The Shadow
The Shadow is one of the most complex archetypes developed by Carl Jung within his psychological work and it relates heavily to the dreaming world and the things we experience within it. It is the belief that we all have a metaphorical shadow in our own subconscious that we ourselves have created by supressing undesirable parts of our own personalities. Most of us move through life only showing people the sides of us that we believe are acceptable, likable and we discard the darker sides of our personalities which surface from time to time much to our dissaproval. Many people will deny that they hold any of these subconscious dark attributes at all and its understandable that we like to believe that we are completely in control of our emotions and the traits that we use to govern our lives.
"Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions." - Dr. Carl G. Jung
Jung explained that in order to become the 'complete' being that we thought we were by ignoring these darker sides to ourselves we had to embrace and understand them and fully integrate them into our lifes. Along with these dark aspects 'lighter' aspects can also be found that have become buried along with the undersirables and its these we can harness from exploring our shadow. An example of this could be that a shy person may be hiding that dominant and endearing side of themselves as they do not want to appear forceful and feel embarrassed by these characterisitics. By harnessing this side of themselves they may find untapped resources of power and the strength to push on and achieve their goals. The fact of the theory is that everybody has a shadow and in order to achieve self awareness we need to open our eyes to it and understand it rather than turning our backs and ignoring it.
The first step in recognising our shadow and accessing it is to take full responsibility for the things that happen to us in our lifes. It's always easy to pass the blame on to someone else and percieve that what happened was their fault and simply ignore the fact that your actions have more consequences than you think. Taking 100% responsibility can be a hard task to do and its something you will have to work at for a considerable length of time but doing so and perservering will lead you to open up many more aspects of your life that you did not recognise you had before.
Experiencing your shadow does not have to be a terrifying experience and will, as a whole, make you a better person. Your dreams help to release your shadow into your conscious mind and these dreams are often seen as nightmares. Sometimes The Shadow can appear to us in the actions of other people as we project our own shadow onto others in our dreams as well as our waking lifes. We see these traits in other people as desirable because we have the same traits inside of us and have a deep regret and dislike surrounding them. The traits we dislike and the traits that we find fascinating in others are traits that we hold but do not yet have full access to them.
The next time you have a nightmare of witness someone or something that has characteristics you dislike instead of carrying on in this mind set try and embrace the concepts as existing within ourselves and see that if controlled they are not destructive or neccersarily a bad thing. If we ignore these traits we will simply carry on through our lifes wondering why a particular loved one treated us badly or why a friend suddenly became unavailable to us instead of admitting that sometimes it is ourselves to where the blame lies.
The Shadow begins to form at a very young age when a child becomes aware of his own place in the world around him. At this point in time information about this concept is limited due to age and experience. A child will begin suppressing the parts of themselves that they believe to be unnaceptable and may unwilling adopt other peoples projective attributes into the ones that they deam to be the correct ones to hold leading to confusion later on in life as more and more information about the rights and wrongs of life become available to them. The course of action to take in dealing with The Shadow is to let include aspects of your shadow and the traits you are finding yourself supressing and also let the traits you already hold true into your inner self mingling the two. Only then will you feel complete.