed the same quality as her father, even if hers was hidden in closed cabinet drawers. She embraced the fact that she was a hoarder and asked her husband to please help her clean out and throw away some of her clippings, because she knew it would be difficult to do on her own. She loved all her pieces of paper just as her father loved his.
Days later when Emilio got not only one drawer but three, Pilar decided to share her story with her father and ask that he forgive her for being so judgmental. Both father and daughter had a good laugh together and hugged, which is something they did as a routine greeting, but never as an authentic expression of love and respect. Her own admission of guilt opened up a new loving and respectful relationship between Pilar and her father that allowed him little by little to let go of his past. He even allowed her to help him fill a few garbage bags each Sunday.
Here’s what’s so exciting. When you understand projection, you will never see the world the same way again. In this holographic world, everyone and everything is a mirror, and you are always seeing yourself and talking to yourself. If you choose, you can now look at what emotionally affects you as an alarm, a clue to uncover your shadow, a catalyst for growth that gives you an opportunity to reclaim a hidden aspect of yourself. Every shadow aspect you embrace will allow you to experience more love, more compassion, more peace, and a greater sense of freedom.
And there is even more great news about owning our projections. When we do, the people in our life experience increased freedom and have an opportunity to shift their behavior. When we disown qualities, behaviors, and feelings and attribute them to other people, those traits appear to actually exist in other people and not ourselves. But time and time again I’ve seen that when people wake up from the trance of projection, the people they have been projecting onto change—they become free to show up differently. When we can see them as they are, release them from our own judgments and clouded perceptions, a new reality will emerge. Ultimately, we must come to a place where we can uncover, own, and embrace every quality that exists, so that we no longer have to project our disowned aspects on others, so we can be free to see people through the wide lens of compassion rather than the illusional lens of projection. It is then that we will be free to love not only ourselves, but all those we see in the world. It is then that we will experience true freedom.
UNMASKING OUR SHADOW
Another effective way of finding unclaimed parts of ourselves is to explore the repetitive behavior patterns we have struggled with for years. These patterns of behavior, which stem from unclaimed and rejected parts of ourselves, become our nemesis. Often we trick ourselves into believing that our less than acceptable behavior is the problem rather than searching for the root cause of the behavior. We may spend years fighting with the same ten pounds, or cigarettes, womanizing, or overspending, only to find ourselves right back where we started or in an even worse position. But if we understand that our patterns of behavior were formed from repressed feelings or a disowned or shamed aspect of our shadow, we can go to the source of our behavior and dismantle the pattern.
All of our habitual behavior stems from an experience or experiences in the past that led us to create particular interpretations about ourselves. From those interpretations certain thoughts were born, and these thoughts made us feel a particular way about ourselves, often a negative one. Our desire to distance ourselves from these unwanted feelings drives us to find ways to make ourselves feel better; thus the birth of our self-sabotaging behaviors.
Annette was six or seven the first time her mom told her she was going out and leaving her alone for the evening. As the sky darkened, she wandered around the empty apartment and decided that her mom didn’t love her. She was plagued by the thought that something bad would happen to her mom and she would be left alone forever. This caused her to feel alone, afraid, panicky, and, above all, different from the other kids whose moms stayed home and cooked dinner. To douse these feelings, Annette found herself taking multiple trips to the kitchen, where her mom had left a big pink box of donuts. She learned that, at least for a short time, the treats made her painful feelings not so bad.
If we explore our behavior patterns—especially those we don’t wish to repeat—we always uncover a shadow aspect of ourselves that we are trying to hide or cover up. The repetitive patterns we find ourselves trapped in always echo back to us feelings that accompanied the original wound. Then, in a great cover-up, we create patterns of behavior that ultimately reinforce the wound rather than giving us the relief that we seek.
Helena was constantly overwhelmed and anxious, because she found herself procrastinating on work projects, tasks at home, and things like getting the oil changed in her car or making an appointment to go to the dentist. Every time she came face-to-face with the consequences of her procrastination, she made a strong promise to herself that she would change. Helena was clear that this pattern of behavior was emotionally depleting and debilitating. Filled with regret, Helena called me proclaiming that she just couldn’t take it one more day. After listening to her rant, I asked her if she was ready to find the root cause of this pattern, the portion of the shadow that was robbing her of a peaceful and joyous life. With trepidation and a bit of resignation, she agreed.
