ECP: Take Back Your Shadow!

I’m going to share with you another tremendous life tool created by Carl Jung, the Swiss physician psychologist. It is the concept of the Shadow, our darkest psychological qualities that we see in others but not within ourselves. When someone triggers our Shadow, we react to the person with anger, but if we step back, we may find that we have over-reacted as happened in this true story from my own life-- a story I shared in my book, Keep Your Eye on the Prize! (www.keepyoureyeontheprize.org) . As a native Southerner, I attended a liberal East Coast college. One night freshman year, I returned to my dormitory room to find my door plastered with smashed tomatoes, eggs, and other items.  The perpetrators were gone when I arrived. I learned that a group of upperclassmen from New York led by Jessica (not her real name) had done this when drunk, chanting hateful things about my alleged racial prejudices. I could have taken action against them, but I was more puzzled than angry. I concluded that they were aggressively ignorant to make such assumptions without knowing anything at all about me other than my home place. Fast forward a year later, I had become a campus leader, and Jessica approached me to apologize. I accepted the apology and added, “You learned something about me, and I learned something about you.” What was this interaction about? Jessica and the group were actually the ones with the prejudices (against Southerners), but they had no awareness of this. My being from the South evoked their Shadow qualities, which they projected onto me, resulting in their aggressive behavior when disinhibited by alcohol. When Jessica apologized, it was because she had come to see that the projection was not valid and she had misjudged me. Whether Jessica ever consciously realized that it was her own Shadow that was the problem is unclear, but good for her for apologizing! She later became a Civil Rights lawyer in New York. Jessica is not alone. The problem of the Shadow exists in everyone. Bullying behavior is a great example of this. The bully is the one who feels weak but is not aware of the Shadow qualities. He or she protects against these feelings by picking on a vulnerable target and projecting the Shadow onto that person. Jung said that a major life task is to take back our Shadow when we find ourselves reacting negatively to someone, especially without reason. If you can catch yourself in the act and can reverse the projection process, you will grow and save yourself (and others) a lot of pain. Have you experienced this dynamic in life? Maybe you reacted negatively to someone or they reacted this way toward you. Let me know the story and what you learned from it!