Romancing the Shadow

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 fa

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 lif

It is impossible to maintain a child’s innocence according to a standard of perfect parenting—that is, the parent cannot meet the child’s longing for love, desire for safety, and needs for mirroring at every given moment. The parent, whose soul has been wounded, is bound to fail. From the point of view of the child’s soul, the betrayal is inevitabl

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 unconsciously, the shadow knows its purpose: It seeks to make the unconscious conscious; it tries to tell its secret. Through repeated patterns of addictive or abusive behavior, through choosing the wrong person to love again and again, the shadow tells its tale.

Unlike Demeter-style time, whose seasonal, organic cycles have a natural rhythm and serve as our ally, Cronos-style time is mechanical and contrived; it creates a life of busyness and devours its subjects, so that it comes to feel like an enemy, even like the Grim Reaper himself.

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

Archetypal psychologist James Hillman points out that betrayal can be seen as a necessary turning point that permits an individual to move out of a childlike state of naïve trust and innocence into an awareness of the complexity of every human being, including the dark side.

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