So I asked my first question: What kind of person would procrastinate? Suddenly she saw an image of her stepfather lying on the couch with the television blasting; he was not getting his work done around the house, and her mother was enraged. As she located the root of the wound, she felt the embarrassment and shame of realizing that she carried that same undesirable quality her stepfather had. When I asked her what interpretation she made about her stepfather, she told me that she deemed him a lazy bum, even though he was very successful in his career. Helena, who was at that time just shy of her thirteenth birthday, decided that from that day forward she would never be lazy like her stepdad. In fact, those around her would say that just the opposite was true—that she was a doer, highly effective, productive, driven, and energetic. But Helena always knew what was left undone, waiting for her to deal with in her own life. She recalled the names she heard being shouted at her stepdad—“You’re a good-for-nothing lazy bum!”—and easily identified the internal dialogue that plagued her on an ongoing basis; the demoralizing truth was that she was repeating these same words to herself more and more each year.
But now as an adult, she saw that even though she was extremely busy doing tons of things each day, she wasn’t able to do what was truly important to the success of her own life. Even though she sat appalled for a few minutes at the thought that she might be lazy just like her stepdad, she could see that this shadow quality, which she had so masterfully hidden, had taken root in her own life and now had to be weeded out if she was to be free from this self-defeating pattern. It didn’t take her long to accept the fact that, indeed, she was lazy when it came to herself. With the real source of her behavior now in front of her, she could begin the process of making peace with the lazy part of herself, so that it would not have to undermine her choices each day and rob her of her self-esteem and her dreams.
Every time we find a behavior that threatens our peace of mind, our happiness, or our safety, we are implored to heed the call of our internal world and explore the root cause of our behavior. When we do, we will unveil an aspect of our shadow. It doesn’t have to take a year or a lifetime. It can take five minutes of radical honesty to unravel a pattern from our past. If we find an impulse in ourselves that we unknowingly hid, we have the right and the ability to bring it into the light of our awareness, forgive ourselves and others for the pain we experienced, and break free from the self-defeating behavior.
Maybe self-neglect is a pattern of behavior that you must confront. You show up for others, but have no idea how to be there for yourself. Your dreams have been put on hold as you support your husband, children, siblings, and friends in getting their needs met. Finally, you can’t stand one more day of neglecting yourself and your own desires. You trace this pattern of behavior back by asking, “What kind of person would go after her dreams and not be there for other people?” The answer you hear is “A selfish person.” For a moment you feel happy that you’re not that selfish person, because you hate selfish people. Looking back, you remember being told over and over again in religious school how bad it is to be selfish, so you made what you believed to be the right decision—that you would never be that. Instead, you became the opposite—a selfless, big-hearted, loving, and kind person who would do anything for the world—and with that internal commitment, people pleasing became your pattern.
To make peace and break this cycle, you must now confront the distaste you feel for the notion of being selfish and expose the judgments you have held toward all those who you have deemed selfish in the past. You must admit to the negative connotations you attach to the word “selfish” and be willing to see that the way you are interpreting that word is limiting, disempowering, and rigid. You must look to see when you decided or were told that selfish people were bad and wrong. You must become willing to open your heart to the selfish part of you and forgive all those who have reflected back to you that being selfish is bad. You must accept the dualistic view that being human comes with both a healthy dose of selfishness and an equal dose of selflessness. If you are unwilling or unable to find a positive view of being selfish and insist on keeping it in the shadow, you will continue to be held, clinched in the pattern of behavior that has you continue to neglect what is important for your individual growth and the fulfillment of your soul’s desires.
To embrace what has kept us trapped, we must muster up the courage to find the gift of our selfish self. If self-neglect is a pattern, being selfish is a vital quality to embrace in order to find our true self. It’s great to support others in living their dreams—I happen to do it for a living. But if I could never choose selfish behavior, I would never be able to finish writing a book, because I would always be swayed to answer the phone or support one of the many people who want my help or attention each day. If we can’t choose between selfish and selfless, we will be driven to bypass what may truly matter to us at the end of our life. Freedom is being able to choose whoever and whatever we want to be at any moment in our life. If we have to act in a particular way to avoid being something we don’t like, we’re trapped. We’ve limited our freedom and robbed ourselves of wholeness. If we can’t be lazy or angry, we can’t be free. When we are reclaiming these parts of ourselves, it’s vitally important to remember that we are doing this to own our true magnificence. It’s best said by C. G. Jung: “I’d rather be whole than good.”
