Romancing the Shadow

by Connie Zweig

  If they become involved at a young age with a spiritual teacher or religious community, they may become insulated from the difficulties of the larger world, avoiding its limits and even professing that it is illusory. They may enjoy the safety of a like-minded group that serves as a surrogate family. And they may feel special, even chosen, as their parents had implied. Finally, they may find a target for the projection of the Self, becoming part of a divine twinship with an “enlightened” teacher that confers special status.

  Despite the dangers of the puer’s flight from reality, from the point of view of the cultural shadow the puer stands for youth and openness, as against age and rigidity; spirituality, as against materialism; creative possibilities, as against mere production; and imagination and talent, as against conventionality and uniformity.

  For the man who is strongly influenced by this pattern, shadow-work does not mean merely getting tough or getting serious; it does not mean simply making a shift to its opposite, the traditional form of masculinity or senex. Instead, it involves finding an appropriate place at the table for the puer character, who can dream of future creative possibilities while the man, who works to become more deeply connected to his masculine body and soul, also builds a grounded life in the world. This developmental task can be achieved through the rigors of psychological work, intimate relationship, and creativity, each of which can give voice to the banished characters and connect the conscious mind to the unconscious depths.

  THE MOTHER’S DAUGHTER: RECLAIMING MASCULINE SHADOW

  Whereas the man who identifies with his same-sex parent carries traditional feminine qualities in his shadow, the woman who identifies with her mother may carry certain masculine traits in her shadow. Vanessa was born to an unmarried woman in her forties who worked as a librarian. Her mother’s mother also raised her daughter alone. In both households, the message was conveyed that men cannot be trusted. In this way, Vanessa’s natural attraction to men and the masculine was hindered, even betrayed.

  Throughout her childhood and teen years, Vanessa and her mom were inseparable. They studied together, shopped together, and went to the theater together. They both enjoyed doing pottery and, in these ways, Vanessa’s mother transmitted the creative spirit to her daughter. However, like Charles, Vanessa came to feel responsible for her mother’s happiness, learning to be a generous and polite caretaker. But, on the inside, both women suffered from low self-worth, fear of poverty, and loneliness.

  When Vanessa turned sixteen and wanted to learn how to drive, her mother refused, saying that it would not be necessary because she would always be there to drive her daughter. Reluctantly, Vanessa obeyed, extending the natural period of her dependency and denying her yearning for independence.

  Vanessa remained an innocent maiden or kore, in her mother’s home as her mother’s best friend, until she was twenty-two. Like Laura, the daughter of Amanda in Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie, who remains trapped in her mother’s fragile glass images, Vanessa at times felt like a hostage. But perhaps because she knew so little of the world, much of the time she felt complacent in her self-enclosure, contained in her mother’s warmth and affections.

  And then, one day, she encountered Bret, a high-strung young man whose black-leather, motorcycle-riding charisma captured her attention. Like Hades, who abducted Persephone in the Eleusinian mysteries, he arose from the underworld to seize her youth and wrench her away from a sheltered, mother-centered life. Initiated into the wildness of new sexuality and the adventures of an independent life, Vanessa stayed away from home for longer and longer periods. Her mother entered a period of Demeter mourning, feeling as if she would rather die than face the loss of her daughter.

  Like this mother’s daughter, many children today are caught in a web of enmeshed family patterns. Invaded by incestuous fathers or controlled by intrusive mothers, they are forced to become alternate spouses, feeding love to monstrous, all-consuming parents. In some cases, only the sudden, threatening appearance of a Hades-like underworld figure can tear them away. Hades may wear the face of a drug dealer who seduces a young teen into another kind of dependency. Or he may use the sounds of heavy metal music or the lure of dangerous sex to break the hold of a tyrannical parent. Hades also speaks through the violent images of film and television, which offer a vicarious, symbolic journey through death and rebirth. For some, Hades is a violent rapist who steals our innocence at great cost, resulting in trauma and even suicide. For others, he is a depressive mood that pulls us down from the light world of ego into the dark world of shadow.

  For the fortunate few who have an underworld guide and the tools of shadow-work, Hades can be the initiator of independence, an agent of self-discovery. Fortunately for Vanessa, she found her way to therapy and began to do shadow-work on her relationship with her mother, sorting out light side from dark side. As she uncovered the shadow qualities that she had absorbed unknowingly from her mom, she could hear the negative voice of her mother complex as a character at the table: She should not trust men; in effect, she should not trust anyone but her mother. The original betrayal had served as the catalyst for her development; it brought her into therapy and forced her to face her desire for and fear of a relationship with a man, which became the focus of her shadow-work.

  Slowly and cautiously, at age twenty-three, Vanessa began dating. She did not wish to replicate her family pattern of a life without men. And, like Persephone, who returns to her mother in spring and to her underworld husband in winter, eventually Vanessa learned to hold the opposites of light and dark, no longer a puella girl but a queen in her own realm.

