Can you talk about your own experiences/methods used in integrating the shadow?
Yeah, well, I can actually. I think a tremendous amount of what you would regard as shadow integration which in the parlance of behavioral psychologists would be something like assertiveness training, right? It's training in how to stand up for yourself, and let's say your better self, which would be the self that you can use productively over a medium to long period of time that would be of use to you but also of use to people around you. So, it's a self that's bounded by the necessity of taking care of yourself but also simultaneously taking care of the people around you. I think the simplest way to start that work is to consult your resentment. You know, it's easy to become bitter about life, and to become angry because, of course, life is difficult and it's full of disappointments and people are also subject to betrayal on the part of themselves and on the part of people that hypothetically care for them and so it's easy to get bitter and get resentful, and resentful is a very useful emotion, even though I think it's one of the most damaging emotions if it's not dealt with properly, and so if you're resentful, it basically means either one of two things, it means you should either grow up, quit whining, and get on with your life, or it means that you're being subject to tyrannical forces of one form or another maybe emanating from you, maybe a consequence of the natural environment, maybe a consequence of society. You're being subject to tyrannical forces and you're not putting your own best interests forward. Like in that broader sense that I've described. I don't mean your selfish, narrow interests that only serve the purposes of instantaneous gratification, I mean, your own best interests in terms of developing your character over the span of your life, and if you're resentful, it either means you're immature and you should grow the hell up, and so you need to figure out how much of your resentment is just that, and maybe allied with the desire to find other things or people to blame. But the other possible option is that you have something to say or do, right? Because you're in a situation where your violating your own internal ethical standards and you're being required, pressured, let's say to say things you don't believe, or do things that you believe are wrong, and you need to determine, you need to start to strategize and plan how you can rectify that so you can say what you mean. Like, if you're negotiating with a marital partner, for example, and there are issues in your marriage that aren't making you happy, well, the first thing is you have to take note of that, to see that you are actually unhappy. The second is that you have to be willing to engage in a certain amount of conflict, because in order to sort out what's disturbing you, you're going to have to lay your concerns out on the table, and say, well look, this is bothering me. You don't have to say, well, I'm right, and you're wrong, and you have to fix this, you have to say, well, I've noticed that this pattern of interaction, or lack of interaction in our relationship is making me resentful and angry, and the danger of that is you're going to take it out on yourself and your partner. The danger is passive-aggressiveness, you know, you're not going to respond to your partner positively when they do something good if you're resentful about them, and you're not going to respond to yourself properly, so you have to lay it all out on the table, sort of in the spirit of ignorant humility. It's like, look, I'm frustrated I'm feeling this way about our relationship, here's what I think might be going wrong, maybe on my part, maybe on your part, and here's what I envision may be a possible solution. That's also really necessary if you're going to say what you have to say which is to manifest yourself properly in the world, is, you can't just complain about what's wrong, you have to think, well what would my minimal preconceptions of satisfaction be? You have to offer that to the person you're negotiating with, and so, then you learn to abide by the truth to the degree that you can do that, and no one does that perfectly, because it's very useful because you're not storing up a whole sequence of memories about how you were unfairly treated and abused and betrayed, instead you are trying to stay on top of it, and not your unhappiness and dissatisfaction when it manifests itself, and to accept that that's the case, and to analyze that to see if it's your problem, with regards to maturity, or it indicates that there's an injustice in the manner in which you and the world are interacting and then to work to set that right, even in small ways. So, it's a matter of characterological development, and that makes you stronger over time, and partly what you need in order to do that, and you have to really understand. This is why we built, in the Future Authoring program we built this section where you have to outline your most dismal future, right. What your future would be like if you let all your bad habits and characterological weaknesses get the upper hand. And the reason we did this is because, you can't straighten yourself out merely as a consequence of hope. Let's say you lay out a vision of the future and what you'd like your life to be like, and that makes you hopeful and it motivates you because it gives you something worthwhile and higher order to work for. Right, and that's useful, that's positive emotion working for you, because positive emotion is experienced in relationship to goals. But it's not as useful as also being chased by something that you're terrified by. And if you have a good sense of how you'd fall apart if you stayed weak, and just exactly what kind of hell that would be, then when you