Dr. Connie's The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul

A Letter to My Grandchildren

https://www.nextavenue.org/for-my-grandchildren-a-letter-of-love-and-legacy/

Interview originally published in Psychology Today

Continued from the homepage:

CZ:  That’s right. I have a client who came to see me because she was cheating on her husband and she had no idea why. Her first marriage had been unhappy and she made excuses for herself because she was miserable. But in the second marriage, there was a lot of love and stability as well as a new baby. She really wanted that relationship, and yet this self-destructive behavior kept erupting. And so she practiced centering, through her practice of Vipassana and walking meditation, and she began to watch the impulse, her internal dialogue and feelings, before she acted out the behavior.

What she uncovered was that she didn’t feel seen or desired in her marriages. So she would have anonymous sex because she then felt desired; she liked the danger. That cheater part of her had unconscious needs that were getting met when she cheated but not in her marriage. In that first layer of shadow work, she began to express those valid needs to her husband and see if she could get them met. Shadow behavior has intelligence—it’s trying to tell us something.

Then we uncovered that in her Catholic upbringing, hse was told she was bad and there was nothing she could do about it because that was her nature: to be evil and wrong. So that cheater part was confirming her badness. And when she acted it out, her higher self was completely overshadowed. The message that she was bad was confirmed. In our shadow work, she realized that all the anxiety she had felt in both her personal and work life was connected to this message that she was bad. And that if she wasn’t good at work, she would be abandoned, and that created workaholic behavior.

What motivated her was a negative motivation not to be bad. And in her relationship, it drove her to be a good wife and mother. She was performing so she wouldn’t feel like she was bad, and then she was acting out the badness in this shadow character, the cheater.

There is a lot of knowledge in these shadow parts but if we dismiss or repress them, we miss out on the gold that’s there for our own self-knowledge, for the evolution of our higher consciousness. We also miss out on the repair from our childhood because all shadow behavior is rooted in childhood messages.

MM:  How does exploration of the shadow alter our relationship to the world, and other people?

CZ:  An ability to observe expands the range of our lives so we’re not living in a narrow persona that’s always deemed acceptable, which is where most people live, people trying to be proper. So there’s a lot of richness and possibility in exploring these shadow parts, even though they may be scary and feel risky. The other thing with that client was her search for thrill and danger. She needed to find constructive ways to experience that, because that’s a positive wish. She was at mid-life and needed more excitement. So you can see there’s a lot of needs inside of the shadow character that have a positive quality to them.

MM:  How much leeway do we allow ourselves in that swing between the acceptable persona and the part that needs to risk and transgress?

CZ:  For some, there can be symbolic transgression rather than physical. Some people can do this through their creative work or through their dreams. In our dreams, so much can happen because there’s no rules by that ethical monitor: the ego. For other people, that’s not enough, and so they need to face fears and find excitement in their lives. As long as you don’t hurt yourself or hurt another person. As long as you honor your commitments and don’t break your word, then you can do all kinds of things. But that zone is different sizes for different people.

Yesterday I saw the movie Captain Fantastic, which I highly recommend. It’s about children being raised in the wilderness in kind of a hippie setting with a lot of freedom. Their father has them do dangerous things: they kill animals to survive, rock climb and break bones, and the question becomes, What is aliveness? What is the value of learning to survive independently in the woods and what is child abuse? I think we all wrestle with that for ourselves because we want aliveness. It’s also like the movie Wild. We became domesticated and civilized, and that wildness is in the shadow. I think it’s one of the causes of the increasing violence in the world today.  One of the reasons people want guns is because we’re disconnected from that wildness. And that spontaneity, that animal instinct is in all of us. It’s very repressed but it’s coming out now in some of these crooked ways.

MM: You’ve written, “To live with shadow awareness is to turn away from the peaks toward the valleys, away from the heights and the rarified air toward the depths and the dark and the dense. It is to turn toward the unpleasant thoughts, hidden fantasies, marginal feelings that are taboo. Our secret lust, greed, envy, rage. To live with shadow awareness is to move our eyes from up to down, to relinquish the clarity of blue-sky thinking for the uncertain murkiness of a foggy morning.” That is so beautiful, and yet we live in a culture that’s addicted to blue-sky thinking. So how can people begin to open themselves to the shadow in their lives?

