25: The Shadow Personality

25 

The Shadow Personality 

          The best piece of advice that I got in my life came from a source I would never have imagined, because that just wasn’t my reality at the time; and although it pierced my heart with the deadly accuracy of a skilled swordsman, I had to laugh at the blissful sweetness of the Ascended Master’s advice that was revealed to me through a gifted psychic medium who channeled St. Padre Pio: “He told me to tell you to resist the urge to be right.”

In one blinding flash of insight, I saw through my tragic character flaw that was responsible for so much aggravation in my life; and every time I got the urge to correct someone the Good Saint’s words popped into my mind, and I had to bite my tongue.

I went to this gifted medium for a spiritual reading, and out of this experience came my novel Healing with Padre Pio; and had I not personally experienced what I did with the departed Capuchin monk who suffered the stigmata most of his adult life (fifty years of daily anguish), I would have questioned the veracity of the whole experience. This is why I have taken Gurdjieff’s words literally: “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life.”

But why did I have the urge to be right all the time? What was this compulsion, this instinctive need to correct people whenever I felt they were wrong? I did it without thought, and it always got me into trouble because it set me apart as arrogant and insensitive; but I couldn’t help myself and did it anyway, because I was the victim of my own shadow. And that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing, the shadow side of our personality… 

The shadow is a Jungian concept. It is the dark, repressed side of our personality, and it is not who we think we are. The shadow is our false self, and it is both our damnation and salvation; but because our shadow resides in the unconscious part of our psyche we are blind to the shadow side of our personality, and we even resist the slightest hint of being made aware of our false nature because it threatens our self-image.

“The shadow by nature is difficult to apprehend. It is dangerous, disorderly, and forever in hiding, as if the light of consciousness would steal its very life,” wrote the co-editors Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams in Meeting the Shadow, The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature; but not until we become aware of our shadow and integrate it into our conscious personality will we ever be a whole person, and happy. But where does the shadow come from, and why does it have so much power over us?

In all honesty, I had no awareness of my compulsion to be right; but after the Humble Saint (no one can suffer the holy wounds of Jesus for fifty years and not be humbled) brought it to my attention, I began to notice that I was not alone in my compulsive need to be right, and I soon began to see that this was a defining trait of the shadow personality.

Why, for example, would that Muslim woman risk sabotaging her Canadian citizenship just to wear her niqab during the oath-swearing part of the ceremony if she did not believe that she was right in her religious conviction? What compelled her to take such a dangerous risk if she was not under the influence of her shadow personality? Would her faith have collapsed had she shown her face while swearing allegiance to her new country? Why would she do what she did if she wasn’t convinced that she was right in her conviction?

“The shadow personality develops naturally in every young child,” said Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams; and they explain that children identify with ideal personality traits in their respective cultures to create a socially acceptable persona, and they repress all those qualities that their culture rejects into the shadow part of their personality because they don’t fit into their evolving self-image. So “the ego and the shadow develop in tandem, creating each other out of the same life experience.”

But not only do we create our own ego and shadow personality out of our own life experiences, we also inherit our family shadow—the archetypal matrix of unresolved family karma, the consciousness of all those experiences that one’s family has repressed to the unconscious family psyche; and this can make our life very difficult depending upon our family’s karmic history, which is why it is written that the sins of the parents are visited upon the children. But, still, the mystery remains; why the urge to be right?

The Sufis have a saying: “There are as many ways to God as there are souls.” Which simply means that every soul is its own way to God. Would this be the source of my compulsive need to be right? Would this be why the Muslim woman risked her Canadian citizenship, because she believed her way is more right?

I suspect so, but I cannot solve this mystery on my own; and so I’m going to call upon my Muse to help me work out the answer… 

Can a person live a lie and be authentic?

Let’s, for argument’s sake, say that we do not live one lifetime only but many lives; and let’s further say that there is no eternal damnation in hell, that this is just a prop used by Christianity to keep people on the straight and narrow. And let’s say that one believes in sin and eternal damnation in hell, like I did in my Roman Catholic youth; wouldn’t that be my personal reality, then? But my personal reality wouldn’t be real; it would be false. And by living a false reality, would I be authentic? That’s the issue of the shadow personality: I would be authentic in my Roman Catholic belief, but my personal reality would be false; it would be my life-lie, which characterizes the shadow personality that is real in its falseness.

This is the mystery of human nature, which is paradoxical in its ontology because we are a complex mixture of the consciousness of the real and false, the being and non-being aspect of our ego personality; but some of us are more real than false, and some of us are more false than real, and if we are more false than real then our shadow has unconscious power over our conscious ego and can make our life difficult, like the Muslim woman whose religious convictions compelled her to risk her Canadian citizenship. No doubt she was genuine in her conviction that she had the right to wear her niqab while swearing the oath of allegiance to her new country, but was her personal reality real or false?

As someone wrote into the National Post, it seems that “her religious/cultural practices are more important than the cultural norms of her newly adopted country,” and although she was granted the right by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to not show her face during the public oath-taking ceremony for her citizenship, her behavior flew in the face of our Canadian Prime Minister, and many Canadians; myself included. But why, if not because she was a victim of her own recalcitrant shadow personality?

“If we don’t acknowledge all of who we are, we are guaranteed to be blind-sided by the shadow effect,” said Debbie Ford in her introduction to The Shadow Effect, co-written with Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson. “Our shadow incites us to act out in ways we never imagined we could and to waste our vital energy on bad habits and repetitive behavior,” she adds, which can throw one’s life into disarray as it did mine and the Muslim woman with our blind and foolish need to be right; but not since I became aware of that aspect of my shadow personality and began to integrate it into my conscious ego. But, again, why does the shadow have this need to assert itself, which in my case was compulsive? 

 “How can you find a lion that has swallowed you?” asked the eminent psychologist C. G. Jung, with characteristic playful humor; which is why he added that it takes great moral courage to see our shadow. By lion, Jung meant our unconscious shadow that has taken control over our ego personality, which I explored in my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway; and the conclusion that I came to was that the shadow has to assert itself to prove to the world that it is authentic and real, as Ernest Hemingway did over and over again to the despair of everyone who knew him., especially his third wife Martha Gellhorn who described him as a “pathological liar and cruelest man I know.” And the more power our shadow has over ego, the more real we think we are. This is why Debbie Ford wrote, “The conflict between who we are and who we want to be is at the core of the human struggle,” which was why my compulsive need to be right made my life miserable.

“The shadow,” said Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, “is both the awful thing that needs redemption, and the suffering redeemer who can provide it,” and not until we smelt the gold out of the dross of our shadow personality will be whole, and happy.

 

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