My Father's Shadow

I've been thinking about the Shadow since Ellen first explained it to me-- years ago. I never understood it until recently, when I read this article on Ashok Bedi's blog, Path to the Soul:  http://www.pathtothesoul.com/articles/.

The article, Personal Shadow and World Peace, in the Articles section of the blog, says (just like Ellen explained it):

"Each one of us has an unconscious, neglected, split

off part of our personality, which we repress and

then project onto the other: onto our adversary, the

minority, the illegal immigrant, the foreigner, the

one that provokes our fear, anger, mistrust,

discomfort." 

The meaning is clear enough, but applying it to one's own life is a task that seems impossible, at first. I can hardly accept that the qualities I detest in other people are actually present in me!
Bedi continues:

"Now if we put our reflective lens on ourselves and explore what irks us about this other, in this mirror, we almost always will see a refection of our unconscious shadow self. When we hate a controlling coworker, when we blame the illegal immigrant for stealing our job, we may be coming out of our own trickster, manipulative core, when we see a certain person  as criminally inclined without evidence, we may be coming out of our own unlived criminal shadow."

Well! I must confess that I did not understand this easily with respect to my own life, my own shadow, so I applied the concept to one of my father's attitudes, and now I understand what I did not understand for years regarding his extreme prejudice.

My father spent his adult life despising people who didn't or couldn't work as much as he did, or as hard as he did, people who "blamed everyone else" for their failures or their poverty. He inveighed against "government hand-outs." He expounded disdain for people who hadn't crafted circumstances as fortunate as his own, whose talents had been lacking, whose family had eroded rather than supported efforts to "pull themselves up by the bootstraps."  My father nursed prejudices against all classes people not originating from the same white, middle-class group in which he raised me and my siblings.

One would assume that my father did not understand poverty, could not identify with people whose socio-economic background gave rise to psychological difficulties translating into social problems or deviance, in addition to mere poverty.

In fact, my father grew up in poverty. His parents-- immigrants from Italy-- accepted welfare in order to provide for their eleven children. As a child, my father did not have ten cents to attend a movie on Saturdays with the neighborhood children.  In winter, four siblings shared a bed, keeping each other warm while ice grew along the bedroom walls. Bread and tomatoes  composed many of his childhood meals. The family ate sausage only on holidays.

My father vowed that when he grew up, he would eat sausage every Sunday. Gifted with the blessed combination of ambition, talent and energy, my father distinguished himself in the business of automobile sales, taking a small dealership and growing it into a well-respected regional enterprise, winning honors for quantity and quality all along the way.

Even as a child,  I realized that my father's driving ambition originated from his terror of falling back into biting poverty.  My father realized it, too, and even said so, yet never connected his own experience of poverty with his adult rejection of people who'd never escaped the same.

The Shadow is easy enough to identity in other people, but the task at hand is to shed light upon my own as it dogs me, pulls me down, keeps me in a feedback loop that perpetuates aspects of my life that hinder me from growth as opposed to opening doors.

I've got some ideas. I actually do see it, at times, and I can admit of a portion of it to myself, but only to myself. I can't write about it, at least not here on a public blog. Occasionally, in courageous moods of optimism, I can address the issue in my private journal, but I haven't been able to keep the momentum long enough to effect an improvement. Maybe that will never happen.  Maybe the nature of the Shadow, being unconscious, can never be neutralized completely. I don't know. I'll have to research the issue.

No, I'll have to stop intellectualizing. I'll have to get back to that personal journal and make deliberate efforts to dig into my personal Shadow. Can I do this without an analyst? Can I do it using the concepts and exercises of Progoff's Intensive Journal? I think so, at least a little bit, and maybe a little bit will go a long way.