CZ:  That’s such an individual question. There’s a risk that if we don’t hold both, we lose part of our humanity, and we may also force another person to carry what we don’t carry for ourselves, creating imbalance in relationship. So how much can you allow yourself to see, to feel, to know and still hold on to your truth, your center? Not be carried away, either by the light or by the darkness, but actually live in your ground, in the center of your reality?

Look at what happened in the Catholic Church. Sexuality was in the shadow. So we can see it all around us. We can see it in the class divisions of working class people hating wealthy people and wealthy people angry at poor people. And cops violent with African-Americans. And native people hating immigrants. This is all shadow projection that adds to the collective shadow and creates darkness in the world. So for some people, whatever contribution they can make to the larger world is their call. For some, their suffering forces them to look inside. For some people, addiction is the call they have to answer. It’s different for different people, but it’s important for all of us to answer that call. We have to take that journey, or we only add to the darkness of the world.

Denial is entrenched because the shadow does not want to come out of its hiding place. Its nature is to hide, to remain outside of awareness. So, the shadow acts out indirectly, concealed in a sour mood or a sarcastic remark or a hostile act. Or it sneaks out compulsively, camouflaged in an addictive, self-destructive behavior, such as emotional eating. Or in a projection onto the Other, demonizing the trait that is lying hidden within – he’s so weak, they’re so lazy, she’s so slutty.

Therefore, we need to learn how to catch a glimpse of it when it appears. We need to sharpen our senses to be awake enough when it erupts – identifying the repetitive thoughts, feelings, and sensations that accompany each shadow.

Then we can learn to romance it, coaxe it out, seduce it into awareness – and make a conscious relationship with it. Like a coy lover, it will recede once more behind the curtain. And again, with patience, we can invite it out to dance. This slow process of bringing the shadow to consciousness, forgetting, and recognizing it again is the nature of shadow-work.

Romancing the shadow is subversive: The culture teaches us to be extroverted, quick, ambitious, productive. Workaholism is lauded; contemplation is shunned. But shadow-work is slow, cautious; it moves like an animal in the night. It moves us against the collective mandate to think positively, be productive, focus outwardly, and protect our image.

The shadow is a demanding task master: it requires endless patience, keen instinct, fine discrimination, the compassion of a Buddha. It requires one eye turned out toward the world of light, the other eye turned in toward the world of darkness.

To live with shadow awareness is to turn away from the peaks toward the valleys, away from the heights and the rarified air, toward the depths and the dark and the dense. It is to turn toward the unpleasant thoughts, hidden fantasies, marginal feelings that are taboo – our secret lust, greed, envy, rage. To live with shadow awareness is to move our eyes from up to down, to relinquish the clarity of blue-sky thinking for the uncertain murkiness of a foggy morning.

As psychotherapists we have helped hundreds of clients catch a glimpse of their elusive shadows. Seeing it — meeting the shadow — is the important first step. Learning to live with it — romancing the shadow — is a life-long challenge.

But the rewards are profound: Shadow-work enables us to alter our self-sabotaging behavior, so that we can achieve a more self-directed life. It expands our awareness to include a wider range of who we are, so that we can attain more complete self-knowledge and eventually feel more genuine self-acceptance. It permits us to defuse the negative emotions that taint our loving relationships, so that we can create a more authentic intimacy. It shows us how to reclaim our projections onto the Other and open our hearts to more compassion. And it opens the storehouse of creativity in which our talents remain hidden and out of reach – our lost creative dreams, our sacrificed gifts. In each of these ways, shadow-work permits us to find gold in the dark side.

We offer the fundamental skills of shadow-work that are needed to move from meeting the shadow to romancing the shadow as a way of life. Romancing the shadow means reading the messages encoded in the events of our daily lives in such a way that we gain consciousness, substance, soul. Romancing the shadow means meeting the shadow for a private rendezvous; eventually, it means taking it seriously enough to learn to embrace it in a long-term relationship.

