Romancing the Shadow

by Connie Zweig

  Sally needed to look at her relationship to sex in the present moment and explore whether she could be vulnerable without promises or whether a shadow character was making a Faustian bargain. The therapist asked her whether she would make love if she knew now that the relationship would not last. Sally applied what we refer to as the Principle of No Regret: She imagined herself one to three years into the future, looking back at this moment in time and asking herself whether she regretted her choice. This practice, which can help us to live life with the least amount of regret, can also help us to gain an authentic perspective on a range of decisions.

  Eventually, Sally realized that she deeply enjoyed feeling courted by this man and that something would be lost when this stage of dating ended. She would lose the archetypal power of the virgin goddess when she had sex with him. She feared becoming a routine lover, a withholding wife, or a disappointed, rejected woman. Thus she uncovered deep mythic roots to her concerns about making love. This was not a simple problem, such as a fear of rejection alone. She would be changing status in the eyes of this man, from Virgin to Aphrodite, and she did not want this moment to be undervalued.

  Nor did she want to undervalue her authentic need for security. She wished to honor her anxiety without bulldozing her way through it; she wished to hear the voice of the character that needed to be heard. Her therapist asked her how she could have sex with Bruce and also honor the sacred aspect of the voice of hesitation.

  For Sally, raised to be an independent thinker and a career woman, this desire for security and the dependency needs that go with it live in her shadow—that is, they feel unacceptable to her. She did not know how to feel these needs without feeling ashamed. After identifying these underlying issues and listening to the voices of the characters at the table, she expressed them to Bruce and felt seen, heard, and understood by him. She then felt her authentic desire to make love with him without regret.

  In this chapter, we have tried to reimagine dating as a journey toward self-knowledge through shadow-work. For many people who long for a Beloved and suffer the loneliness and shame of being single, or the feeling of failure that may result from the dating process, we offer our compassion. And we suggest that doing shadow-work on personal issues, family issues, and archetypal motifs may ease your suffering and offer signposts along the way, guiding you toward your destination.

  In the story of Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne, she calls on her father to rescue her. By turning her into a tree, he pulls her back into an earlier state of nature, insulating her from adult intimacy with men, rather than forward into culture, which is represented by the god Apollo. In many romantic liaisons, the opposite-sex parent has a powerful pull on our attractions and on our underlying patterns of intimacy. We will explore this idea in Chapter 5.

  CHAPTER 5

  SHADOW-BOXING: WRESTLING WITH ROMANTIC PARTNERS

  How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

  I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

  My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

  For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

  I love thee to the level of every day’s

  Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

  I love thee freely, as men strive for right;

  I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

  I love thee with the passion put to use

  In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

  I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

  With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

  Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,

  I shall but love thee better after death.

  —ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

  In a famous Greek myth of romance, Eros insists that Psyche make love to him in the dark. Like Eros, many of us want to remain hidden when our passions loosen the reins of the ego’s control. We long to know the Other, but not to be known. We ask probing questions, but reply with half answers. In a myriad of ways, we run from being seen and avoid becoming vulnerable, disguised in tight personas and baggy clothes, hiding in sordid addictions and clandestine habits.

  And yet, right alongside the urgent longing to know the Other and the refusal to be known is the converse longing: the urgency to be known and the refusal to see. Like Psyche we open our arms to love, but we may not open our eyes. We consent to temporary blindness, giving our sweet love to unknown others, people who are not what they seem, people who become strangers with the light of dawn. Like Psyche, we follow the lead of Eros, god of love—and when we light a candle in the dark, we are shocked at his Otherness.

  For this reason the divinity of desire has been called Eros the bittersweet. With the sweetness of love, the bitterness of shadow is evoked. And our desire, which seems to be such an intimate friend, comes to appear as a hostile enemy that brings longing, envy, and even hate in tow.

  We long for wholeness, a greater unity that stems from meeting the Beloved, our other half. Eros, our archetypal longing, causes us to reach for that which is missing; our desire is organized around this radiant absence. And we yearn to melt into the Beloved, to find there the missing piece, and to lose ourselves in a paradise of everlasting love. Jung expressed this universal quest of the human soul in this way: “The soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a ‘You.’ Wholeness is a combination of I and You, and these show themselves to be parts of a transcendent unity whose nature can only be grasped symbolically.”

  Yet as the god spreads its wings of desire, it blinds us to the reality of what is there. In this chapter we move from the tentative exploration that defines dating to the spell cast by romantic love and the infamous blindness that results. We will learn, through the stories of many couples, how romance leads us through dark alleys to the meeting with the Other, the stranger who appears in our most intimate moments to sabotage our feelings of familiarity, safety, and love. And we will show how shadow-work can transform the painful consequences of romantic blindness, so that eyes blinded by persona can see ever more deeply into soul. By reexamining relationships from romance to marriage in the context of the shadow’s hidden needs, eventually we can move from shadow-boxing with the Other to shadow-dancing with the Beloved. We can pierce the veil of illusory projection and see our partner with clear perception. Then we will discover that the Beloved is both the solution and the problem; the Beloved is the answer and the question to be asked again and again.

