Connie Zweig

The author offers exploration of self and practical guidance dealing with the dark side of personality based on Jung's concept of "shadow," or the forbidden and unacceptable feelings and behaviors each of us experience.

Meeting the Shadow

Laura Mei

The personal shadow contains undeveloped, unexpressed potentials of all kinds. It is that part of the unconscious that is complementary to the ego and represents those characteristics that the conscious personality does not wish to acknowledge and therefore neglects, forgets, and buries, only to discover them in uncomfortable confrontations with others. Meeting the shadow calls for slowing the pace of life, listening to the body’s cues, and allowing ourselves time to be alone in order to digest the cryptic messages from the hidden world.

Like a society, each family also has its built-in taboos, its forbidden arenas. The family shadow contains all that is rejected by a family’s conscious awareness, those feelings and actions that are seen as too threatening to its self-image.

Today, shadow refers to that part of the unconscious psyche that is nearest to consciousness, even though it is not completely accepted by it. Because it is contrary to our chosen conscious attitude, the shadow personality is denied expression in life and coalesces into a relatively separate splinter personality in the unconscious, where it is isolated from exposure and discovery. This compensates for the one-sided identification we make with what is acceptable to our conscious minds.

Our shadow self remains the great burden of self-knowledge, the disruptive element that does not want to be known. The aim of meeting the shadow is to develop an ongoing relationship with it, to expand our sense of self by balancing the one-sidedness of our conscious attitudes with our unconscious depths.

A dream always points to an unconscious situation. It is complementary and reveals that which is not sufficiently within the field of our awareness. A dream will not restate a situation which the dreamer already sees adequately and correctly. Where there is doubt in the conscious mind a dream may help to resolve that doubt by reiteration, but whenever a dream repeats something of which we feel utterly convinced, a challenge is thereby raised by the unconscious; our projections are held up to us.

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