Taking this journey into the past may feel slightly daunting at first. But the fact is this journey is one of the most rewarding trips we can take. It’s intriguing to uncover our shadow, to see how it has taken root, and to catch ourselves before we say something we don’t really mean or do something that we will regret. Our shadows are there for us, waiting to offer invaluable insights about ourselves. We can never manage or defeat our self-sabotaging behaviors without embracing the shadows that are driving them. There is no pattern of behavior that can’t be broken or changed if we are willing to expose its roots and the emotional upset that caused us to reject the shadow aspect in the first place. When we can compassionately embrace the part of us that has set this behavior in place, we will take back the power over our own actions and break the automatic responses of our unwanted patterns. This process often creates a conundrum because, as human beings, we are designed to want to feel safe, and more often than not, repeating the same old behaviors is what gives us a false sense of safety. It somehow feels easier to repeat the past than explore a different outcome. But to break open a repetitive self-sabotaging behavior, we will have to give up this illusion of a safety net for a moment and be willing to feel what’s underneath. And when we find ourselves in the presence of one of our shadow aspects, we will be able to unravel the mystery of our undesirable behavior and cause change to begin.
As we become more and more aware of the fruitlessness of succumbing to the same tired old patterns, we can turn to our courageous self, ask for support, come face-to-face with the shadow part of ourselves that is hidden, and have a heart-to-heart. By becoming intimate with the cast of characters that make up our own internal drama, we can learn to make peace and give support to the life that we want to achieve. On the other hand, if we fail to acknowledge the opposing forces that give rise to these characters, we can easily get caught in the trap of believing a story about ourselves that is only partially true, and we can lose sight of the amazing opportunity to be a fully expressed human being. If we refuse to acknowledge the duality within, we will be trapped, identifying with the character whose voice is the loudest within us, no matter what that character’s agenda or mission might be.
THE GIFTS OF OUR SHADOW
The shadow contains essential characters in the script of your life. Your job is to learn from the shadow, to integrate it, and allow it to evolve your thinking and expand the boundaries of your self-created persona. Your challenge is to find its value and to bring the light of forgiveness and compassion so that you can defuse its ability to dismantle your life. Your job is to bring its complex characters out from the shadow, and to use their power and potency as sacred fuel to become who you were meant to be in this lifetime.
If the villain inside you is angry, you must forgive this part of yourself and consider the possibility that anger is exactly what you need to fight against some injustice or oppression or to get you out of an abusive situation and back on track to creating an amazing life. If your shadow is filled with fear about who you are and what you think and masks the real you by creating a phony and inauthentic self, you must forgive yourself and look to see how and where these qualities can be put to use. Maybe these parts of you will help you deal with a controlling partner or a bullying ex-spouse who threatens to destroy your relationship with your children. If the villain in your life story is insatiable and always searching for something to fill its emptiness, you don’t need to repress its urge through feeding an addiction and continually beating yourself up. Instead, you can harness the energy of this aspect of yourself and use it to make positive change in your life or the life of someone you care about.
The point is you must forgive yourself for possessing all these human qualities and find a healthy respect and a healthy outlet for each and every aspect of yourself. You never know when you will need a part of you that you have locked away. You never know when a part of yourself that you deemed to be worthless will deliver the exact skill you need to make a difference for yourself or another.
I’m reminded of Jason, a thirty-year-old with rugged good looks and an addiction to all things dangerous. As a young boy, after being labeled by his friends and family members a “scaredy cat,” Jason decided that fearful was the last thing he wanted to be. He started playing hockey when he was eleven and soon developed a taste for extreme sports. His love of danger was the perfect cover-up; no one who scales mountains or jumps out of airplanes could ever be accused of being a coward.
