Bestow Love on the Unlovable Parts of You
One of Jung’s most important concepts is the idea of the shadow. The shadow is not synonymous with evil, though great evil can surely come from our shadows. Rather, I would define the shadow as those parts of us, or of our groups and organizations, that, when brought to consciousness, are troubling to our concept of ourselves, contradictory to our professed values, or intimidating in what they might ask of our timid souls.
Learning about and confronting our shadow is a central moral problem. This means that we have to be able to recognize our narcissistic motives, our cowardly retreats, and our slippery deal making with our values and still not be overwhelmed by guilt for our “unlovable” parts. I have always been moved by the two-millennia-old observation of Philo of Alexandria that we should be kind because everyone we meet has a really big problem. Remembering that allows me to be kind to many on this earth with whom I would otherwise have conflict. But I confess that I have trouble applying it to myself, given my expectations for myself. I cannot deny what I know. I cannot exempt myself from the radical scrutiny that I can apply to others, and I cannot evade accountability for whatever spills into the world through me. Thus, I find it hard to lend myself that respect, that level of forgiveness that I can so often grant to others.
Terence reminds me “nothing human is alien to me.” So in my personal inventory, I must include the cheat, the coward, the lascivious, the penurious, even the violent. I may claim that I have never murdered someone, but perhaps unconsciously I have murdered my own potential, murdered my best dreams or those of others, or in my distractions and rationalizations, colluded in the many murders that go on in this world every day. Yet to acknowledge such complicity, such collusion, is to feel overwhelmed by sludge, reduced to a static, passive, even pathetic lot. Still, is it not the beginning of wisdom to recognize that what is wrong in the world is also wrong in me and that what must be righted in the world begins with me, rather than preaching to my neighbor?
Jung observed that a shadowless person is a superficial person. I have met a few persons through the years who claimed to have no shadow. They lived well, meant well, brought no overt harm to others, but they failed to see the nuances of their behaviors, the unintended consequences of their choices, or the pallid lives they conducted. One of the surest ways to learn something about our shadow is to ask those who really know us, perhaps those who live with us, to let us know what it is in us that annoys them, hurts them, impedes them. Not many of us would willingly invite such a potential indictment, yet it is played out every day in our relationships, through our children, and in our unwitting contribution to the pathologies of our times.
Anyone who becomes conscious over the years must occasionally look back and shudder: What was I thinking? Why did I do that? Why did I not do what I knew I wanted to do then? And so on. The list of particulars is as long as we have lived and continues to grow. Possibly the largest of the shadow issues still lies ahead. I find that the biggest shadow issue, that which people most resist, most rationalize away, most avoid, is the magnitude of the unlived life. As we just heard, Jung observed that the greatest burden the child must live is the unlived life of the parent. I suspect equally that the greatest burden our souls must bear is the unlived life. There is something in us, all of us, that knows what is right for us, which path is ours and not someone else’s, something that pushes us beyond our comfort zone into areas of growth, development, and presence in this world greater than we have lived up to this point. We all have — to use the ancients’ term — a daimon, a guiding spirit, a link to the larger energies, that courses not only through us but also through the universe. The daimon, as the ancients understood it, was a tutelary spirit, an agency linking the microcosm with the macrocosm. All of us have had this experience, especially in childhood, but when that voice, that prompting, comes later, it feels threatening because it asks too much of us, or at least it asks that which wedges us out of our comfort zones. It is in those moments that we defer, repress, or distract the inner voice and choose the more comfortable path. How many people have told me that they wish to do something, write a book, for example, and how many ever do it? They fail to understand that they have to lay themselves down before their fears and sacrifice their persuasive comforts to do so. They have to put aside self-doubt, bring the discipline necessary to every day, show up in a larger way than feels comfortable. And when they don’t do this, something inside of them knows it and sours, mourns, grieves. And the more this flight occurs from whatever wants to live through us, the larger the shadow grows, the more intimidating our life becomes. After all, if I cannot face myself, admit my fears, and still wrestle with what wants to come into the world through me, how will I ever take on the outer fears found so readily in this world?
In the ever-growing inventory of self-criticism, we find it more and more difficult to forgive ourselves and to move on in service to life. Of course, there are those who move blithely through life, unaware and uncaring of consequences to themselves and others. Some of them are sociopaths and live in an arid emotional desert. They stopped feeling a long time ago. But most are not. They simply try to stay one step ahead of their lives, ahead of consequences, and have ready rationalizations that even they know are spurious.
