Page 24 - NAMAH-Jul-2021

Namah Vol. 29, Issue 2, 15th July 2021

and her colleagues and even her spouse. But
it is a choice she will have to make between
changing something or letting the slow but
sure frustration within her to eat her.

Assimilating the shadow is a challenging
but enriching process

An experientially significant ‘gift’ of our
shadow is that it contains a huge amount
of repressed psychic energy within it. So
working with our shadow is intuitively felt
The shadow part of our make-up is not only to be the right way, even though everything
composed of unpleasant or morally wrong in our nature wants to run away from it
aspects, but at the same time, it houses also because everything unfamiliar is also scary.
our unique aspects which as infants and Jung has said that working with the shadow
children we often repress for the sake of mixing part calls for a tremendous moral strength,
in with the family or school peers. For instance, for it requires an immense courage to face our
a genuinely bright girl whose questions and own darkness and take full responsibility for
observations are felt as embarrassing or it, work through our emotional wounds and
challenging to her parents and who is traumas so that, once becoming conscious of
shamed for being ‘rude’ and ‘a bad girl them, we can free them of the sharpness and
who doesn’t trust her parents’ will develop terror they contain. It requires us to step into
ambivalent feelings towards her original unfamiliar spaces in us, ask uncomfortable
ideas and way of thinking. Such a person questions, question our upbringing, the various
while growing up may always try to ensure ways we have been wounded, neglected,
she is not upsetting the status quo of her sometimes even abused by those whom we
classroom or the boardroom, and thus her had implicitly trusted. It also involves seeing
originality keeps simmering just beneath how we have caused wounding to our own
the surface. If she keeps downplaying her selves in the process of navigating through
talents, such a person may feel increasingly life, and how the ultimate responsibility of
frustrated, stifled and irritable. If she can finally our fate lies in us, and not in our parents, or
begin to understand the roots of why she feels community, or religion. Further, it challenges
unsure about voicing her honest opinions and us to accept our own actions and traits which
emotionally assimilate that she is not that we ‘prefer’ to see in others but never in us
4-year-old girl any more, whose originality
will cause her to lose her parents’ affection, In fact, it is again one of the golden rules
she may then begin to start giving space to of our psyche’s functioning that the kind of
this repressed part of her. No doubt that any people we cannot tolerate and who invite our
change disturbs the existing equilibrium intense dislike, disapproval, even downright
around, and perhaps her ‘newly-found’ condemnation, have the same traits that hide
assertiveness will cause frictions between her in our own depths and we embody them

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