The Shadow

The Shadow is like a unconscious ego. It's where all the repressed traits you don't like about yourself go. All those insecurities, doubts, worries, and fears. And the more repressed traits you have the larger your shadow gets. The larger your shadow gets, the more its going to weigh you down, the lower self-esteem you will have, and the harder it will be to sleep at night.

In society there are generally acceptable traits, unacceptable traits, and there's those REALLY unacceptable traits.

Acceptable and unacceptable traits vary from human to human and from culture to culture, but REALLY unacceptable traits are universally agreed upon no matter what culture you go to.

We all still have traits in us that we repress - it's called being human. And to medicate these feelings of self-hated, of interiority, you're going to chronically seek out validation and approval from people, from drugs, from anything, because you never give to yourself. You never give it to yourself because you may feel inferior, you may hate your body, you may hate your mind, you may hate your thoughts, and you may hate yourself..

But you're not your ego. You're not your identity. While it's true in this reality that you're labeled as such - outside whatever the hell this is you're just awareness and anyone who tells you anything different is stuck in the ego identity trap of life.

Now what happens to your "I" in the shadow? Well your "I" still Identitfies with things unconsciously even though you don't want to be associated with them. Remember it's hard to get rid of your identities. They are kind of stuck and glued together.

  • Every pimple
  • Every scar
  • Every awkward moment
  • Every stupid mistake
  • Every heartbreak
  • Every embarrassing photo
  • Every lost opportunity
  • Every failed relationship
  • Every failed friendship
  • Every cringe-worthy social media post
  • Every cringe-worthy blog post
  • Every mispoken word or phrase
  • Every rejection
  • Every moment of self-doubt
  • Every wrong decision
  • Every unfulfilled dream
  • Every disapointment
  • Every broken promise
  • Every grudge held
  • Every wasted hour
  • Every weakness exposed
  • Every unkind thought
  • Every uh person you had a crush on

Everything...

Oh Yes.

Now that I think of it - it looks like I've a repressed a lot of things too.

They're all there, just unconscious and every now and then your insecurities will come out - all the things that you deeply repressed in yourself.

Projection

Now one of the consequences of having a shadow is that you may project the traits you repress in yourself onto others, because those traits have to eventually come out.

Context is everything, the person may not like you but it might not be about your identity. People conflate their identity with themselves and think they're their identity, but they're not.

You see everytime you make a judgment about someone it is revealing something about you and if you know a little bit about psychology you just may be able to figure out what is going on in their head - what they may know about themselves, but not reveal to the world.

These unconscious quick snappy monkey thinking biases can be very very nasty. Most likely its the other person's ego trying to protect itself. If their ego feels threatened they need to make sure someone else is inferior in someway to feel better about themselves.

Projection happens ALL THE TIME and if you're deeply into watching Anime like me then you may have caught on a couple.

Most famously, in Episode 15 of Neon Genesis Evangelion, during the "kiss" scene, Asuka tries to provoke Shinji by bring up his dead mom.

"You don't want to kiss a girl on the anniversary of your mom's death? Afraid she may be watching you from Heaven?"

However, Asuka's mom is dead as well. She is projecting her unresolved emotions and trauma related to her own mother onto Shinjii. Perhaps maybe what she deeply wants is an emotional connection to Shinjii, but is too emotionally immature to admit it? She subconsciously admits that she wants him to "do" something for her. And when he doesn't later on she has a mental break down that he won't "do" anything for her.

You see anytime someone is mad at another person — everything they are mad at that other person for — there is a chance that they're repressing that very same thing inside themselves.

This happens a lot when a person is unwilling to confront certain aspects of themselves which makes the other individual uncomfortable so they will attribute their own undesirable traits onto that other person.

And so yeah, angry bitchy girls like Asuka are pretty much textbook cases for projection, particularly when they are around guys that keep them guessing. However, not all anger or frustration is projection, it's just easy to know when you know the character's motivations and desires.

You don't perceive reality correctly. We are only really interacting with our thoughts surrounding that person and our projection onto that person. Projection exists to code meaning onto reality in order to make it functional for us. If we were not able to project onto reality we would not be able to make sense of what we need to do in order to get by in life. If we could not project onto language we would not be able to communicate. We constantly project onto reality. The problem occurs when we don't realize we are project onto reality, when we're unconscious to it, which we often are.

Traumas

Now we are getting into the good stuff. So we all repress embarrassing moments from time to time, but what about THOSE REALLY EMBARRASSING MOMENTS. You know, the ones that stick with you for life? Oh yes those ones, how could I forget?

So here is the thing, you can't really stop trauma or really repressed traits. You will always still identify with your traumas. Thoughts can not be destroyed. Try to destroy a thought - you can't do it. The only thing you can do is observe it, see it for what it is, and stop emotionally investing in it day by day by emotionally investing in other things. All those emotions, beliefs and values will go away when the "I" stops identifying with them by identifying with other things.

