Since first learning about the concept in an intro English course at my old community college, Carl Jung’s “shadow” has endlessly intrigued me. By Jungian definition, the Shadow is an aspect of every person’s personality (Journal Psyche NP). It is, in its essence, a combined force of everything a person doesn’t like about themselves. Now Jung was a smart guy, he gave the world ideas like extroversion and introversion, and that’s something that people talk about every day. Similarly, the Shadow is something we see even more often.
Have you ever met someone with a face that you felt the strong urge to hit? Or have you ever found yourself meeting someone for the first time and immediately hated them, even though all of your friends loved them? Chances are, you’re more like those people than you think. In our day to day life, our shadows appear to us in people that we talk to and observe. As a sort of being made up of a person’s suppressed insecurities and internalized hate, a Shadow is something we ourselves hate. Essentially, when you meet or see a person who exhibits the traits that you hate about yourself, you project your self-hatred onto this person. So let’s say that you are a “talker;” you jabber on and on all day, constantly stopping to chastise yourself for talking too much and being annoying (by your own perception), until after months of trying you manage to reel yourself in. So you being a former talker, you join in a conversation with a few strangers in line at Target and find that one of them will just not shut up. You find yourself enraged, wishing you could cover their mouth, knock them out, or anything else. Now you may be aware that the reason you find them annoying is that they talk a lot, but you probably wouldn’t realize why you find talking a lot to be so annoying. It is only because within them you saw a shadow of yourself, and it terrified you.
This insidious Shadow really does bring out the worst in us. We are so focused on ourselves and our perceived problems that we project them onto every person that we see. We give so much power to them. So much so that my friends and I were able to torment one of our own, out of fear. In high school, we all had a friend I’ll call Evan. Now none of us were particularly attractive people, but Evan seemed to have pulled a shorter straw. Short, hefty, had a squeaky voice and a squeakier laugh (and he didn’t have the best personality either). He was an easy target. While he really was our friend, he just represented all of the things that we didn’t want for ourselves, and daily we would hit his self-esteem with verbal jabs and he’d laugh it off, which made it worse.
We’ve all worked on being better, and we have been. I had many deep seated anger issues, but I’ve managed to get a handle on them. I think coming out of high school also helped us all hate ourselves a little less, and thus treat others a little better. But our shadows still live within us and around us, and within you too. “To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real” (Jung NP). It is a bold enemy that you must face daily, not with anger but with love. Whatever childhood issues or personal disappointments you have, you need to face them, and acknowledge them. You can never truly get rid of these things, just as you can’t erase your actual shadow. But, by recognizing its existence, you can stop being afraid of it.
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