Romancing the Shadow

by Connie Zweig

  THE LOSS OF THE LOYAL FRIEND

  For the Greeks, friendship, or philia, meant love of soul. For Plato, friendship as a form of Eros encompassed our longing for perfection. For Aristotle, an individual’s capacity for friendship was a measure of the quality of soul. If you did not love yourself, you could not love a friend. If you did not treasure your own gifts and meet the obligations of having them, you could not treasure the gifts of a friend.

  The ideal of male friendship is embodied in the Greek mythical twins Castor and Pollux, known as the Dioscuri. Their mother, Leda, had two sets of boy-girl twins: Castor and his sister had a mortal father; whereas Pollux and his sister had an immortal one, Zeus. The two boys became inseparable, sharing adventures and challenges, such as the quest for the golden fleece. But on one journey, Castor was stabbed and killed, and Pollux became inconsolable. He prayed to Zeus to permit him to die as well, so that he would not be separated from Castor and forced to return to Olympus alone. In compassion, Zeus allowed Pollux to share his immortality with Castor, causing them to spend half their days in Hades and half on Olympus. When that solution became unbearable, Zeus made them both immortal, and today they appear to us in the heavens as the constellation Gemini.

  The twins reveal several aspects of male friendship: They are alike, brotherly, yet they are opposite, mortal and immortal, earthy and spiritual. They are action-oriented, yet they can be supportive and loyal. When one gets wounded, the relationship feels as if it fluctuates between heaven and hell. For some, it may not survive. But with grace it can become immortalized, a soul friendship.

  If one brother is viewed as an inner figure within the other, he may stand for either the mortal shadow or the immortal Self. In this way, the bond can come to signify more than our need for mirroring; it promises to fulfill our deepest longing to be united with something larger than the individual ego by providing an experience of completion.

  For most people, friendship implies loyalty, an allegiance to the bond that transcends circumstance, even life-threatening circumstance. We would like to believe, even unconsciously, that a true friend, like an alter ego, would take on our suffering, perhaps even sacrificing his or her life for ours. This timeless promise is illustrated in a tale of the Trojan War in which Patroclus, beloved friend of the Greek hero Achilles, dons the latter’s armor to fight in his stead. When Patroclus is killed, Achilles is so grief-stricken that he slays his friend’s murderer, even knowing that the act foretells his own death. The two men’s bones are later placed in the same golden jar.

  Where do you witness this kind of loyalty? What engenders it between people? What is being sacrificed between two close friends? What is obligated? What are the limits of your giving?

  Perhaps this loyalty appears today, from time to time, among young children who remain trusting and innocent. One seven-year-old boy who recently fell from a tree onto his head, which resulted in a concussion, told his father that he was glad that he took the fall, rather than his best friend. “I couldn’t stand to see Carl in that kind of pain,” he commented.

  Today, only a few people experience the kind of friendship in which they offer to stand in for another’s fate or to speak from their specialness. Instead, for many of us the word “friend” has degenerated to mean buddy, acquaintance, companion, neighbor, diminishing our fantasies about this potential bond. And, as a result, the deep reciprocity of soul friendship has been lost for us.

  In fact, in interviews, author Lillian Rubin asked people to identify their best friend in an effort to discover whether their designations were reciprocal. To her surprise, she found that 84 of the 132 respondents did not mention the person who originally submitted their name. For all of these people, the feeling of friendship was not mutual. And only 18 out of the 132 people placed that mutual friend at the top of their list.

  This shocking finding is reflected in many of our clients’ stories. Frequently, one friend wants more from the relationship than the other—more time, more talk, more depth. The fuser, who seeks more intimacy, may feel deprived and disappointed when the other does not respond in kind; the distancer, who seeks more spaciousness, may feel intruded upon, even devoured by the love-hungry friend.