  Who do we spend our entire life loving?

  MEETING THE OTHER: PROJECTIONS HIT THEIR TARGETS

  When two people meet and feel a deep connection, their hearts open like flowers. So do their imaginations. Five-year-old Ned, a blond-haired blue-eyed cutey, played in the park with his parents when a young girl, about his age, approached. She said, “You look just like John Smith in the Pocahontas movie.” Ned grinned and his little chest filled with air. He announced to his parents that he had a new girlfriend.

  Projection begins at a young age. We view it as a natural, unavoidable process, not a pathological problem to be rid of or a symptom to be cured. Through projection, the unconscious mind expels both positive and negative traits, attributing them to other people, whereby they can become conscious. Because by definition the unconscious is hidden, like the dark side of the moon, we need to discover indirect ways to catch glimpses of it. And projection is a primary way of doing so.

  Rob, an architect in his forties who has been married to his second wife for ten years, recalled how he met his first in an instantaneous romantic projection. “I walked into a college dorm and saw this blond-haired girl sitting on the couch. She was swinging her legs, wearing bobby sox and loafers, to the music of Simon and Garfunkel. I walked up and told her that we would be married one day. She told me I was nuts. But two years later, we were husband and wife.” Five years later, they were divorced.

  Carrie described a first date with Vince, who appeared on a motorcycle in black leather boots and jacket. She
stood on the balcony above and said to herself, “My Romeo has arrived.”

  Projection is like shooting an invisible arrow. Each of us carries a kind of archer’s quiver strapped on our backs. Every so often an arrow shoots out unpredictably, and we say something nasty or we fall in love. When we turn around to find out where the arrow came from, the quiver moves out of sight.

  If the receiver has a soft spot to receive the projection, it sticks. For instance, if we project our anger onto a dissatisfied mate or our seductive charms onto a good-looking stranger, then we hit the target and the projection holds. From then on the sender and receiver are linked in a mysterious alliance, which could feel like erotic passion, intense disgust, or unbearable envy.

  Julia, twenty-nine, a slight, wiry woman who works as a pastry chef, reported breathlessly that she had found the man of her dreams two weeks before. She knew nothing about him, but because of the look in his eyes and the sound of his voice she was certain that they would be married by the end of the year. The therapist asked her to write a short piece about her internal experience of the moment of their encounter:

  Her eyes seek the Fit, the match between her world and his. The parallel lines, the flush corners, the edges that rub up against each other. She feels for the Fit, the mesh, the weave that joins her with him.

  She saw him in a moment across the empty, white-walled room. She saw him with her whole body. It cried out with the Fit. It moved her toward him relentlessly on a one-way vector; no return. He sat still, waiting. Her body sat nearby and began to pulse. The air between them felt thick, resonant, palpable. The Fit was screaming from her cells.

  She looked into his eyes and said slowly, “I’ve been waiting for you for so long.” He nodded and said slowly, “I know.” The Fit smiled in her cells. Nothing had prepared her for this moment. She was perfectly prepared.

  We might wonder why the sender shoots these arrows into others. Poet Robert Bly uses the following metaphor: When we were very young, we had a 360-degree personality, which radiated energy from all directions. But the adults around us could not tolerate this much exuberance. So, in their own discomfort, they unintentionally but inevitably betrayed us by shaming and humiliating us for certain feelings, such as vulnerability, or behaviors, such as competition, which we then learned to hide. Our teachers may have scolded us for other behaviors, such as daydreaming, or our priests may have imposed terrible guilt for our sexual feelings. These denied, disowned parts of our souls—anger or depression, jealousy or resentment, intellectuality or sensuality, athletic or artistic ability—get exiled into the dark. As a result, the full circle of energy that was our birthright is sliced away piece by piece, leaving only a thin, proper facade to greet the world.

  When we begin dating, as a natural part of development the shadow goes in search of its lost traits in others in an effort to recover the full range of our personality—the gold in the dark side. Like Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy (aka Bones), who does a high-tech DNA check on his patients within minutes of their first contact, the shadow scans for a love fit, looking for the “one.” When we find romance and fall in love, our unconscious fantasy image of the Other often is a composite of familiar parental qualities, which we inherited through identification, and our own neglected traits, which we banished into shadow through repression. When we feel a harmonic match with another person, a seemingly magical feeling of familiarity or resonance—the Fit—a part of us begins to believe that our soul’s dream of acceptance and belonging can be fulfilled.

  Without our knowing it, the shadow is at work attempting to recreate early childhood relationship patterns with a secret mission—to heal old wounds and feel loved. We view this inevitable childhood projection as the first stage of romance, a kind of fusion that may feel like living inside of an eggshell, an enclosed form in which the couple feels nurtured and self-contained. Like two chicks in the shell, they feed one another on love, which speeds the growth and development of both. Other friendships may fall away as the partners imagine meeting all of each other’s needs and fulfilling all of each other’s desires.