  THE FATHER’S DAUGHTER: RECLAIMING FEMININE SHADOW

  Whereas the mother’s daughter identifies with her same-sex parent, the father’s daughter identifies with her opposite-sex parent and thereby banishes certain traditional feminine qualities into her shadow. Deborah, forty-six, began shadow-work when a relationship with a younger man ended after two years and she admitted to herself, perhaps for the first time, that she would never have children. Depressed and suffering from insomnia, she drank three cups of coffee to awaken each morning and smoked marijuana or drank wine to relax at night. As she sat in a large, overstuffed chair and sobbed uncontrollably during the first therapy session, surprised and embarrassed at her outburst in front of a stranger, she looked a bit like a lost child, except for the cigarette burning in her right hand. Although she was an accomplished actress and a politically active feminist, Deborah felt anxious, alone, and, above all, disoriented by her recent self-reflection.

  She had never before told her life story, and it flowed from her like a river that had been dammed up for years. “We lived on a large ranch outside of Denver and, as a young girl, I was left alone a lot with the animals. Always in blue jeans and dirty shirts, I helped to plant and harvest the garden and loved to watch the horses and cows give birth. As I got older, I began to ride the horses and liked nothing better than to ride all day. I felt most alive outdoors and, long after dark, my mother would have to convince me to go inside for dinner.

  “My dad worked as a doctor in town and stayed away a lot to go to the theater at night. When he did come home, we took long hikes and talked about the theater, which led me to dream about becoming an actress. I adored him and thought of him as the perfect gentleman. He dressed in expensive clothes and frequented the best restaurants. A pillar of the community, he sat on the board of the local charity and just looked like the ideal father. He pretty much left my mother, whose family had owned the ranch for three generations, with a couple of staffers to run the ranch. But when he returned, the mood in the house changed. We would all have to sit down to dinner together at seven o’clock and try to be a family.

  “My parents seemed more unhappy when they were together than when they were apart. They weren’t alcoholic or abusive or anything like that. But my dad would make subtle, cutting remarks about my mother’s appearance or about the dinner, and she would become sad. I remember one inc
ident in particular when I was about seven years old. He instructed my mother to set the table differently and, hanging her head, she obeyed. I think this moment left an indelible mark on me: I told myself that I did not want to be anything like my mother. I couldn’t stand her subservience. And if that’s what women do to be married, I would rather remain single.”

  With that remark, Deborah took a deep breath and looked up. “Well, I guess I got what I wished for.” Then she continued, “But I really don’t understand how it happened, how I never married or had a child. I mean, my family was not all that bad, compared to most. How could I be such a failure at relationships?”

  Without knowing it, Deborah had identified deeply with her powerful father and the masculine world over her mother and the feminine. She had become a father’s daughter, a girl whose idealized relationship with her father results in an unconscious alignment with him, causing her to reject and devalue her mother and her own feminine qualities, which are exiled into the shadow. Deborah’s father, whose upright persona and superior ways won her heart, had overshadowed her mother in their home. As a result, many of her mother’s hidden abilities remained lost to Deborah.

  Deborah lived out one image of this archetypal pattern of the virgin, the Artemis-style father’s daughter. Unlike Athena, who is also a father’s daughter of Zeus, Artemis does not develop her mind in her self-containment; she develops a connection to nature, a sense of sisterhood with other women, and a brotherly affection for men, beginning with her twin, Apollo.

  The Greek goddess Artemis was born on an isolated, uncultivated island to her mother, Leto, a nature deity who was impregnated and abandoned by Zeus. Artemis had little nurturing or supervision by either parent and, like Deborah, raised herself in the outdoors. When Artemis met her father at age three, Zeus granted her wishes for a bow and arrows, a pack of hunting hounds, mountains and wilderness as her special places, and eternal chastity.

  Like Artemis, Deborah’s experience of mothering was primarily archetypal. She ran wild with the horses and cattle and rested in the arms of Mother Nature. And, like the goddess’s father, her glamorous, all-powerful father remained remote and belittled women. Finally, like Artemis, Deborah unconsciously wished for a solitary life: As a witness to her mother’s humiliation, her ability to identify with traditional femininity was betrayed. She rejected outright the stereotyped roles of women, saying, “I’m unwilling to live through a man or in service to a man.” Vowing not to be vulnerable or dependent, she instead lived out her mother’s unlived life, becoming a vocal feminist who stands for what she called the authentic female voice.

  Today, at midlife, Deborah faces the high price of her inviolability: Her nurturing, vulnerable feelings and her capacity for a healthy dependency have remained in the shadow for so long that she is terrified of releasing them. Even today, she cannot imagine a relationship with a man that does not require her to give up her identity as an independent woman. As a result, she will remain childless.

  Slowly, with shadow-work, Deborah discovered that her contempt for traditional femininity had contaminated her feelings about her own feminine self. She uncovered her mother’s unspoken rage in her own collective projections at men. In her grief about her unborn children, buried beneath her independent persona, she uncovered her own Demeter mourning and thereby came to value her Demeter-style mother, who had been banished long ago by the father’s daughter. Using imaginal writing to explore her grief, she tells of the link between her father’s daughter pattern and her childlessness:

  As I write this piece, I am in midlife, sitting by the warm fireplace in my beachfront home. I let the music go still. I add a log to the fire and step back into the soundless container, pen in hand, facing the empty page, feelings of grief and loss welling up into squiggly lines meant to transmit this moment of my very private life to another, an unknown other, perhaps a woman like myself who also has no demands of feeding schedules or dirty diapers, no breasts that fill at the cry of a small one, no baby-sitters to find or preschool to choose. Another perhaps who is grateful for the absence of these messy interruptions but who wonders, too, in her quiet moments, about small smiles missed, small hands and feet unseen, silky skin untouched, and the first step not taken.