  In long-term friendships, these boundaries may fluctuate with changing circumstances, such as a pregnancy in one woman. Then parental complexes can take over and result in shadow-boxing. For example, Lori and Frances had been close since elementary school, sharing the intimate details of their daily lives into their college years. Now in their thirties, their lives diverging, Lori still expects consistency in their intimacy but feels that Frances has pulled away, moving into her own world, which does not include her friend. For Lori, the Third Body of the friendship is wearing thin.

  “We say we’re best friends, but it’s just a manner of speaking. I have to take all of the initiative; there’s no reciprocity. When I sent her a birthday gift, I got no response. When I took my school exams, I got no phone call. Sure, we have a long past to draw upon. But you can use history for only so long. It’s just a crutch if there’s nothing happening in present time.”

  Recently, Frances had a baby and called Lori after a month had gone by, angrily asking her friend, “Why haven’t you come to see the baby? It’s been nearly five weeks.”

  Lori responded curtly, “Why did I have to find out about your baby from your secretary?”

  Apparently, both women felt hurt and neglected, but neither risked the authenticity to say so. Their more proper personas sat in the seats of power. Unconsciously, Lori believed that if she spoke up and expressed unpleasant feelings, such as anger, the relationship would end. She had been taught as a child to be upbeat and sensitive to the needs of others, attuning to their souls, rather than nurturing her own. Unfortunately, she still obeyed this parental voice.

  Of course, Lori secretly wished to speak with her friend about her feelings, but feared that Frances would respond with coldness and indifference. “I know that character in her. Her mother had the same cutting tone: end of conversation. And she hated it when her mother did that to her. Now she does it to me.” When her friend slipped into the trap of this shadow character, Lori felt devalued, resentful, and angry.

  She faced a crisis of commitment: Perhaps, she thought, it was time to let the friendship go. “We could save the friendship if I can really speak without editing. But the violence in her tone frightens me. It reminds me of my rageaholic father and causes me to clam up in silence. Then I feel no hope for our relationship.”

  A week later, with the help of her therapist, Lori told Frances about her bitter disappointment and her irritable feelings, deciding to risk the friendship as it is to see whether it could become something else. At the same time, she told her friend how much she cared for her. Frances was shocked; she had no idea how disturbed Lori had become. When she responded with loving concern, Lori felt as if a huge barbell had been lifted off her back. “Then I could feel the friendship underneath all of those feelings again, and it felt strong and cozy, as if I were coming home.”

  There are many cultural reasons for the loss of consistent, stable friendships, the scarcity of the cherished friend, and the lack of reciprocity between people. With the breakdown of the extended family and the disappearance of community, people have become more mobile, moving to urban centers, where they may meet many new people in a year, and allowing their bonds with older friends to weaken. Their work-centered lifestyles also demand the time that was previously available for leisure, which is required to cultivate and maintain friendships.

  In addition, we tend to devalue people who are not romantic partners as “just friends,” as if they are less important than our mates, as if only romance brings rich reward. When Alex divorced at fifty and lost his father soon after, he felt empty, alone, and a failure at relationship. When the therapist asked him about male friends, he began to tell stories about several men he had known since the 1960s, when they were political radicals together. When he reconnected with on
e man in a distant city, the friend flew into town for Alex’s father’s funeral, surprising him with a depth of concern. Speaking openly of these friends, Alex began to feel less isolated, more capable of friendship, and more accepting of himself.

  Also, our worship of individual autonomy and shaming of dependency needs makes it difficult to admit our deep affections for others or to display our reliance upon them. Men, especially, tend to fear intimacy with one another; they are taught to deny their vulnerability, and they are often refused closeness by their fathers. As a result, they typically find it difficult to lean upon other men or to ask for help. Many rely solely on their wives or lovers for, intimacy, which puts a tremendous burden on their romantic relationships.

  Finally, deep-seated sexism makes it difficult for men and women to be friends. And institutionalized racism makes it difficult for people of diverse ethnic groups to be friends. Yet, for these very reasons, it’s imperative to form these bonds and explore these collective shadow issues; friendship can be a potent antidote to enemy-making.