determine to do something, like to tell the truth, and to say what you think, and to not do things that you hate, then you're going to be pulled along by the purpose that your vision has provided for you, but also pushed along by your desire to avoid the worst forms of hell that you've already outlined for yourself, personally. And that can also help you be brave enough to stand out in a situation that would require conflict, because if you have something to say, and you have something to negotiate about with someone, then there's going to be a certain amount of conflictual dialogue that accompanies that, right? To lay out a set of problems and to describe the fact, forthrightly, that those problems characterize a relationship, and then to seek for solutions is quite stressful in the short term. And it's really easy to avoid, and so people avoid it all the time, and then they store up grievances across the span of the relationships, and eventually the grievances return in monstrous form and just eat everything up. That's where you get divorces, that's where you explode at your boss and then end up fired, or that's when you develop high blood pressure after 15 years because you can't stand all the accumulated monsters in your closet and you drink yourself to oblivion because you can't stand your life, that's all, you know, very counterproductive, but it's easy to avoid that unnecessary conflict on a moment to moment basis because it's very stressful to speak forthrightly about genuine conflict especially if you're dealing with important parts of your life. But otherwise you don't straighten them out and then you have to carry all that forward. So you have to be terrified of the consequences of not speaking your piece, and that can counterbalance the terror of trying to have a conversation. So, well, and also you have to look at the shadow idea, and you have to get in touch with the depths of your anger. You know, lots of people are resentful all sorts of things, they're resentful about, oh, women, and they're resentful about men, and they're resentful about the patriarchy and they're resentful about the left wing, and resentful about the right wing, and resentful about politicians, and they're resentful about the cataclysmic force of nature, and its ability to make people sick and suffer, and they're resentful about their own inadequacies and their bad parenting, and god, like the list is just bloody endless and that can make you very very angry. That's part of that resentment, and cynical and bitter, and dark, and full of fantasies about destruction and a desire to bring things down, and a wish that everyone else suffered and desire to shake your fist at god, and all of that is really dark. Well, Jung said, you know, the human shadow extends all the way down to hell, and he really meant that, you know, because all of the terrible things that people are really motivated to do, are associated with that shadow domain. Like, none of you are saints, in any likelihood you have a terrible capacity for destructiveness, and when you start to consult your resentment and see how angry you are, it can terrify you to see the depths of that anger, sometimes that will manifest itself in very destructive fantasies, you know. The nice person that's you, so it's quite frightening to open the door and see all that, and that also associates you with the entire dark shadow of mankind, the satanic element of the human character. But it opens the door to understanding as well, to understanding how people could do terrible things, because you could see yourself as one of the people who could do terrible things, that's really useful, you know, because, well then maybe you start being motivated to be the sort of person who wouldn't do terrible things, you know, if you could really come to terms with the fact that that's part and parcel of you. Also, in a perverse sense it's also a discovery of your own strength though, because if you have that desire for aggression, that desire for destruction, that ability to fantasize in that aggressive manner, it also means that you can incorporate some of that into your speech and into your actions so that you're a lot more immovable, right, and a lot more of a force to contend with. It can give you some respect for yourself when you realize that you're a force for destruction as well as creation and you're also a lot more likely to treat yourself with a bit more intelligent caution, to know that a part of you is a ticking bomb in some sense that could go off, and so you tread a bit more lightly around yourself, and maybe you encourage people to tread a bit more lightly around you, which isn't such a bad thing, and all the people I know have a clearly dangerous side and you don't want to have that activated any more than necessary. But it's also what makes them respectable and strong, especially if they have that under control. So, well that's a little bit of a dialogue about shadow integration, it's a very challenging undertaking, to pull in that dark side of your character, and that would be all the things that you've repressed, or failed to develop as a consequence of trying to be a harmless and, or lets say a harmless citizen who looks virtuous on the surface, that's the Jungian persona. And you need that, because everybody needs a mask that they wear in public, like a suit, you know, so that we can tolerate seeing each other on the street, we don't have to look right into our depths every time we interact. We need that persona but that has to be transcended, and the way to transcend that is to integrate the darker parts of the character, they're very useful, that aggression, that sexual demand, all of that is very difficult to socialize, that competitiveness, unbelievably useful in terms of force of character if you could manage it. [...]