Of course, some people find this shift distasteful, even abhorrent. Why not simply behave properly, they ask, shape our attitudes, cut and trim our feelings so that they fit moral, ethical, god-given outlines? Then white is white and black is black, and the struggle with grays can end.

The mind is dangerous, they say, like a tiger in a cage. Open the door and it will think cruel, inhuman thoughts. The body is wild, they say, like some unruly beast. Let it run loose and it will do terrible, perverted, aggressive things.

These people believe that we need more protection from the lures of the shadow — stricter morals, higher fences. They wish to bring back old fundamentalisms to shield us against forbidden feelings, ambiguous choices. They seek to widen the split between good and evil, between Jesus and his dark brother Satan, between the followers of Allah and the heathens, between the members of their religious cult and the rest of fallen humanity. Longing to remain on god’s side, they refuse to engage the darkness in their own souls.

But this deep-seated denial of shadow, this pervasive resistance to looking in its eye, is accompanied by a strange obsession with it. Just as we turn away from the gloomy facts of life, we also turn toward them again in curiosity, compelled in some strange way to try to understand the dark side of our nature. Millions of people read terrifying Gothic novels with great appetite, compelled to visit a domain of cruelty, lust, perversion, and crime. Or we sit for hours transfixed by films about cold, vengeful, bloody behavior that, in the outside world, would be deemed inhuman. The conventions of Gothic horror even shape our daily newspaper reporting and broadcast news programs, which tell front-page tales of hero-villains that lead double lives. The shadow is both dangerous and familiar, repulsive and attractive, grotesque and alluring.

In truth, we can no longer afford these extreme attitudes toward the shadow: we cannot afford to look away from the beast in denial, pretending that a naive, trusting stance will protect us from it “out there.” And we cannot afford to look too directly at the beast for too long, for we risk numbing our own souls. Instead, we need to cultivate an attitude of respect toward the shadow, to see it honestly without dismissing it or becoming overwhelmed by it.

In this way an encounter with the shadow might become an initiation, a call to remember the multi-faceted complexity of human nature and the fertile depths of the human soul. We need to start by acknowledging the dark side — but we do not end there. An encounter with the shadow might lead to debate about pressing social questions and even bring about change in social policy. For example, a wave of police shootings based on racial prejudice might enhance efforts toward racial reconciliation. Or a series of allegations of pedophilia among the clergy might result in a deeper examination of the role of celibacy in the lives of religious people. Or, a personal experience of the devastating effects of climate change –hurricanes, desertification, food and water shortages, mass migrations —  might lead a CEO or a farmer or even a politician to question his own denial.

I suggest that for most people — that is, those without serious psychological problems —  greater shadow awareness can lead to greater morality. In fact, Carl Jung, who coined the term “shadow,” posed it as a moral problem. He suggested that we need a reorientation or fundamental change of attitude, a metanoia, to look it squarely in the eyes, that is, our own eyes.

Denial is entrenched because the shadow does not want to come out of its hiding place. Its nature is to hide, to remain outside of awareness. So, the shadow acts out indirectly, concealed in a sour mood or sarcastic remark. Or it sneaks out compulsively, camouflaged in an addictive behavior. Therefore, we need to learn how to catch a glimpse of it when it appears. We need to sharpen our senses to be awake enough when it erupts. Then we can learn to romance it, coaxe it out, seduce it into awareness. Like a coy lover, it will recede once more behind the curtain. And again, with patience, we can invite it out to dance. This slow process of bringing the shadow to consciousness, forgetting, and recognizing it again is the nature of shadow-work.

Romancing the shadow is subversive: The culture teaches us to be extroverted, quick, ambitious, productive. Workaholism is lauded; contemplation is shunned. But shadow-work is slow, cautious; it moves like an animal in the night. It moves us against the collective mandate to think positively, be productive, focus outwardly, and protect our image.

The shadow is a demanding task master: it requires endless patience, keen instinct, fine discrimination, the compassion of a Buddha. It requires one eye turned out toward the world of light, the other eye turned in toward the world of darkness.