  Despite these epidemic difficulties, many people fight depersonalization to maintain rich personal lives. They sustain long-distance relationships by phone or electronic mail. They form men’s or women’s groups and shadow-work groups to cultivate a sense of community. And they honor their bonds with weekly meals, monthly rituals, shared child-rearing, joint creative or political projects, and a desire to do shadow-work to nurture the relationships through difficult times.

  SOUL FRIENDS/SHADOW FRIENDS

  Members of other cultures hold rituals to honor the special bond of friendship. In India, each boy is married twice: once at puberty to a friend in a lifelong commitment and again at age sixteen to a wife, also in a lifelong bond. These rites offer the boy a sense of security in relatedness throughout a lifetime. In Germany, too, a friendship ceremony calls for the two people, each holding a glass of wine or beer, to become physically close by entwining arms, then to drink up after making a promise of eternal brotherhood.

  This kind of friendship is not a persona friendship, which may arise from shared circumstances, such as those enjoyed by working colleagues, members of sports teams, or parents of school-age children. Typically, it does not arise from shared aims, such as those pursued by club members with common interest or members of a spiritual community seeking higher consciousness, who may share the transpersonal bond of spirit rather than the more personal bond of soul. In a persona friendship, we may be attracted to the other person’s shields—money, sex, or power—and attempt to win them over for our own benefit, to use them for our own ends. We may get stuck in roles, in which one is the enabler for the other’s addiction, or one holds a superior position while the other feels shame and envy, or the two may simply enjoy an activity together, such as shopping or basketball, without much intimate exchange. Finally, in a persona friendship the two tend to express sentimentality, a substitute, readily digestible form of the deeper, darker emotions.

  Instead, in a soul friendship, we honor and recognize each other’s essential nature. Our roles are more fluid; our respect is mutual; our deeply felt bond does not rely on doing as much as being. Soul friendship requires a loyalty to more than the passing feelings or opinions of the cherished one, a fidelity to more than temporary goals or appearances. It demands authenticity, or loyalty to soul. In effect, it demands that we honor the Third Body of the friendship. In return, it offers a place where we don’t have to hide.

  In addition, soul friendship will have different meanings in different contexts. For young girls who meet in adolescence and suffer a crush on one another, entering the eggshell phase, becoming inseparable, and remaining loyal friends through college, marriage, and child-rearing, a soul friendship survives the passage of time. It endures despite changing circumstances and developmental differences. It may lose its intensity, go latent even for years, or remain the one stable relationship in a lifetime, outlasting even marriage. For the women involved, each has a witness to her life story. If they are lucky, each has a refuge, a place where she belongs.

  For these lifelong friendships, the memory of a shared history is key. Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, supports the bond by permitting the friends to connect through the past when the present-time tie wears thin. As mother of the Muses, Mnemosyne loves musing, narrative, rhyme, and myth, as well as the images that hold narrative together. When friends reminisce, they are less interested in facts and actual events than in symbolic memory, the recollection of intensely felt moments that are endowed with depth. Friendship, like psychotherapy, makes room for this subjective quality of memory.

  Some friends who meet later in life feel as if they recognize one another at a deep, unspoken level; their affinity transcends their personal histories. So they do not need to look backward and recount the past. They simply step into the present moment together as if their bond is timeless, as if a Third Body existed before their meeting and glues together their fates.

  Those who are attracted through affinity, or like meeting like, feel a sense of resonance with the other person, as if he or she is a twin. Like the Greek twins Castor and Pollux, in some African tribes twins are the ideal of best friends. Children born on the same day are considered twins who were somehow separated before birth but who share a lifetime bond. Friends, therefore, share their journeys before life and will do so after life; their destinies are intermingled. They embody the mystery of the two-in-one.