  Then, one day, inevitably, the shell cracks—and the relationship breaks down. The old rules, often unspoken, which previously provided security (“You are all that I need” or “I pay for everything, so we have sex when I want it” or “You carry the feelings for both of us”) no longer hold, and the partners face a crisis of commitment. Once the shell has been cracked, it cannot be put back together again. The partners may try, but they have entered a new stage of relationship: They are now too well developed to remain fused. For those who do not know that this is a natural developmental crisis, the relationship will end, and the partners inevitably attempt to re-create the eggshell with the next person. But for those who can negotiate the new rules, which allow for greater individuality and authenticity, the partners can go play in the chicken yard—a larger psychic space with more room for individuality and clear boundaries—and yet remain a couple. Then the relationship can begin again.

  What traits does your lover carry for you that creates the unconscious attraction between you? What do you give to him or her that might be returned to your own treasury? How would that influence the way you live your life?

  COMPENSATING THE OTHER: TWO PARTS MAKE A WHOLE

  At the same time that we send projections, we also carry them for others. Some people tend to draw certain kinds of projections toward them. The receivers’ shadows also try to heal old wounds through being seen deeply, feeling adored or respected. But those who receive the arrows of projection pay as steep a price as those who send them—being seen via projection is not being seen authentically. For example, women who carry Aphrodite energy speak about the pain of feeling objectified as an image of beauty and of being envied by other women; at the level of soul they often feel unseen and misunderstood. And men who are chosen for their Adonis sex appeal or their wealth and power also may question whether they are viewed as objects or seen in their authenticity.

  The shadow’s aim of completion via the new partner explains why opposites attract—optimists and pessimists, pursuers and distancers, extroverts and introverts, artists and scientists, pragmatists and spiritual seekers together make one whole. Consequently, through an unspoken division of labor, many couples operate like one person, trading strengths and weaknesses with the Other throughout a period of compensation.

  Then they may discover, at some point down the road, that just those traits in the partner that seemed the most attractive—part of the shadow’s solution—become the least attractive—part of the problem. “He’s so strong and commanding” becomes “He’s such a power freak.” Or “She’s so sensitive and nurturing” becomes “She’s so overly emotional and dependent.” Of course, because we have rejected these qualities in ourselves, at some deep level we are repelled by them in the other person.

  Without shadow-work, shadow-boxing is inevitable: As the partners reject their disowned qualities in the Other, they get drawn into painful, repetitive fights, inevitably ending up hurt and angry and perhaps separating from each other. In defending against the pain, we also defend against the love. But with shadow-work, a partner may rediscover his or her own rejected traits in the projections and learn to romance them. In this way, the sources of conflict can be viewed as sources of opportunity; the relationship becomes a means to find gold in the dark side both in ourselves and in our partners. As a result, our partner, who felt like an enemy, becomes an ally to our soul. And the relationship deepens.

  But other problems may arise as well. When one partner begins to retake possession of lost parts of him or herself, the Other no longer needs to compensate for a lack and therefore no longer serves as the source of the partner’s sense of wholeness. Ted, who was attracted to Carol’s outdoor Artemis qualities, her love of nature and animals, is now a competent camper himself and no longer depends on her to blaze the trails outdoors. If their relationship were based, even to some degree, on her competence and his incompetence,
chaos could result. The two would need to discover deeper sources of connection.

  Shirley believed, since she was a young child, that she was unintelligent and uncreative, so she used a sexual shield to feel and appear attractive and to compensate for her feelings of inferiority. She habitually became romantically involved with highly creative but unavailable men, seeking that which she yearned for outside of herself. As she gradually discovered her own creative voice, her unconscious attraction to creative, unavailable partners faded. Eventually, she used her seductive powers less and her authentic feelings more to establish contact with men.

  Joel, a forty-six-year-old screenwriter, was divorced by his home-maker wife after a twelve-year marriage. Accustomed to intimacy and a supportive woman, he felt surprised at the strength of his attraction to Ellen, a stockbroker, who clearly thrived in her autonomy. During their first six months of dating, they enacted the Daphne and Apollo myth: He pulled her in, while she pushed him away.

  As they became more romantically involved with each other, they entered the eggshell stage: Joel did not wish to face his separateness and independence and tried to feel safe through fusion with Ellen. In response, she created a power shield and clung to her separateness for safety, judging his dependency needs and her own as unacceptable. Whereas he feared abandonment most of all, she feared being overwhelmed by his neediness.

  Their patterns quickly became problematic: Joel felt that he could never get enough love from Ellen, as if he stood at the watering hole but was not allowed to drink. Ellen, self-contained like an Athena-style woman, felt smothered, unable to breathe her own air. When her emotional claustrophobia reached a peak, a destructive part of her picked up a metaphorical sword and lashed out at Joel with cruel words, cuttmg their intimacy in an effort to restore her sense of safety. Each time this pattern recurred, they faced a crisis of commitment.