To live with shadow awareness is to turn away from the peaks toward the valleys, away from the heights and the rarified air, toward the depths and the dark and the dense. It is to turn toward the unpleasant thoughts, hidden fantasies, marginal feelings that are so taboo. To live with shadow awareness is to move our eyes from up to down, to relinquish the clarity of blue-sky thinking for the uncertain murkiness of a foggy morning.

As psychotherapists we have helped hundreds of clients catch a glimpse of their elusive shadows. Seeing it — meeting the shadow — is the important first step. Learning to live with it — romancing the shadow — is a life-long challenge. But the rewards are profound: Shadow-work enables us to alter our self-sabotaging behavior, so that we can achieve a more self-directed life. It expands our awareness to include a wider range of who we are, so that we can attain more complete self-knowledge and eventually feel more genuine self-acceptance. It permits us to defuse the negative emotions that taint our loving relationships, so that we can create a more authentic intimacy. And it opens the storehouse of creativity in which our talents remain hidden and out of reach. In each of these ways, shadow-work permits us to find gold in the dark side.

We offer the fundamental skills of shadow-work that are needed to move from meeting the shadow to romancing the shadow as a way of life. Romancing the shadow means reading the messages encoded in the events of our daily lives in such a way that we gain consciousness, substance, soul. Romancing the shadow means meeting the shadow for a private rendezvous; eventually, it means taking it seriously enough to learn to embrace it in a long-term relationship.

Of course, some people find this shift distasteful, even abhorrent. Why not simply behave properly, they ask, shape our attitudes, cut and trim our feelings so that they fit moral, ethical, god-given outlines? Then white is white and black is black, and the struggle with grays can end.

The mind is dangerous, they say, like a tiger in a cage. Open the door and it will think cruel, inhuman thoughts. The body is wild, they say, like some unruly beast. Let it run loose and it will do terrible, perverted, aggressive things.

These people believe that we need more protection from the lures of the shadow — stricter morals, higher fences. They wish to bring back old fundamentalisms to shield us against forbidden feelings, ambiguous choices. They seek to widen the split between good and evil, between Jesus and his dark brother Satan, between the followers of Allah and the heathens, between the members of their religious cult and the rest of fallen humanity. Longing to remain on god’s side, they refuse to engage the darkness in their own souls.
But this deep-seated denial of shadow, this pervasive resistance to looking in its eye is accompanied by a strange obsession with it. Just as we turn away from the gloomy facts of life, we also turn toward them again in curiosity, compelled in some strange way to try to understand the dark side of our nature. Millions of us read terrifying Gothic novels with great appetite, compelled to visit a domain of cruelty, lust, perversion, and crime. Or we sit for hours transfixed by films about cold, vengeful, bloody behavior that, in the outside world, would be deemed inhuman. The conventions of Gothic horror even shape our daily newspaper reporting and broadcast news programs, which tell front-page tales of hero-villains that lead double lives.The shadow is both dangerous and familiar, repulsive and attractive, grotesque and alluring.

In truth, we can no longer afford these extreme attitudes toward the shadow: we cannot afford to look away from the beast in denial, pretending that a naive, trusting stance will protect us from it “out there.” And we cannot afford to look too directly
at the beast for too long, for we risk numbing our own souls. Instead, we need to cultivate an attitude of respect toward the shadow, to see it honestly without dismissing it or becoming overwhelmed by it.

In this way an encounter with the shadow might become an initiation, a call to remember the multi-faceted complexity of human nature and the fertile depths of the human soul. We need to start by acknowledging the dark side — but we do not end there. Ideally, an encounter with the shadow might open debate about pressing social questions and even bring about change in social policy. For example, a wave of accusations of satanic cult abuse might lead to an inquiry into the growing fascination with demonic forces. Or a series of allegations of pedophilia among the clergy might result in a deeper examination of the role of celibacy in the lives of religious people. Or a rash of hate crimes based on racial prejudice might enhance efforts toward racial reconciliation.

I suggest that for most people — that is, those without serious psychological problems — greater shadow awareness can lead to greater morality. In fact, Carl Jung, who coined the term “shadow,” posed it as a moral problem. He suggested that we need a reorientation or fundamental change of attitude, a metanoia, to look it squarely in the eyes, that is, our own eyes.