A little shadow reminds us there’s a sun

I saw The Secret. I've thought positive. I’ve affirmed. I’ve meditated on outcomes that came to pass. I’ve banished bad moods with good thoughts and chased away depression with gratitude. In general, I strive to be “positive.” Nobody wants a bitter, dried-up therapist. For the most part, self-help has helped my Self be a bit nicer and more well adjusted.

But I get really sick of the mystique that surrounds the self-help movement, and the subtle pressure and repressed negativity that shrouds it. People are remarkable at turning something innately neutral or good into an instrument of self-punishment. It’s not much of a leap to go from "I work to stay positive" to "Omigod, I’m such an ass because I can’t stay positive." Not many of us feel positive all of the time, but many of us feel we "should". In that vein, too much positivity can turn an interesting person into a glassy-eyed automaton spouting meaningless catch-phrases.

In truth, life is up and down, and things happen to us that knock us off course. The world contains famine, war, poverty, and violence. People treat us poorly and we have to readjust and set boundaries. We often behave in petty and obnoxious ways. If our attitude towards the transgressions against us, the things that bother us, and our own shadow sides is to ignore it and send it all away into a bubble of white light, then we are unconscious. When negativity is repressed and unconscious, we are more susceptible to its impact than if we are conscious to it.

Plus, if you are always forgetting the negative, isn’t that the perfect opportunity to gloss over your own bad behavior and avoid the chance to apologize? It’s also the way to ignore the voice in your gut that tells you that a situation is not right, not just, and not meeting your needs?

Jungian psychology defines shadow as the parts of ourselves that we deny, that we find offensive to integrate. Jungian psychotherapy focuses on integrating the shadow as a way to healing of the psyche. The idea is that we can contain all parts of ourselves, acknowledge our hateful and rage-ridden parts so as to have greater choice not to act upon them. Holding the good and the bad about ourselves and others in our consciousness at the same time promotes integration and healing. We can recognize our collective addiction to burning fossil fuels while trying to find a way out of the cesspool it’s put us in. We can understand that we get jealous and petty and then find strategies to avoid hurting others during those moods. We can allow failures to inform and inspire us onward rather than as proof positive that we aren’t manifesting our dreams well enough.

Repression leads to projection, and transferring all the negative parts that are inside onto those others. Projection is one of those things that is much easier to see someone else doing. My biggest unease about positive thinking, manifesting, the power of positive intention, and other New Thought technologies is that it leads people to disown their negativity while projecting it heavily onto everyone else. You see it when the zealot scorns the skeptic, and the skeptic judges the zealot. How much more rich and difficult it is for all of us to recognize the places where we all play the Zealot, the Skeptic, and, yes, their close companion, the Fool.

Books and movies, as well as people focused on positive thinking to the exclusion of the shadow appear incomplete and perhaps insincere to me, as a healer and as a person. Maybe it’s because I see human beings as more noble and with greater potential. I reason that if you are never supposed to engage your negative side, it must mean you can’t be trusted to see that part of yourself without it taking you over. The mythology that we are prey to the devils of our base natures is an outmoded one which I hope will be replaced with emphasis on personal responsibility. I have an optimism about humans, and their ability to triumph and make the right choice not in spite of but in full recognition of their shadow sides.