  Others may not experience their affinity as primary. Instead, they may experience the friend’s Otherness as the compelling quality, entering a differentiation phase in which they push against the friend to maintain their own separateness and uncover their own uniqueness. This is friendship as a via negativa, in which the friend is us, yet is not us. The friend is the loyal opponent, the Other who sets our limits and challenges our abilities. In the shadow friend, we meet the Other to find ourselves.

  When Eve, a San Francisco artist and puella free spirit, met Myra, a Chinese-American law student, worlds collided: The combination of their personal and cultural differences was explosive. In reaction to a highly controlling mother, Eve lived a highly unstructured life, free of personal obligations, committed relationships, or work demands. Myra, on the other hand, believed in duty to family, friends, and work; she wished to serve others, to structure her time, and to maintain privacy and simplicity. Both women were drawn to the friendship; each felt mystified by the Other, compelled to explore their differences. Yet, having banished into shadow many of the Other’s qualities, each felt quickly put off, irritable, then angry when hearing the other’s needs in Turkish. As Eve put it, “It’s painful to be at war with my very nature in my friend.”

  For their friendship to survive, Eve and Myra had to practice shadow-dancing; they needed to learn patience with one another and tolerance for their differences. They needed to observe their own shadow projections to see how they contributed to the repetitive cycle of mutual suffering, tie themselves to the breath, and romance those projections. If one had tried to convert the other to her ways, the friendship would have failed. So they slowly and gently explored each other’s preferences in style, temperament, timing, and purpose. In this way, each discovered her own uniqueness, and each discovered the gifts of her shadow sister. Finally, each woman could begin to extend the range of her own repertoire.

  For some pairs, the Otherness is too shadowy, too off-putting, and too uncomfortable. As a result, a friendship cannot even begin. When Brian, thirty-five, met Sam, twenty-eight, in a men’s group and the latter reached out to be friendly, Brian was repelled. He did not know why the other’s man’s approach and the sound of his voice elicited such a strong negative response.

  Brian said, “When Sam speaks, he’s always gentle and soft, as if he doesn’t want to offend anyone. And he talks nonstop about his new-age religion. He believes that if everyone meditated in just the way he does, there would be an end to violence and a new millennium. I can’t stand his blissy attitude, his spiritual
denial of the suffering of life. He’s so self-righteous, as if he has all the answers anyone needs—it drives me crazy.”

  Brian, too, had been involved in a meditation community in his twenties and had become deeply disillusioned with its precepts and practices. Since then, he had married, had a child, and taken on the responsibilities of a working father. When Brian met Sam he also met a past part of himself, a puer character who now appeared to him to be naïve and inauthentic. In Turkish, he heard his own past self-righteousness in the voice of the other man. So he summarily dismissed him.

  But if, instead of shaming these feelings in himself, Brian had worked through them more deeply, he may have felt compassion for Sam, whether he chose to befriend him or not. By not doing so, he got caught in a shadow projection and was blinded to any value in the younger man’s point of view. And he could not choose whether to be acquainted with him more deeply or not.

  James Hillman has pointed out that the Other, who can become a friend or enemy, often seems to be given, rather than chosen. In this way the Other is an instrument of fate. This relationship between shadow friends requires the acknowledgment of deep ties and the fulfillment of mutual obligations. A failure to do so by one member can result in feelings of bitter disappointment.

  Who is your soul friend? Who is your shadow friend? Who have you sacrificed as a result of a shadow projection?

  MEETING THE OTHER: FRIENDS AS PARENTS, FRIENDS AS GODS

  In some friendships, family projections may play a key role; the shadow may scan for a fit to re-create childhood patterns and heal old wounds. A college woman, for example, may idolize her more mature roommate of the same age, becoming dependent on her and gaining a model of femininity that was absent in her home. A man whose early life was shaped by a competitive brother who is close in age may feel rivalry and even antagonism with other men. Or an adolescent may form a bond because a quality that is rejected by her family is accepted by a friend. When she discovers that she can act out this repressed feeling or explore this forbidden behavior, and the friend can tolerate the intolerable trait, she forms a fast friendship.