  Does she feel as I do that childlessness is a separate state of consciousness from having children, as distinct as waking is from sleeping? Does she feel as I do that she has taken from her father his most precious dream?

  To my father, childlessness is a stain on my womanhood, a blemish on my worth, a failure of maturity. Adulthood for a woman means in some profound way to birth and care for young ones, helpless and dependent ones, so that to remain childless means to remain a child. To remain childless means to avoid fulfilling a female mandate, to betray a biological gift. I refer here to an inner wound, as if we were meant to grow two arms but grow only one—an amputation to our potential as women.

  The feminist in me rages at this feeling—I was not born to breed. I am enough as I am. I can live independently—without a child—and I shall. But as a single woman coming to terms with not having a child, now incapable of having a child, I carry a secret terror of meeting new men, assuming they all seek to impregnate the one they love; they all seek to re-create themselves; they all dream the dream of family life.

  And I carry a secret shame that no matter what I could produce or create that would make my father proud, I have utterly failed him because he has no young ones playing at his feet as he grows old. This is my fate, and so it is his.

  I ask myself in this moment, How do I stop seeing the world through the eyes of a daughter without becoming a mother? How do I become a woman who did not give birth to children—but did give birth to herself?

  Finally, Deborah returned to the ranch to visit her mother after a decade away. Frail and facing death, her mother admitted for the first time the pain of her own sacrifices, rather than pointing out her daughter’s failures to form a family. And together the two women mourned the end of their family line and jointly planned how to sell the family property.

  To sum up, these four archetypal patterns of ego development and shadow formation emerge inevitably as we are shaped by family and cultural influences. They are a few of the many stories we may tell with our lives, or we are the vehicles through which they express themselves.

  Which parent is your model of ego identification? Who is your shadow parent? Do you fall into one of these four patterns? If so, which archetypal version of the pattern do you live most fully? After you contemplate these questions, you may have a sense of how to reclaim lost aspects of your own soul.

  RECLAIMING MASCULINE AND FEMININE SOUL

  To reclaim authentic masculine and feminine soul, we have several tasks ahead of us: We need to begin to make conscious the hidden dynamics of identification and repression that formed our egos and shadows, respectively. For a father’s son and a father’s daughter, this work involves, first of all, clarifying our more conscious relationships with him and with the masculine principle. We need to look closely at how we have become like our fathers and disowned our father’s qualities, how we have idealized him and rejected him. We need to become aware of how we listen to the inner voice of our fathers as a shadow character who lays down the law like a wrathful god, so that we relive that relationship day after day as his child, his victim, or his rebel. In the end, we must be consciously willing to carry our fathers within us as they once carried us in their arms.

  For example, a child may have adopted some of his traits or tried unsuccessfully to fulfill a career wish that belonged to him. Another may have veered off in the opposite direction to thwart a father’s will. In the one case, the child tries to live the father’s unlived life; in the other, the child tries to escape his influence. Either way, the child is trapped in a dynamic that is determined by unconscious intense feelings about the father, not by conscious adult choices.

  Second, shadow-work for people who are living out these father-dominant patterns inv
olves uncovering the influence of the rejected parent, the mother and the feminine. We can begin by trying to make conscious those aspects of ourselves that we unknowingly absorbed from our mothers, such as an artistic sense or a love of business, wilderness, or children. And we need to examine our mother’s shadow qualities, which we may carry as excess baggage, such as dependency, substance addiction, or deeply buried resentment and rage. We need to become aware of those disliked and rejected qualities in her that we have struggled to disown, because they probably continue to influence us below the boundaries of awareness as shadow characters. And they hold a key to unlocking the depths of soul.

  Our sorrow for the lost mother and our lamentation for the lost feminine goddess have a cultural component as well: Although the personal mother may be present to raise a child, her role may be devalued and her soul diminished in the family, making her psychically absent to a father’s son or a father’s daughter. Or she may have entered the world of work herself and struggled to return to the home with her feminine soul.

  For a mother’s son and a mother’s daughter, shadow-work involves clarifying our relationships with her and with the feminine principle, including those qualities we have idealized as well as those we have devalued. We must be consciously willing to carry our mothers within us as they once carried us in their bodies. Then, we need to explore the more covert influence of our fathers, their blessings and their curses, which we hear in our minds like the whispers of a stern ghost.

  Our sorrow for the lost father and our lamentation for the lost masculine god have a cultural component, too: Many fathers have been called away from their families by the Sirens of sex, work, alcohol, or drugs. Caught in a compulsion, they run toward it and away from their young ones, who suffer their absence and the loss of masculine soul.