But far more commonly, people sink under the weight of guilt, shame, or betrayal. These pernicious emotions represent a necessary recognition of harm done yet continue to poison the soul with the enervating toxins that impede change. While all the twelve-step programs promote a self-inventory, a laundry list of harm brought to self and others, they follow with the recommendation that one should seek confession and make amends with those harmed, when doing so would not bring further harm. That all makes sense. But one has to add one’s own name to that list of those harmed, to the list of those needing amends and reparation.
Just as any of us may have regrets for things done and for things not done, so do we also have to see in what way the legacy of those choices continues to affect others, or perhaps continues to metastasize within us. Such unconscious compensatory treatments of this discrepancy can show up in anesthetizing behaviors, lives of distractedness, or lives of compulsive compensation. The unfinished business of the past can show up through the dominating business of the present. It can show up in our avoidance of new initiatives, our self-sabotage, our flight from engagement with various zones of sensitivity. Clearly, the past does not go away and is not past. Again, the real question is, What does it make us do, and what does it keep us from doing?
How can one say then that one must learn to love these unlovable parts? One of the paradoxes of the life of Jesus was his admonition to love the enemy, to embrace those who persecute us. How impossible an idea can that really be? Frankly, it is so impossible that most of his adherents don’t even bother to try anymore and have ready rationalizations to legitimize this moral sleight of hand. To love the enemy would then ask me to love myself as my enemy as well.
If we are living in accord with our inner reality while simultaneously suffering the depredations of this discordant, dis-eased world, we nonetheless have supportive energies, clarifying affects, and a sense of purpose. When we get off track, these same manifestations turn against us. While the world rushes to pharmacology to numb the inner discord, the question remaining is simply and obviously this: What does the soul want, as opposed to our protective but regressive complexes? This simple question is intimidating because such an agenda can very quickly lead to the larger rather than the smaller in our lives, necessarily reframing our sense of what our life journey is about.
Anyone with a modicum of conscious awareness of oneself may discard self-respect as the first casualty of naiveté and inflation. But then how does one live a productive, growing life after that? Having a casual, untested self-esteem is overrated. If you are busy doing the life you are meant to do, rather than just being busy at being busy, you will find old questions of self-esteem slip into the background.
The more thoughtful we are, the longer the list of things that ask forgiveness. Given that it is so hard to forgive ourselves when we are sensitive to those around us, I have always drawn some leavening from the concept of grace. Theologian Paul Tillich expressed it best when he defined grace as accepting the fact that we are accepted, despite the fact that we are unacceptable.1 Yes, given the accountability of a thoughtful, conscientious adult, our list of shortcomings is long indeed. And yet, given that we too are only human, sensitive, vulnerable, bound to our wounding history, then why can we not also lend a measure of grace to ourselves as we might readily to others? Since when are we exempt from the human condition? Why are we an exception to Philo’s recommendation of kindness, given that we too are persons in a rather big crowd with really big problems? Why are we judged more than the other? Is not our radical condemnation of ourselves a narcissistic variant of our “specialness”? Is it not a form of peculiar narcissism to fault ourselves even more than others? Is it not a perverse satisfaction to deny to ourselves the grace we can bestow on others? Is it not a failure of love to be unable to love even the unlovable parts of ourselves?
The capacity to love our unlovable parts is not an endorsement but a recognition that they are also part of who we are. These troubling zones of the soul are what give form and depth to the human gestalt, without which we would be but creatures of our environment, automatons of “goodness,” conditioned by overwhelming forces of sanction, social pressure, and accommodation. These parts are what give us character rather than the thin-souled one-dimensional creatures we were sometimes raised to be. These unlovable parts are what make us most human and therefore most worthy of grace and of love. Only grace, which accepts, and love, which heals, can ever lead us to a larger spiritual life, lest we remain mired in recrimination and derogation of the richness of the soul. Furthermore, paradoxically, only in the act of loving these unlovable parts of ourselves, which our ego consciousness sees as other, can we ever love others. This acceptance of others starts at home, by accepting the other that resides within us as well. I am still working on this myself, but I am working on it.