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.

In order to pursue her dream of a committed relationship, Bonnie needed to find a place at the table for the assassin, the protector of her vulnerability and independence. She needed a way of relating to this character so that it would not push away the very men she might truly desire. Eventually, she found the gold in her dark side when she

As James Hillman has pointed out, soul offers an approach to life as sacred, an orientation toward depth. It brings a quality of awareness that is reflective, imaginative, and downward, engaged with the dailiness of things.

When these kinds of defenses break down and anxiety-provoking feelings begin to break through the surface, we feel flooded with fear. At those times, we may adopt the behavior of an earlier stage of life (regression) in an effort to ward off the anxiety. In regression, we time-travel into the past, longing to be adored or cared for by another, free

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.

We use the term “ego” to signify the inauthentic “I” or self (with a small “s”) that develops to survive in difficult environments and to become acceptable to the conventional world. We view ego as the result of many inevitable adaptations to forces that cannot tolerate the authentic expressions of the Self—helplessness in a small boy develops into

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.

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