Ego and Shadow

Kay,

The "shadow" is how I have always thought of the ego. A subversive element to it, more interested in maintaining itself than anything else. Distorting the reality of situations to suit its purpose and its survival.

Marilyn


Hhmmm... isn't that true for each part, ego and shadow? That unless consciously injected with compassion, each is only out for its own survival?

We're born knowing how to flee. How to fight. How to snatch a worm out of mama bird's beak before our siblings can. How to knock the other hummingbirds off the perch.

But calmness, compassion, contentment, mercy, forgiveness... the only way I know to develop those traits is by conscious practice.

That's where shadow work comes in. If we don't learn how to love ourselves first, with all our flaws, if we don't handle all the selfish little baby birds and menacing beasts that dwell in our own shadows compassionately --humorously, even -- then we can't cut anyone else any slack.

Jeremiah Abrams calls shadow work "the pursuit of an unhypocritical life." That's a hell of a good definition.

Hell of a task, too.

K

Marilyn's Question

Kay,

I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your book. I know that you have been told this a million times, but here is one more, it was so much in your voice. I could imagine you sitting in front of me with your faint Texas accent, saying those very things in those very words. I have loaned it to a couple of friends and both have liked it. I wanted to ask you how you differentiate between the "shadow" and the "ego."

Marilyn

If only we could! What an excellent question.

Your ego is how you learn to act as you grow up. Your ego is who "Marilyn" is.

Your shadow is everything that doesn't fit into the picture of "Marilyn." It's Marilyn's opposite, everything Marilyn doesn't want to be.

Both grow up together, side by side, hand in hand. Every time your parents said it was bad to get angry, or your peers thought it wasn't cool to be so enthusiastic, et cetera et cetera, something voluble and lively fled the light world of your ego and hid in the darkness of your shadow. As repressive as parents and school systems tend to be, most of the juice goes into our shadows.

Thus your ego learns how to please, how to get around in your culture, and gets all the credit out in the world -- let's say Marilyn is a very hard worker -- while your poor ole shadow has to hide in what Robert Bly calls the "long black bag we drag behind us" thinking I'd really like a day off, sometime, you know? and eventually getting frustrated enough to sneak past your ego and take swipes at other people. That John Doe is so lazy!

"Shadow work" is noticing that you're unreasonably upset at John Doe, and asking yourself why. Hhmmm... why am I being so snarky? If I'm getting angry over someone else looking relaxed, maybe I need to relax myself. Schedule a little more play into my life. Shadow work pulls something out of the dark bag -- the unconscious -- and brings it up into the daylight world where you can see it and decide what to do about it -- makes it conscious. Better for you, better for John Doe.

Here's a good description of ego-shadow formation, from Meeting the Shadow, by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams:

"As ego comes, so goes the shadow: the disowned self is a natural by-product of the ego-building process, which eventually becomes a mirror image of the ego. We disown that which does not fit into our developing picture of who we are, thus creating a shadow. Because of the necessarily one-sided nature of ego development, the neglected, rejected, and unacceptable qualities in us accumulate in the unconscious psyche and take form as an inferior personality--the personal shadow.

However, what is disowned does not go away. It lives on within us--out of sight, out of mind, but nevertheless real--an unconscious alter ego hiding just below the threshold of awareness. It often erupts unexpectedly under extreme emotional circumstances. "The devil made me do it!" is the adult euphemism that explains our alter ego behavior.

Ego and shadow are thus in an age-old antagonism that is a well-known motif in mythology: the relationship of opposing twins or brothers--one good, the other evil--symbolic representations of the ego-alter ego in psychological development. Taken together, these sibling opposites form a whole. In the same way, when the ego assimilates the disowned self, we move toward wholeness."
--Meeting the Shadow, The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature,
--Edited by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, p. 47