After coming home from one of his infamous trips abroad, Jason decided to visit his divorced mother to meet her new fiancé. He was shocked to find out that Jack, the man of his mother’s future, was close to twenty years her junior. After Jason had spent an evening listening to Jack dodge questions about his job history and his businesses, Jason’s fear overwhelmed his usual respect for his mother’s boundaries, and he set out to find out everything about his mother’s new boyfriend. An Internet search revealed nothing, so he asked a few acquaintances who were closer to his own age to check into the million-dollar business that Jack had been alluding to all evening.
In a matter of days, Jason’s suspicions were validated as he uncovered a recent bankruptcy, a horrible credit history, lawsuits, and a long list of debts. Jack’s multimillion-dollar business had a nice office space, but failed to have any business to speak of. Although Jason’s suspicions were confirmed, days later he still couldn’t muster up the courage to say anything. Then, when his mother announced that Jack would soon be moving in with her to combine household expenses, Jason looked inside to find the strength to voice his concerns, but instead he found only the scared little boy who didn’t want to lose his mother’s love. His shadow was now dictating what he could and could not say. Jason knew he had to speak up, but felt paralyzed in the presence of his fearful self, which had been banished for all these years. Only by acknowledging and opening his heart to his fearful self—relegated to the shadow—did Jason find the courage to finally tell his mother what he knew. He was able to ask his mother to reconsider having Jack move in until she had found out the truth of who he was. Unattached to the choice she would ultimately make, Jason felt proud that he had the courage to reveal what he knew to his mother and now had a healthy dose of compassion and respect for his fearful self. After all, it was his fearful self, not his courageous self, that had prompted him to unmask the man who was likely preying upon his mother.
Looking further, Jason was able to identify many times that his fearful, suspicious self helped him stay out of trouble. Having found the gifts of his fear, Jason no longer had to play the role of the fearless risk taker all the time. Now he had nothing left to prove. He reclaimed a deep strength he never knew existed when this shadow aspect had remained hidden in the dark.
To be a whole human being, we have to acknowledge the existence of all our feelings, human qualities, and experiences and value not just the parts of ourselves that our ego has deemed acceptable, but everything that we have deemed wrong or bad. If we are willing to allow our dark side to be a part of the whole of who we are, we will find it comes equipped with all the power, skill, intelligence, and force needed to do great things in the world.
The journey to extract the gold in the dark, to find the gifts of our shadow demands that we bring radical honesty to the places where we’ve been in denial; forgiveness and compassion to the parts of ourselves that we’ve been ashamed of; love and acceptance to the difficult experiences from our past; and courage to the areas of our life where we’ve been afraid to admit our vulnerabilities. It’s not a process of smoothing over, covering up, or pretending that the things we do to sabotage our success are not that big a deal. In fact, only by admitting the cost of some of our behaviors will we unlock the energy to defy the gravitational pull of our past and step into the infinite possibilities of our true self.
When we come face-to-face with the shadow, we soon realize that this part of ourselves is not trying to destroy us. Instead, the shadow self is trying to lead us back to wholeness. I’m reminded of the scene in Batman: The Dark Knight in which the Joker is holding a knife to Batman’s throat. Batman dares the Joker, “Go ahead and kill me.” The Joker, with a perplexed, twisted look on his face, replies, “I don’t want to kill you. You complete me.” What he is saying is that without his heroic counterpart, he would be nothing at all. If we are savvy enough to enroll our inner villains—our pessimist, our arrogant self, our dictator, our victim—in the script of our highest self and recognize that they are not enemies, but rather hurt and lost parts of ourselves that are in deep need of love and acceptance, we can live in accordance with our soul’s highest mission and find peace in this world.
EMBRACING OUR LIGHT SHADOW
Our shadow isn’t just our dark qualities or things society considers bad. Our shadow also includes all the positive qualities we’ve hidden away. These positive qualities are often referred to as our “light shadow.” It’s not just our darkness we’ve buried. It’s our positive traits—our powerful, loving, and delicious aspects—as well. The fantastic and interesting news here is that we have buried as much of our light as we have of our darkness. We may have buried our genius, competence, humor, success, or courage. Maybe we’ve hidden our self-confidence, charisma, or power. Maybe our full self-expression, uniqueness, or joyful self was buried after we heard, “Don’t be too big for your britches,” “Don’t brag or people won’t like you,” or “It’s lonely at the top.”
