You pay a greater price for being so nice and deferential than for consciously showing your Shadow. First, to follow the latter path, you must begin by respecting your own opinions more and those of others less, particularly when it comes to your areas of expertise, to the field you have immersed yourself in. Trust your native genius and the ideas you have come up with.
Second, get in the habit in your daily life of asserting yourself more and compromising less. Do this under control and at opportune moments. Third, start caring less about what people think of you. You will feel a tremendous sense of liberation. Fourth, realize that you must sometimes offend and even hurt people who block your path, which have ugly values, who unjustly criticize you. Use such moments of clear injustice to bring out your Shadow and show it proudly. Fifth, feel free to play the impudent, willful child who mocks the stupidity and hypocrisy of others.
Finally, flout the very conventions that others follow so scrupulously.
In general, consider this a form of exorcism. Once you show these desires and impulses, they no longer lie hidden in corners of your personality, twisting and operating in secret ways. You have released your demons and enhanced your presence as an authentic human. In this way, the Shadow becomes your ally.
Unfortunately, there is no doubt that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
The 'shadow' side of your personality contains all the parts of yourself that you don't want to admit to having. It is at first an unconscious side. It is only through the effort to become self-aware that we recognize our shadow.
It is the unknown "dark side" of our personality—dark both because it tends to consist predominantly of the primitive, negative, socially, or religiously depreciated human emotions and impulses, like sexual lust, power strivings, selfishness, greed, envy, anger or rage, and because, due to its unenlightened nature, it is completely obscured from consciousness. Whatever we deem evil, inferior, or unacceptable and deny in ourselves becomes part of the shadow. The counterpoint to what Jung called the persona or conscious ego personality
It is the sum of all personal and collective psychic elements that are denied expression in life because of their incompatibility with the chosen conscious attitude.
We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate; it oppresses.
It is frightening that man also has a shadow side to him consisting not just of little weaknesses but foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism.
0 Comments