Religion has long created shadow selves in the psyche. I disowned my inner ‘weirdness’ for 20 years and it caused depression and unhappiness until I started liberating myself and embracing my inner weirdness in my thirties. In my family proper and normal were the values pushed and anything weird was frowned upon. We can also grow up afraid of our light, our gifts, our radiance. We can grow up afraid of our perceived darkness, wildness or weirdness. Shadow selves are disowned because they are rejected in the family or even considered dangerous. Then being too caring or loving would not really have felt that safe and so would be rejected and sent away as a shadow self. Perhaps you grew up in a very critical family and you learnt to survive by being critical and judgemental back. If you were raised in a very pushy family where you were encouraged to achieve then being too laid back, or chilled would have been labelled as lazy and therefore the achiever became a primary self. At a certain point the pleaser became a primary self and anything that ran counter to this way of being was rejected and lost over time. Any hint of being too outspoken or loud or rebellious may have been punished. For instance, we may have been raised to be a good boy or girl and encouraged to be nice and pleasing. The shadow is a container for all the aspects we have rejected while growing up. These parts fled deep into our unconscious minds where they continued to remain until something shifted that allowed then to reintegrate with the personality. They are parts of us that were not welcomed in the reality we were growing up and so we learnt to ditch them. Our shadow selves are not dark, evil, or dangerous. When our authentic self is hidden beneath layers of conditioning then we will not be fully ourselves until something or someone comes along to wake us up. This story highlights the problem where our nature is like that of the young tiger and we are raised in a culture and family to think, feel, see and behave like a goat. Then the two tigers disappeared together into the forest. When he finished chewing, the young tiger stretched, and then, for the first time in his young life, he let out a powerful roar-the roar of the jungle cat. There forced the young tiger to take a bite from the dead goat. Frustrated by this lack of comprehension, the old tiger dragged the young one back to the place where he had made his kill. But the young tiger was unimpressed with his own reflection it meant nothing to him and he failed to see his similarity to the old tiger. The old tiger grabbed the young one by the scruff of the neck, dragged him to a nearby creek, and showed him his reflection in the water. He did not know what to make of this full-grown tiger who smelled like a goat, bleated like a goat, and in every other way acted like a goat. Although the old tiger was a veteran of many hunts, he had never in his life been as shocked as he was when he confronted the young tiger. The rest of the goats ran away as soon as they saw the old tiger, but our little tiger who believed he was a goat saw no reason to run away, of course, for he sensed no danger. All went well until the day that an older tiger approached the goat herd and attacked and killed one of the goats. ![]() The tiger cub grew up among the goats believing he, too, was a goat. Approaching the dead tigress, they discovered her new-born cub and adopted him into their herd. The goats, who had run away, returned when they sensed that the danger was over. ![]() But the stress of the chase forced her into labour, and she died as she gave birth to a male cub. She gave chase and, even in her condition, managed to kill one of them. ![]() One day when she was out hunting she came upon a herd of goats. Once upon a time there was a tigress who was about to give birth. This story comes from that wonderful book Embracing Ourselves by Hal and Sidra Stone. This connection is very Freudian since Freud, believed the unconscious mind was a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression.įor me there is a better story that highlights what the shadow is really about. That if we do not keep it suppressed it will take over our life and destroy or ruin us. ![]() This story highlights the fear we have about the dark portions of our shadow. In the story Hyde begins to take over the personality and as a result wreaks havoc on his life. Jekyll represents the respectable part of one’s personality, and Mr. Hyde is a story written by Robert Louise Stephenson that in some ways appears to be the archetypal shadow story.
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