We find our hidden light shadow the same way we discover our dark one. We look around for the places where we are projecting our light onto other people. If we see someone we want to emulate, it’s because we are seeing qualities that exist within us. If we are enthralled by someone else, it is because the aspect we love in that person exists inside us. There is no quality that we respond to in another that we lack. It might be hidden behind some bad behavior or an old, outdated shadow belief that says we are the exact opposite of what we are seeing in the other person. But I promise you that if you are attracted to a quality in someone else, no matter how great, it also exists inside you.
More than twenty years ago, as I continued making progress in my recovery from drug addiction, my life in South Florida, where I owned a retail boutique, seemed empty and insignificant. I kept feeling the impulse to do something deeper and more meaningful, so I decided to go back to school and study psychology, thinking that I would become a therapist. I had moved to San Francisco and was immersed in consciousness studies and enamored with shadow work. One night my sister called to tell me that Marianne Williamson was speaking at the Palace of Fine Arts. She got me a ticket to the sold-out event, and as I sat in the audience I was stunned. I watched as Marianne boldly called people to a higher vision for themselves and the world. I heard her unabashedly implore us to step out of the smallness of our own ego-centered lives and into the grandness of serving as part of a divine mission. Although I was listening intently to the words she spoke, I was more overcome by her presence. I left there completely in love with Marianne Williamson.
I returned to my apartment, intent to discover the parts of myself that I so clearly saw in her. I loved that she had the courage to speak the truth, even if it meant shocking people in order to wake them up. Also I admired the way she was able to clearly articulate a difficult message, speaking with such eloquence that her words penetrated into people’s minds and hearts. I was enamored with the depth of concern she seemed to feel for humanity and the sense that she was dedicated to something larger than just her individual life. I also envied her beauty, her sense of style, and her willingness to look like a hot, sexy woman and not one of the many stereotypical frumpy spiritual teachers. She took the stage looking gorgeous and sophisticated, yet her holiness came through loud and clear.
As a dedicated student of projection, I looked beyond her behaviors and tried to discover the underlying characteristics that gave rise to those behaviors. I asked myself, “What kind of person is able to just be herself on stage?” Clearly, an authentic person. “What kind of person would care so deeply for the rest of the world?” A selfless person. “What is the quality that allows Marianne to speak up, to tell the truth even when it’s shocking or scary?” I heard very clearly—a bold person.
I looked at my list of qualities, which read, “bold, authentic, and selfless.” None of them were characteristics I owned or acknowledged within myself. Those who know me now may find this hard to believe, but back then I was not somebody who told it like it is. Afraid of losing the approval of those I loved, I skirted around issues and lacked the self-confidence to even stand in front of a room without shaking. I was more concerned with looking good than I was with saying something that would change people’s lives. I was more concerned with saying it nicely than with being straight or authentic. Yet I knew that if I saw these strengths in Marianne, the potential for them must exist also within me.
I began practicing being more authentic with people and challenged myself to speak up even when I wanted to be silent. To develop the visionary part of myself, I started my day with a prayer for the world and followed with a daily prayer for myself. To be more selfless, I focused on what I could give rather than what I could get. Marianne’s magnificence reflected back to me my own hidden potential. By seeing her light, I literally glimpsed who I could be in the world if I had the courage and the tenacity to acknowledge that the strengths I attributed to her were also my own. This is not to say that they don’t exist in her as well; clearly they do. Boldness, authenticity, and selflessness are universal qualities; each one of us has the right to express them in our own unique way.
Before I broke the trance of my light projection on Marianne, I wanted my first book to be as beautiful and poetic as her ground-breaking book A Return to Love. But as I surrendered to the unique unfolding of these qualities within me, I realized that I was being guided along a different path. My mission was to be the Champion of the Darkness rather than the First Lady of the Light. This was the divine plan for my life, and I never would have glimpsed it if I hadn’t embraced all of my projections.
Taking back our light from those we’ve projected it onto opens the door to an unimaginable future. I never dreamed that I would one day write a book with Marianne Williamson, that we would become friends, or that we would support one another in the fulfillment of a collective mission. This is what’s possible when we take responsibility for the light we see and admire in others. Instead of staying in the trance, we own up to the part of us that is aching to come forth and do the work to own it within ourselves.
