Parents, children, teachers, clergy, and friends add to the mix, helping to determine what is allowed to be expressed and what is not. For some families, emotional vulnerability and crying are encouraged; for others, they are banished into shadow. For some families, anger and conflict are tolerated; for others, they are the worst taboo. For some

On the other hand, a woman who sacrifices her career opportunities to be a stay-at-home mother may envy her husband’s achievements. In addition, she may succumb to the danger of envying her children’s opportunities as well. If she lives vicariously through her daughter with conscious pride, she also may suffer with unconscious resentment and

However, for millennia, the sexual archetype has been split: It is worshiped for its powers of creating life, and it is damned for its powers of connecting us to the shadowy realms of the body and instincts. Therefore, sexual shadows pervade our intimacies. Eros, the god of love, opens the floodgates of desire and shuts them just as rapidly. Or he

For example, when we bury uncomfortable feelings to avoid dealing with them (suppression or repression), we pay the price of our aliveness.

Poet Robert Bly has also explored a version of this pattern, which he calls the “naïve male” and identifies by several traits: The man assumes that others are sincere and fair, without seeing their shadows. With this kind of blindness, he has special, prized relationships only with certain people. In addition, he may be passive in relationships,

The family holds mythic power—the source of all good, the defense against evil. It’s exalted as a sacred ideal, which promises roots, blood relations, future generations. It ties each individual life to its fate, imprinting it genetically, biochemically, and psychologically with blessings and curses. To imagine life without family is to imagine

As wounded children themselves, our parents defend against the return of their own difficult, buried feelings when they are stimulated by a child’s natural spontaneity, raw emotion, and eroticism. As their defenses flounder, the parents often protect themselves by unknowingly judging and condemning their young ones through shame and rejection.

But we do not believe that the dissolution of the family and the concomitant lack of moral order we see around us stem primarily from an absence of moral order imposed from the outside. Instead, we suggest that in many homes the family soul has been sacrificed to maintain the illusion of the family persona. As a result, the family shadow erupts,

Eventually, they may develop a shame complex, becoming sensitive to rejection, eager to accept blame, and hungry for acceptance and approval At the level of soul they feel unworthy, debased, and unlovable, anxiously anticipating the next shaming moment. At the center of the complex sits an archetypal image: a worm, a termite, a dark spot or glob of