Nineteenth century Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung was the first person to coin the term “shadow,” although many before him described the “darker impulses” of humans. Your shadow is made up of all the qualities that you learned are unacceptable in society. This includes thoughts, feelings, impulses, and actions that you learned are bad, unacceptable, and bring on disapproval and a loss of love.
Each person’s shadow is slightly different due to the unique messages they received from their family, school, religious community, and peers. These specific messages shape what you see as acceptable attire, how to speak with others, what’s OK to say and not say, and so forth.
There are also certain qualities that are generally held in the shadow for most people in most societies. These include things like anger, aggression, physical violence, sex, masturbation, selfishness, and greed. Basically, think The Seven Deadly Sins from Catholicism (pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth).
From a very young age we begin to pick up on what is good and what is bad. Sometimes this is directly taught to us through reprimands or punishment (“Don’t hit your brother! Hitting is bad!”), and other times it is learned through observation of adults and listening in on their conversations. Regardless of how we learn it, we quickly realize there are ways we should be and ways we must never be. Sounds a bit like the Nice Person training we talked about earlier in this book, right?
Well, there’s one interesting twist here. All of those things that you learn not to do don’t just disappear. The desire to hit your brother, take his cookie, and eat it right now is still inside of you, you just learn how to suppress the impulse.
In this chapter, you are going to discover much more about your shadow and how it holds the key to liberate you from the cage of excessive niceness. First, we have to expand who you think you are...