I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me                                   And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
 Robert Louis Stevenson

I remember memorizing “My Shadow” from my dog-earred green volume of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. The rhymes just rolled off my lips, and I thought little of shadows and much more about my recitation. In truth, like most children, I often thought of my shadow as a substitute playmate when no other could be found. My shadow was always with me, and this was a good thing.

Until it wasn’t. A good thing, that is. Until later in high school when I studied the works of Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung who wrote:

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.

The shadow as a moral problem, an awareness of the dark aspects of the personality? This shadow is not your childhood friend, the happy, little fellow that offers good company. A student of Jung’s and fellow psychologist, Erich Neumann, describes the shadow as All those qualities, capacities and tendencies which do not harmonize with the collective values – everything that shuns the light of public opinion, in fact – now come together to form the shadow, that dark region of the personality which is unknown and unrecognized by the ego. 

Anything that hides from the light of public opinion and which is unknown and unrecognized by the ego or conscious mind seems suspect, indeed. Suspect and frightening. As I matured and stowed my Child’s Garden of Verses in the back of my closet with my Barbies and a few beloved stuffed animals, I grew increasingly aware that my shadow was the sort of problem that would simply not go away. Coming to grips with it was, as Jung argued, going to take considerable moral effort.

From adolescence on, I worked diligently and with real conviction to maintain a public persona much like a face to meet the faces in T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. This was a face whose attributes harmonized with the collective values of my world. This was a cheerful, optimistic, humble, and hard-working face. This was a face that largely kept its form regardless of the circumstances. This was a female face, a persona that was characterized by all those social mores and expectations for women. Looking back, I’m not proud to admit that I was darn good at keeping up this face. The failure to do so, I believed, was social death. The failure to do so was simply unacceptable. I could have been a poster child for Jung’s theories regarding repressing the shadow and over-identifying with the ego.

In Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, novelist Doris Lessing writes: There it lay, just out of sight, deadly and punishing, for its pulse was that of a cold heaviness, it had to be a counterweight to joy. This is the shadow, the dark aspects of one’s self that are just out of sight, those undesirable qualities, thoughts, and feelings that surely must be a counterweight to joy. At the forefront of my own list of undesirable qualities was shame. Just below the surface of all the joy and assurance I projected was a deep and abiding sense of shame. I was ashamed that I didn’t regard the needs of others before my own, that, too often, I compared myself to others, that I had failed to do something I should have, that I wasn’t more insightful, more empathetic, more encouraging, more giving. In short, I was ashamed of almost everything I was and would be.

For much of my life, my shame–like a good shadow–followed me into and out of relationships and experiences. And though I worked hard to ensure that others didn’t see it, its dark presence loomed and threatened to unmask me. Jung writes that shame is a soul eating emotion. Contemporary writer and sociologist Brené Brown claims that shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change, that it derives its power from being unspeakable.

In his book Shame and Grace, writer and theologian Lewis B. Smedes writes that the difference between guilt and shame is very clear–in theory. We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are. Shame is such a powerful shadow because it confidently pronounces what we are (and what we are not). And it becomes even more powerful when we feed it by encouraging it, repressing it, and refusing to speak about it with others. Too often, I was guilty of all of these, and so my shame grew. Like a shadow, I simply couldn’t shake it.

At the core of my shame has been a persistent preoccupation with self. Regrettably, I have spent too many hours of my life preoccupied with what I am not. And as this preoccupation increased, it devoured precious minutes and opportunities. As I have matured in my faith, I have discovered that this type of preoccupation is a universal impediment to living for Christ. When John is testifying about Jesus, he says: He must increase; I must decrease. [John 3:30] This is exactly it. I must decrease. My shadow must be outed and shrunken. If Christ is to increase in my life, if I am to be who I long to be, then I have to call forth my shame into the public light and name it what it is: a shadow of the worst sort.

In her best-selling book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead, Brené Brown writes: If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive. If Carl Jung were alive today, I would like to think that he would buy a ticket for one of Brown’s talks. And then, I’d really like for him to rise unabashedly from the audience and shout, Preach it, sister! I mean why not? One researcher affirming the work of another–it could happen. It should happen.

There are seasons in our lives when shadows darken our world. They emerge from their hiding places and blot out the sun. Jung knew that we all have these shadows and, that if we are to grow and mature, we must acknowledge and deal with them. The apostles understood that, dark as these shadows may be, our preoccupation with them–even if it is self-deprecatory preoccupation–must decrease. Seasons of shadows are universal impediments to seasons of light. The good news, however, is that light abounds and flows eternally from so many sources. We just have to step into it.

 

My Shadow

 An hour after dawn,
 my shadow stretches proprietarily along the road
 blackening the sunny mounds of trefoil
 and the burnished wings of finches.
 Its legs are dark trunks.
 Across the seas of first light,
 its torso spreads like a continent of shame,
 while its head, a hapless tectonic plate,
 settles over a mantle of shoulder. 
  
 Its appetite knows no end:
 bridal heads of Queen Anne’s Lace
 scarlet crests of cardinals,
 dew-glazed grass, maple saplings—
 it stuffs them all into its burgeoning belly.
  
 Now as the sun streaks through the trees
 and lights up the orchid petals of cone flowers,
 it blunders forward—leaden, determined,
 the worst of me.
  
 Even as morning christens the world,
 it holds the road
 and will not move aside.