Whatever inspires you is an aspect of yourself. Any desire of the heart exists to support you in discovering and manifesting it. If you have an aspiration to be something, it is because you have the potential to manifest the quality you are seeing and the behavior that this quality will bring forth. It will not necessarily be in the exact way that others are expressing the quality, but in your own way.
In my workshops, I always pick a different celebrity and ask people in the audience to share with me what they love most about the person. Recently I chose Bono, and of course I heard at least twenty different qualities that people love about him. One person loved his talent; another raved about his creativity; another, his charisma. Some were enamored with his vision, while others were inspired by his leadership, his selflessness, or his generosity. They each shouted out the quality they attributed to him as though everybody couldn’t help but see it and would naturally agree. But this is rarely the case, because each person saw him through the lens of their disowned self that wanted to come out and be embraced. Everyone had different perceptions, because everyone had projected a different piece of their light onto the screen of the man named Bono.
In this example, Bono is serving as a great mirror for all those who follow him to find the hidden aspects of themselves. He gives people the opportunity to take back their own light and find expression for the qualities they see in him. All celebrities have the power and responsibility to not actually claim people’s projections. In fact when they do, they often get trapped in their own illusional self, which promises to make their own shadow act out. Instead, their job is to reflect the projections back to all those who are transferring their light to them.
Remember, our shadow is often so well hidden from us that it’s nearly impossible to find. If it weren’t for the phenomenon of projection, it might stay hidden from us for a lifetime. Some of us buried our shadow traits when we were three or four years old. When we project onto other people, we have an opportunity to finally find these buried and hidden treasures.
INTEGRATING THE SHADOW
By now, you might be able to acknowledge that the shadow—with all its pain, trauma, and strife—is an indestructible part of who we all are. No matter how hard we try, we will never succeed in getting rid of it or squelching its presence. We do, however, get to decide if we will allow it to destroy our life and rob us of experiencing our greatness, or if we will milk it for all its wisdom and use it to propel us into the most extraordinary version of ourselves. We have all tasted the sweetness of love, the sour disappointment of loss, the bitterness that remains after a heartbreak. Every one of these experiences is part of our divine, unique recipe. We wouldn’t be who we are without them. Most of us suffer from the painful and unwanted parts of our recipe, but there are some extraordinary people who choose to use their pain to heal their heartache and contribute to the world rather than get suffocated by the shadow aspects of their past.
John Walsh, the host of America’s Most Wanted, did just that. The death of a child is one of the toughest ingredients any one of us could imagine having to survive, yet many will have this experience as part of their recipe. After his six-year-old son Adam was murdered, John became an advocate for victims’ rights and turned his anger into action by establishing a television program and advocating for legislation that has led to the prosecution of tens of thousands of criminals. He could have just as easily chosen to swallow his grief or stay a victim himself to this most horrific experience, but instead he chose to use his anger, pain, and heartache to create the television show America’s Most Wanted, which is responsible for capturing over a thousand fugitives and bringing home more than fifty missing children. Out of the heartbreak of his personal trauma, he was able to save others from experiencing the same pain and has emerged as a man who is awed and respected.
After her only sister died of breast cancer at the age of thirty-six, Nancy Goodman Brinker—a breast-cancer survivor herself—founded the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, a nonprofit that has raised over $1 billion for research, education, and health services. By embracing the events of her life and making a commitment to not be a victim, she has done extraordinary things to raise awareness, to help others seek early detection of this potentially life-threatening disease, and to advance the search for a cure.
Can you imagine what our world would look like if Thomas Edison had not embraced all of himself and his experiences? At a very young age, he had all the evidence in the world to believe that he was a loser, a failure, and an idiot. He tried thousands of different theories for discovering electricity, each of which appeared likely to succeed—and failed each and every time. But instead of giving up, he looked beyond his failures, learned from them, and kept going. He held on to and believed in the possibility of his genius, his vision, even before it had been proven. If he had done what most of us do, if he had labeled himself a loser and stayed trapped within the confines of his limitations, refusing to forgive himself for his failures, we would all still be in the dark—literally. Because Edison was able to integrate and learn from his failures, he found the motivation to continue to pursue success and turn on the lights for all of us.
