Can you see your shadow?

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” — Marcel Proust

By Ross Freake

Our inner shadow looms much larger than the one following us on a sunny day.

We are, however, less aware of the inner one. While the noon shadow can’t hurt us, the internal one often plays havoc with our lives. 

Iron John author Robert Bly, arguably, the founder of the men’s mythopoetic movement, called the shadow a long, black bag that we drag behind us into which we stuffed aspects of ourselves our friends and family didn’t like. 

“We spend our life until we're 20 deciding what parts of ourselves to put in the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again,” he said.

Bly connected Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung’s notion of the shadow with the stories he was gathering — of men on quests, dragons in caves, dark woods, and strange guides. 

In these tales, the hero often faces something terrifying or humiliating — a representation of the shadow — before he can claim his wholeness.

The ManKind Project (MKP) was born out of a hunger for initiation, integrity, and integration, and placed shadow work at the centre of its mission: to support men in becoming emotionally literate, accountable, and purpose-driven.

MKP’s New Warrior Training Adventure is a big step on the path of investigating and getting to know our shadow.

In MKP, men learn to:

• Identify the unconscious beliefs that shape their lives (e.g., “I’m not good enough,” “If I show emotion, I’ll be weak.”)

• Take responsibility for their projections — how they judge others for what they’ve disowned in themselves

• Reclaim disowned traits — not to excuse harmful behaviour, but to find the gift hidden in our darkest part

• Witness and be witnessed in an I-Group, where nothing human is foreign, and nothing true is shamed

We are controlled by beliefs and urges we don’t know we have, and until we shine a light down into our own abyss, we’re doomed to dance to a tune we might not recognize. 

Even as adults, when, not if, these “bad qualities” climb up from our psychic basement like an unloved relative, we lock the door and ignore the knocking.

Those we can’t ignore, we project onto other people — jealousy, anger, greed, fear, envy, sloth, lust, laziness. We might not notice them in ourselves, but we sure see them in others. We see the splinter in their eye, but not the log in ours.

The show-off in the weight room, the know-it-all in the classroom, the inconsiderate driver on the highway, the nosy neighbour wouldn’t annoy us if they weren’t exhibiting repressed parts of ourselves.

When we react — over-react — to something our spouse, children or co-workers do, we’re responding to some unheeded part of ourselves.

The world really is a reflection of us, a mirror. We look in that mirror and see the monsters and then project them onto other people. That which we fear will, like Job, will most likely come upon us.

“The shadow is composed of all those aspects of ourselves that have a tendency to make us uncomfortable with ourselves. The shadow is not just what is unconscious, it is what discomforts the sense of self we wish to have,” Jungian psychologist James Hollis wrote in Why People Do Bad Things.

“What we call the shadow then, is the sum of all those separate energies that operate unconsciously, and therefore autonomously, of that are an affront to what we consciously wish to think of ourselves.”

The shadow is a shape-shifter and unless we pay constant and close attention, we may miss the shifting sands that constitute us, which can quickly turn into quicksand.

It may look like: 

• The Nice Guy who avoids conflict, but seethes inside  

• The Stoic who won’t ask for help even when he’s drowning  

• The Rebel who uses anger to mask grief  

• The Addict numbing pain that was never safe to express  

• The Joker who hides terror behind a laugh 

Before we can fuse our splinter parts, we have to acknowledge that they exist. Pretending they aren’t there causes us problems and embarrassment because they’ll show up like a broke brother-in-law or annoying neighbour.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves,” Jung said.

When the shadow is brought into the light, we finally see ourselves.

Shadow work is, however, challenging. It asks us to feel things we’ve spent years avoiding. That’s why MKP does work in I-Groups. No one has to walk alone. The men in the circle have likely faced their monsters, and in that group, fighting similar battles, a brotherhood is formed.

In every NWTA weekend, and every I-Group meeting, men are invited to face what they’ve hidden. Not to “fix” it. Not to get rid of it. But to name it and own it. And to choose something new. They stop dragging the bag and begin to unpack it — with compassion, courage, and company.

But the path is long and winding; the journey never ends. “The wild man is not a product you can buy, but a process you can enter,” Bly said.

One of the great shadow stories in literature is  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which Robert Louis Stevenson explores good and evil, repression, and the duality of human nature. Mr Hyde is the doctor’s evil alter ego who does what he wants, but doesn't accept responsibility for his actions. 

A more modern version of that story is Star Wars, movies where director George Lucas used Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader as incarnations of good and evil. Lucas learned his mythology from Joseph Campbell, who wrote about the hero’s journey in his first book, the Hero with a Thousand Faces.

“The self is the totality, and if you think of it as a circle, the centre of the circle would be the centre of the self,” Campbell wrote in Myth and the Self. “But your plane of consciousness is above the centre and your ego’s up there above the plane of consciousness, so there’s a subliminal aspect of the self which you do not know. And this is in play constantly with the ego.”

Just as Campbell learned from Jung, Sam Keen learned Campbell. “What we know about ourselves is in continual dialogue with darkness.” Keen wrote in Your Mythic Journey. “Self knowledge and ignorance are linked because of the selective structure of the human mind. In focusing attention on one thing, we ignore another.”

NWTA and I-Groups also teach that we have a golden shadow, not just a dark one. If we can’t see the good qualities in ourselves, we can see them in other people. Just as we project our “bad” qualities onto others, we project our good ones.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,” Author Marianne Williamson wrote. “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?”

Zen master Cheri Huber echoed that. “It takes a tremendous act of courage to admit to yourself that you are not defective in any way.”

Yet, if we own our positive traits, we don’t have any more excuses for not realizing our potential — for not running that marathon, losing weight, giving up smoking, for not being as good as the people we admire. 

“We possess every trait and its polar opposite, every human emotion and impulse,” Debbie Ford wrote in The Dark Side of the Light Chasers. “We have to uncover, own, and embrace all of who we are, the good and bad, dark and light, strong and weak, and honest and dishonest.

But darkness doesn’t become light just because we want it; and even when we do, it doesn’t fade with the flick of a switch.

"Unless we do conscious work on it, the shadow is almost always projected; that is, it is neatly laid on someone or something else so we do not have to take responsibility for it,” said Robert A Johnson.

Even if we refuse to acknowledge that gem of wisdom, the shadow knows. But if we walk with our shadow, befriend it, and open the bag, we find our gold.

“As long as we live, we are in process — dragging the bag, opening it, and learning what's in it,” Bly said.

Ross Freake initiated in Chilliwack in 2018.