Individual & Collective Shadow in the U.S.
What Millions of U.S. Citizens Deny and Project
This newsletter is available in audio format as well. The audio is an unedited reading (by me) of the written newsletter.
In this edition, we’ll take a deeper dive into what Shadow is and is not as I use it here. The November 1 post provides intention, context, and a general trajectory for this newsletter.
Shadow
In mid-March, 2003 I sat with Animas Valley Institute’s Bill Plotkin and others in Payson, Arizona, for five days of an experience entitled “Sweet Darkness: The Initiatory Gifts of the Shadow, Projections, Subpersonalities, and the Sacred Wound.” On the evening of our first day there, the United States began bombing Iraq. So while we were exploring our respective individual Shadows and projections, our country’s collective Shadow and projections — “the evil out there” that we tend to see in other nations, groups, cultures, genders, colors, orientations, and people — was on full display, providing us an opportunity for recognition, ownership, and integration at the national level as well.
Jungian analyst Robert Johnson refers to “persona” as “what we would like to be and how we wish to be seen by the world.…our psychological clothing” — the mask we wear. He refers to “ego” as “what we are and know about consciously” and to “Shadow” as “that part of us we fail to see or know…. that which has not entered adequately into consciousness.”1
In A Little Book on the Human Shadow, Robert Bly posits that behind each of us in childhood, “we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents’ love, put in the bag.” In order to keep our elementary-school teachers happy, we continue to fill the bag, and in high school we further fill the bag in order to please our peers. “We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put in the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again. Sometimes retrieving them feels impossible, as if the bag were sealed.”2 Bly points out that “There is also a national bag, and ours is quite long…. we are noble; other nations have empires. Other nations endure stagnant leadership, treat minorities brutally, brainwash their youth, and break treaties.”3
Bill Plotkin, in Wild Mind, writes that Shadow “is composed of those elements of our psyches that are unknown to us,” — it “is what is true about us that we don’t know — don’t know at all — and, if accused of it, would adamantly and sincerely deny.” He further clarifies that “The aspects we do know but keep hidden (whether we like these aspects or not) are not part of the Shadow.”4
So, Shadow refers to disowned or repressed traits of an individual or group that the individual or group doesn’t recognize in itself and unknowingly projects onto others, whether or not the trait is considered positive or negative and whether or not the others actually embody the projected trait. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t.
If I tend to have a disproportionately highly charged emotional response to people I experience as angry, there’s a good chance that I’ve repressed or disowned my own anger — it’s in my invisible bag. Until I recognize this dynamic and work to integrate my anger, anger will follow me around and allow me to see all these angry people “out there” everywhere I go, while I remain oblivious to being the one constant at every scene of all this anger. Everyone else is angry. I’m not. Oops.5
Reiterating what Plotkin points out, the word shadow is sometimes used to refer to negative or undesired traits that we don’t like about ourselves — which is fine. We might refer to these traits as our “dark side.” These undesired traits that were never in or that we’ve already retrieved from our invisible bag are not what we mean by Shadow in this newsletter, and we’ll provide clarity by using “Shadow” for the Jungian sense of the word. We don’t know our Shadow is there. Our repression and denial are not conscious choices.
Collective Shadow
Collective Shadow, as used here, refers to elements that are common to individuals in the United States. A nation or an organization does not have a discrete psyche or Shadow as an individual does. A nation’s Shadow exists in the collective impact of individual Shadow elements that are common to many — not necessarily all — of its citizens.
As developed in Healing America’s Narratives and expressed in this newsletter, the collective Shadow of the United States historically and currently includes at least these nine traits: ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness, and these traits (and their denial and projection) can be observed throughout American history and current events: a bulleted list of examples appears in the November 1 newsletter. With the intention of owning and integrating our Shadow and healing our narratives, we will be exploring each bulleted item in future posts.
We’ll also be making the case that the collective national Shadow of the United States emerges through an unhealthy, group-centric iteration of masculine energy and a virtual absence of healthy feminine energy. We’ll take a deep dive into each of those italicized words in coming posts as we explore the histories of women, Native Americans, African Americans, the Vietnam War, the post-9/11 wars on terror, and a variety of other current issues and events.
America’s Shadow, One Man, a Gift & a Threat
What you’re reading here and what led to the writing and publication of Healing America’s Narratives have as their genesis a blog post I wrote in 2016 after the Republican party had selected their presidential candidate. It is not hyperbole to state that the 45th president of the United States embodies all nine of America’s Shadow traits and that his life — before, during, and after his time in the White House — presents us with a gift: an invitation to recognize, own, and integrate our national Shadow amid our ongoing American experiment. He also presents us with a threat: his public manifestations of ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness invite to the surface millions of Americans who admire him and these traits, are easily manipulated by him, or both.
We’ll explore this in some detail in future posts, but it’s important to note that this one heir to his father’s fortune is a symptom of deeper American dis-eases that deserve our attention. Donald Trump, danger that he is, did not create the United States of the 3rd decade of the 21st century — the collective national Shadow of the United States created him.
Recommendation: The Plotkin, Johnson, and Bly books cited below regarding Shadow continue to serve me well. Also, Ken Wilber and the folks at Integral Institute developed the 3-2-1 Shadow process, which is deceptively simple. A 6-minute video of John Dupuy, founder of Integral Recovery, walking himself through the 3-2-1 process appears below the notes.
Something to Consider: Evidence of Shadow often appears as a disproportionate emotional response to a person, moment, event, issue, conversation, etc. These two questions can be useful:
What is it about this person, moment, event…etc. such that I respond to it as I do? (That’s the easy, but still very useful externally focused question.)
What is it about me such that I respond to this person, moment, event…etc. as I do? (Internally focused and a bit more skin in the game, yes?)
Be honest with and kind to yourself.
Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark
Side of Your Psyche, (HarperOne, 1991), 3–4.
Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow, (Harper &
Row, 1988), 17–18.
Bly, 26.
Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, (New World Library, 2013), 208. As he uses the word, psyche refers to our “capacity or faculty to experience, both consciously and unconsciously — including through dreams, thoughts, perceptions, imaginings, memories, and feelings.” The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Filed Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries, (New World Library, 2021), 381.
Anger is not necessarily a “bad” thing; it is clarifying. What can go wrong is how we understand anger (awareness) and what we do with it (behavior).