Edith Eva Eger arrived at Auschwitz on May 22, 1944. After being separated from her father and witnessing her mother being taken away to the gas chamber, Edie lived each day in the most horrific of circumstances, watching other inmates electrocute themselves on the barbed-wire fence surrounding the concentration camp and not knowing when she took a shower whether water would come out or gas. Edie survived the worst circumstances that any of us could imagine, yet if you met her today, you would see a beautifully integrated human being who allowed herself to thrive in spite of—and in some ways because of—her painful past.
She did this by exercising the choices that were still available to her even under these bleak and inhumane conditions. When she was asked to dance for Dr. Mengele, the architect of cruelty who was responsible for the torture and murder of millions of Jews, she closed her eyes and chose to imagine that the music was Tchaikovsky and she was dancing in Budapest to Romeo and Juliet. When the German soldiers took her blood twice a week, telling her that it would help them win the war, she chose to tell herself, “I am a pacifist. I am a ballerina. My blood will never help them win the war.” She chose to view the guards who held her captive as more imprisoned than she was. She soothed the pain of her mother’s death by repeating to herself over and over, “The spirit never dies.” She clung to the part of herself that she still had the power to control and refused to allow anything that happened externally to murder her spirit. “If I survive today,” Edie told herself, “then tomorrow I’ll be free.”
Edie, now a gifted and compassionate clinical psychologist and the matriarch of a wonderful family, is clear that by integrating the darkness that was thrust upon her, she exacted the sweetest type of revenge against Hitler. When she was being filmed for The Shadow Effect movie, I asked her if she held any anger toward Hitler. She innocently looked me straight in the eye and said, “I wouldn’t hold on to any anger toward Hitler. If I did, he would win the war, because I would still be carrying him around with me wherever I went.” Edie is a champion of freedom, the carrier of a light that is so great and inspiring that we would all be served if we walked in her footsteps.
It’s so easy to get trapped in our hurt and pain and allow our shadow and our history to dictate our future and undermine our well-being. When we hold on to our resentments toward ourselves or anyone else, we bind ourselves to the very thing that has caused us pain by a cord stronger than steel. As my dear friend Brent BecVar shares, refusing to forgive those who have hurt us “is like being a drowning person whose head is being held under water by someone else. At some point you realize that you have to be the one who fights your way back to the surface.” The only way to battle heartache and the oppressive nature of our shadow is with forgiveness and compassion. Forgiveness doesn’t happen in our heads, but in our hearts. It unfolds when we extract the wisdom and the gifts from even our darkest experiences and emotions. Forgiveness is the hallway between the past and an unimaginable future.
Stories like these demonstrate that we are all living in accordance with a greater plan and that, indeed, everything happens for a reason. Nothing occurs by accident, and there are no coincidences. We are always evolving, whether we are aware of it or not. Oftentimes this evolution is painful, but the pain serves an important purpose. It is a necessary ingredient in our divine recipe. By feeling the ache of loneliness, our hearts open to receive more love; by overcoming the people and situations that have oppressed us, we realize the depth of our strength. When we are willing to acknowledge that our pain, traumas, and heartaches have in fact equipped us with wisdom essential for our growth, we naturally forgive and even bless those who came into our life to teach us those difficult lessons. Our lives are divinely designed for each one of us to get exactly what we need to deliver our own unique expression to the world.
Our mind may tell us that bad is bad, good is good, and that we can never really be all that we dream of being, but if our shadow could talk, it would tell us otherwise. It would tell us that our brightest light can shine only when we’ve accepted our darkness. It would reassure us that there is wisdom in every wound. It would show us that life is a magical journey of making peace with both our humanity and divinity. Our shadow would tell us that we deserve better, that we matter, that we are more than we ever dreamed possible, and that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
As we embrace our shadow, we find out that we are living a divine plan, a plan so important, so vital for our own evolution as well as for the evolution of humankind. Like the lotus flower that is born out of mud, we must honor the darkest parts of ourselves and the most painful of our life’s experiences, because they are what allow us to birth our most beautiful self. We need the messy, muddy past, the muck of our human life—the combination of every hurt, wound, loss, and unfulfilled desire blended with every joy, success, and blessing to give us the wisdom, the perspective, and the drive to step into the most magnificent expression of ourselves. This is the gift of the shadow.