Everything Mind

CRAZY RALPH, IN FRIDAY THE 13TH

DEATH IN THE AIR

As young boys, my friends and I—the sneaky little bastards that we were—would watch films like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th during sleepovers (unbeknownst to our parents, of course). Since that time, autumn, Halloween, and the celebration of all things spooky and unknown have held a special place in my heart. Any time you bring together monsters, zombies, and aliens with a shit ton of candy, well, what’s not to love?

I recently found myself contemplating the cultural celebration known as Halloween while I stood in an extremely long line with my wife, waiting to embark on a forty-five-minute walk through a haunted-graveyard attraction in Connecticut. I became utterly fascinated with the fact that the month of October brings people together in celebration of things they would otherwise normally consider gross, barbaric, and evil.

I’m a complete weirdo and find all these things entertaining year-round. (Don’t forget Everything Mind. It’s all part of the path—dark and light.) As I stood there watching the “normal” (well for the most part anyway) people anticipating their turn in the graveyard, I found the celebration of blood, severed body parts, chainsaw-wielding maniacs, and death so fucking weird—the only reason they seemed to be there was because it was October.

Psychosocially speaking, there’s a personality type called type T, which—if that’s your type—means you’re a stimulation-seeking, excitement-seeking, thrill-seeking, arousal-seeking, and risk-taking individual. (Think Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in the film Point Break. That’s right, “Vaya con Dios, brah.”) So okay, maybe the thrill seekers waiting in line around me weren’t as radical or extreme as Bodhi (Swayze) and Johnny Utah (Reeves), but this would explain some of their attraction to all things horror in October. However, not being type T myself, I was still at a loss.

With the exception of my near-death relationship with addiction, I’m typically the farthest thing from a thrill seeker. I’ve never been one to go on roller coasters. (Well, that’s not entirely true. I did go on the Batman ride at Six Flags many years ago when I was shitfaced. Even then, I remember holding on for dear life, screaming like a child, with my eyes closed the entire time.) I’ve also never had any interest in other thrill-seeking behaviors such as bungee jumping or skydiving. Hell, if I’m in the front passenger seat of a car, and the person driving gets too close to the car in front of us, I’ll push my foot down on the floor as if I had the ability to control the brakes myself. Yes, really.

While I continued standing there in line at the graveyard, thinking about all this, I remembered a concept from the great psychiatrist Carl Jung, one that he called the shadow self. The shadow self is an unconscious aspect of one’s personality that the conscious ego doesn’t identify. This resonates much more deeply with me than type T personality because the shadow self represents the denied aspects of who we are and the social masks we wear. When we deny certain unsavory parts of ourselves, we project them onto others and thus use them as scapegoats instead of facing our own unpleasant characteristics. So let’s see here: Denied aspects of myself? Check. Projected them onto others? Check. Wore social masks? Check. Yes, these are all things I’ve been guilty of throughout the years and am still periodically guilty of today.

The idea of our shadow self always makes me think of Michael Myers in the Halloween movies and how he lurked in the shadows and stalked his victims before killing them. You kind of sense he’s there, but because you don’t actually see him, you just brush it off. This is similar to what most of us do with our shadow selves. (Bonus points for Michael, as I also find him eerily reminiscent of humanity’s dark collective unconscious, all personified in one unrelenting, unremorseful, and evil-as-fuck being.)

In his book The Integral Vision, Ken Wilber offers a more applicable version of the shadow self and explains why it’s not only important, but necessary for us as humans to work with and uncover our hidden shadows. Wilber writes:

The “shadow” is a term representing the personal unconscious, or the psychological material that we repress, deny, dissociate, or disown. Unfortunately, denying this material doesn’t make it go away; on the contrary, it returns to plague us with painful neurotic symptoms, obsessions, fears, and anxieties. Uncovering, befriending, and re-owning this material is necessary not only for removing the painful symptoms, but for forming an accurate and healthy self-image.1

Another way to sum up our shadow self is this: any time we feel a strong emotional response to something outside of ourselves—another person, for example, or, even in my case, horror movies—that’s the first sign our shadow self is acting up. For most of us, our experience of these emotions is typically followed by criticism and blame toward those outer elements in order to divert our attention away from the dirty little parts of ourselves we’d rather not acknowledge. When it comes to horror movies, I think my love for them (rather than criticism or blame) is partly because there’s a guilt-free association with projecting some of the denied aspects of myself onto them. I’m not saying I have a hidden or denied taste for blood or murder, but there is a lot of pain and fear in horror movies, and there is definitely pain and fear within me as well.

The shadow self acts as a “shadow” for a reason; we’re afraid of what we’ll find out about ourselves when we shine a light on it and look. The good news, though, is that as we work on overcoming our fear about these hidden places inside of ourselves and take a closer look at these denied aspects of our shadow self, we liberate a lot of pent-up energy—energy that previously had been reserved for keeping those unsavory parts of ourselves hidden.

When we bring awareness to our emotional states and the corresponding ways in which we act toward others as a result, we take back control of our internal well-being—well, either that, or, we can keep going on autopilot and, as Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies so eloquently said, “Your suffering will be legendary, even in hell!” Whichever you’d prefer.