The Gold In Your Shadow – Finding Love!

If you don’t know what the human shadow is, start by reading this.

It’s a mistake to think that shadow is all negative. Often it contains a great deal of “gold” – positive qualities which weren’t acceptable to others when we were small. This might include our vulnerability, tenderness, compassion, empathy, love, sadness, anger, assertiveness and so on. You might have a sense of your own “missing” golden qualities.

More than anything else, I think, we put qualities like our confidence, brilliance, power, potency, and magnificence into shadow.

In many cultures children are taught that it’s wrong to be “too big for your boots”, that “pride goes before a fall”, that it’s wrong to “blow your own trumpet”, and so on.

So where do they put their self-confidence, self-worth and self-esteem? Into shadow. Children do this to conform to the expectations of the people and culture around them, whether they want to or not. The logic seems simple to a child: “If I conform, I will be accepted. If I do not, I may be rejected.” Given this situation, most children will choose acceptance every time. Fortunate indeed are those whose differences and special qualities are nurtured and encouraged.

Video – shadow work

The reality is that children can be humiliated and diminished, whether unconsciously or deliberately, by many things. They may suffer hurts to their self-esteem at the hands of parents, relatives, other adults, siblings, teachers, and the school system. They may be shamed because they do not have the “right” talents, appearance, or abilities for the culture in which they live. They may want to do things which do not meet the expectations of those around them, who see them as “different”, “weird”, “abnormal” or “alien” – and reject them.

In fact, many of the men and women who come to do emotional healing work on their shadows with me and my facilitator colleagues speak of feeling different or weird from an early age. Yet in my eyes, they were the courageous ones, the ones who were simply made to feel like outsiders because they had talents and abilities which others didn’t understand. But as we all know, it can be hard to feel different….

Which of us, as a child, did not want to be popular, good or “normal” in the eyes of those around us? Which of us did not want to be accepted by the others? And even when parents try to make their kids resilient, it seems so much is beyond their control. 

This desire for acceptance by their peers explains why so many children gradually hide more and more of their positive qualities. Into the shadow bag goes their sense of self-worth, their magnificence, their strengths, their skills, talents and abilities, and above all, their intuitive knowledge that they are perfect.

So it goes. But, as we’ve seen, what goes into your shadow bag, whether positive or negative, will change in character.

Videos exploring the shadow (link)

Anger may become rage, sadness can build into deep grief which burdens a man’s soul. Repressed sexuality may transform into an addiction to porn or a desire to victimise women. Fear may become acute and irrational anxiety, devoid of connection with reality. Self-protection and risk management can transform into some kind of judgementalism or predatorial behaviour.

Everything changes, nothing stays the same, once it’s in shadow.

As for a boy’s sense of self-worth and self-importance, well, when shoved into shadow, they may inflate into grandiosity or collapse into a sense of insignificance.

When you see someone who has a grossly inflated sense of superiority and grandiosity, it’s a fair assumption that most of his self-worth and self-esteem were beaten (maybe literally, maybe metaphorically) out of him as a child. The same is true when you see a man who’s playing small, not showing his natural talent, and hiding his abilities. As boys, both of them put most, if not all, of their self-worth into their shadow bag. This somehow kept them safe from shame and humiliation, or worse.

Another defensive strategy some children adopt in this situation is to strive for perfection. This is really a quest to be seen as good enough – and therefore hopefully accepted and maybe even loved – by a parent for whom, in reality, nothing can ever be good enough. Of course, perfection is unachievable, so this strategy can be a real killer.

Alice Miller, one of the pioneering child psychotherapists of the twentieth century, wrote a book called The Drama Of The Gifted Child. In that book, she described the drama for each and every one of us: it is that we arrive on the earth “trailing clouds of glory”, and then, unaccountably, our glory is rejected.

The glory of a child is his innocent purity, within which he carries a truly wondrous set of appetites, spontaneities, angers, desires, and drives. This is his gift to his parents. Sadly, as with so many unexpected gifts, his parents may find they don’t want that gift, at least not in the form it arrived. Perhaps what they really wanted was a “nice” boy or girl who would do more or less what they expected, who would follow in their image, perhaps. A child who would be convenient for them. And so they unconsciously set about making their child into something else.

That’s not unusual. To a greater or lesser degree, each of us was diverted from our own path, the one which would have made us into the person we were always meant to be. Now, as adults, we may feel an urge to find our real selves by seeking out this true path and seeing where it takes us.  That’s a choice summed up for me in Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken, where he writes: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by
And that has made all the difference.”

(You can find a shadow work facilitator named Ali Kirk here, who can help you recover yourself on the road less travelled.)

It’s not that our parents were malevolent – it’s just that they needed us to fulfil a particular role in their lives. As Robert Bly so astutely observed, “Our parents rejected us before we could talk, so the pain of the rejection is probably stored in a preverbal place.”

This is why it can seem so hard to change anything in conventional counselling or therapy. This is why archetypal counselling, emotional healing work, and working with your shadow are so powerful – these techniques get right to the heart of the issue, quickly, safely and powerfully.