That seems simple, but so many people make the mistake of thinking that they can just stop identifying by attacking the thought or trait.

"No That Doesn't Exist!!! No That Is Not Who I am!!! No That's Not Me!!!" — yada yada you tell yourself something along the lines of this.

You can not just stop identifying with a trauma. I've made this mistake too many times. Thinking I could just forget about it or just shut it off. It doesn't work. You have to confront it head on. You can't run away from your problems no matter how much you try. That's the really uncomfortable truth of it.

Taking responsibility for yourself is one of the hardest things to teach yourself in life. You will still think about it. Every night you try to go to sleep the shadow will come out at night and keep you up. All those repressed traits. People will keep their darkest secrets with them and go through years and years of pain and suffer before confronting it. The reason I believe that we repress our insecurities so much is because we are afraid of being vulnerable. Being vulnerable and genuine is hard. It's hard to trust people. You'll think it'll make people dislike you. But it's really the only true way to make a human connection. A true emotional connection. Being honest, being genuine, and being vulnerable. Saying what you're actually feeling inside.

That is the way of religions, the way of the philosophers — that's what they are all talking about. Living a life true to yourself, true to your deep self. We are living in a paradox — a duality of paradoxes constantly trying to counterbalance each other, a gigantic mess. We are trying to achieve a lasting identity. Something to remember us for — if not us, our family, our offspring, if not them, then what? A symbol? A group? A country? Trying to live with honor? Is any identity correct? Does any identity make sense? Is it just a human need to fit in? Just an illusion of the animal brain to feel like it matters, to feel like it belongs to survive, a code of the simulation, the false reality we are perceiving, the illusion we are living, to fulfill the ego's lasting desire to matter in a world where we're lost and confused.

As it turns out, it's actually very difficult to practice self-criticism, and self-assessment. We like to think we are not fake and we are not putting up a front or face, but... sigh ...

Congitive Dissonance is the cardinal sin in humans. It feels uncomfortable to be wrong, nobody wants to feel that they are wrong, we all want to feel like we are in the right, like we somehow have the correct version of reality... It's so arrogant of us.

Shadow Integration

The less repressed traits you have the stronger and healthier your ego is and the more confident and more emotionally mature you will be around yourself and others.

So this is where good old therapy comes into play. You need to look inside yourself and see what judgements you're casting onto others. And once you know those judgments you need to know how it relates to your own repressed traits. Once you've known the relationship it's time to integrate your shadow.

Don't worry this isn't Calculus. You won't have to know all these integral methods. This is a whole different type of Integration. But this type of pain isn't as mental as it is emotional. And there are a lot of different shadow integration methods out there (I've pretty much listed most of them under my therapy section). The Integral Guide is a great guide to get you started.

This integration starts with being ok with being vulnerable and uncomfortable with the painful moments of life. Taking them one by one and accepting them. I mean that is what all confidence boils down to at the end of the day. Teaching yourself to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Slowly lifting all those emotional weights one by one. The shadow are your weights. They help you grow your emotional muscles. And the shadow is not going anywhere. The shadow is apart of us whether we like to admit it or not.

It is apart of our ego. The parts that we do not like are us - all of it is us. Reality is us, the picture you're seeing, everything you're thinking and feeling, that is all us, but at the same time it's not — its the ultimate paradox.

Shadow Archetypes

So the shadow can kind of have an identity on its own, a persona on its own, an archetype on its own, an alter ego, an unconscious ego, an unconscious alter ego.

One of my favorite examples of this is within the video game Celeste.

Madeline has another character that is inside of her called Badeline. Badeline can be represented as the shadow — of all her negative thoughts, behaviors, and emotions — everything she represses in herself. By treating her shadow as another personality on its own, Madeline interacts with Badeline. She then starts to understand why she thinks certain things and tries to overcome them through self-acceptance of her overall self.

That being said, an unconscious ego can be very dangerous if it's not handled properly. It can contain repressed emotions that only come out during certain moments purely motivated by instinct alone. A character only motivated by animal like desires...

You see where this is going? One of our most repressed traits we have is our own sexuality. Reason being, it's uncomfortable to admit that you want to procreate with someone. I mean that is essentially the pinnacle of vulnerability. There is so much risk and pain involved in it. Yet, despite all of that if we were not able to act on those feelings we would not be here right now. We have primal feelings for reproduction that aren't necessarily logical and because they are so repressed, they actually can become quite dangerous. If the shadow takes over your mind you are no longer in conscious control of it. The shadow has in fact, hijacked your brain.

Your shadow has unconscious biases over your actions. The more aware you become of your behaviors the more you can take responsibility for your actions. In order to do so, we all need to start becoming more comfortable with being a little more uncomfortable.