Whether or not we choose to admit it, we enjoy having conversations with ourselves. Sometimes these conversations are silent, other times they are audible. Personally, I’m a fan of the audible conversation because I’m alone during the day. Personal preferences aside, these inner dialogues are rooted in a powerful psychological concept – the Shadow.
I will qualify everything I say from this point forward by stating I have no more than a high-level grasp on most psychological concepts and the individuals who formulated them. I state that because the Shadow is a well-known Jungian (Carl Jung) concept. My goal is not to alienate any Freudians or individuals who have beliefs strongly rooted in the concepts of other significant psychological figures. My goal is to analyze the concept of the Shadow and how inner dialogue can help discover it.
Defining The Shadow
Qualifying statements made, let’s return to the Shadow. The Shadow is, at the highest level, the part of ourselves we elect not to show the world. However, we do project this part onto others more regularly than we’d care to admit. If you are critical and judgmental of others, it’s extremely likely those traits are ones you possess internally as part of your Shadow. This process is called projection.
How The Shadow Develops
Your Shadow’s formation begins the instant you begin developing. Starting in our early childhood, we begin to decipher the world via the feedback of our actions. If our behavior garners approval from others, we annotate that behavior and repeat it with the expectation of continued approval. If a behavior garners disapproval, we also annotate it, but we don’t repeat it.
The Conflict of our ID and our Ego
Notice, even though we may not repeat a disapproving behavior, we still annotate it, and we definitely do not remove the underlying feelings which drove that behavior. Collectively, these underlying feelings are what Freud deems our “ID”: all the positive and negative emotions, feelings, and thoughts we possess.
Conversely, Freud deems the behaviors and underlying feelings we do not suppress as our “Ego”. Our “Ego” is the filtered version of ourself we present to the world. The friction between our “ID” and our “Ego” is where we begin to look for the shadow. Good examples of this friction are times we do not agree with our superiors.
What Triggers The Shadow?
In these situations, which are usually in the context of our job, we are conflicted because our expression of displeasure could mean hindering our potential to advance. More times than not we suppress these feelings of displeasure and hope it leads to advancement at a later time. In other words, we leverage delayed gratification.
Repeat this process of suppression many times and the Shadow grows. Eventually, the Shadow grows so enormous it cannot be contained by your Ego. To use non-psychology terms, this moment is when you snap. When this happens, your underlying feelings come forward and consume you.
The experience is a horrible one and the consequences are often worse. Everybody in their life has snapped. However, what troubles people about these moments is the feelings which came forward are not somebody else’s – they are their own.
The Role of The Shadow in Our Personality
In Latin the word “persona” translates to “mask”. Combine “persona” with the suffix “ity”, and you get the word “personality”. Does this mean a person’s personality is just the image they portray to others? Based on what we’ve learned, yes. People will suppress what they truly feel in the interest of themselves and their community. It’s not a good or a bad thing, it’s just our nature. However, it doesn’t mean we should accept this friction between our ID and Ego.
Leveraging The Shadow
Understanding our Shadow can help unlock more of our potential. We’ve been speaking about the Shadow in a negative context, but it contains many positive elements which, when selectively leveraged, can yield extremely positive results.
For instance, assertiveness is a necessary positive trait that can be easily misconstrued as being demanding or needy, both negative traits. Another positive element of the shadow is creative impulse. Our creative impulse is driven by our genuine interests which we are often not pursuing because of our fear of not fitting into established social hierarchies.
So then, where does that leave us with the Shadow? Is it our dark side or is it the best version of ourselves suppressed by a need to fit into normal social hierarchies? It’s both. Probably not the answer you want to hear, but that’s the truth. The Shadow is not something to be feared but to be understood. But how do we begin to understand it? We start by having a conversations with ourselves.
The Necessity of Having Conversations with Ourselves
You don’t need to have an audible conversation, but you do need to allow your true feelings, no matter how dark, to come to the surface and enter into the dialogue. That is the first and only rule of having a conversation with your Shadow – do not suppress anything. The entire point of having this conversation is discovery. Allow yourself to work through all angles, address all concerns, and uncover what is the best outcome for you.
Enough of these conversations will ultimately lead to a better understanding of yourself and the world. As somebody who’s had many of these conversations, I can confirm they possess life-altering potential. The external world pulls you in many directions. Allowing it to wholly govern you is the first step to living a miserable life. To avoid this hell, you need to possess a deep understanding of who you are and are not. When you understand those characteristics, you simply eliminate the elements of the external world with which you do not align.
The choice is yours: embrace your shadow and live in alignment with your true self or ignore it and always question why the world doesn’t make sense.
Be More.
Become Polymathic.
Quote of the Week: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” – Carl Jung