Carrying The Shadow

The other side of shadow work

There’s frequent discussion in Jungian psychology about the importance of exploring and owning our shadows, perhaps most abundantly in neo-Jungian spaces where “shadow work” has become a separate field entirely. Yet there’s typically too little emphasis placed on what to do when part of what you’re managing is the weight of someone else’s shadow, or a whole nation’s. A compelling new book from Routledge Press, Re-Visioning the American Psyche, contains a provocative essay by mythologist Kwame Scruggs on this topic entitled “Life From the Shadow’s Point of View.”

Through recounting a fairy tale that he crafted and then explores psychologically, Kwame turns the entire concept of the shadow on its head.

The fairy tale begins like this:

Once upon a time, not this time, but another time, there lived a small black boy. He lived in a comfortable home that seemed to hold all worlds. But one day he became curious, and he left the comfortable and expansive home of his parents. He walked down the center of the front walkway and went to a carnival. He had never been there before, so he had no idea where to go. He followed the flow of the crowd.

The flow took him to an area where he was bound and chained to a wall. Others who were not bound and chained were allowed to throw objects at him. These objects consisted of all the things that the people did not want to own themselves.

The boy realizes that only the black children are having things thrown at them, while the white children are doing the throwing. As a child, he initially anticipates fairness so he imagines that the game will soon be reversed. But the roles never reverse. The white children move on, laughing, and the boy is left to walk home alone with his “newly acquired stench.”

Hilma af Klint - The Swan, No. 10, Group IX/SUW, 1915

By using a story told through the perspective of a young boy, Kwame provides readers a lens through which we might gain a felt sense of the developmental injury caused by racism and ongoing, perpetual, culture-wide projection. “The fact that only white people were casting the debris is symbolic,” Kwame writes, “of America projecting its dark side onto the ‘cultural other.’”

His exploration of the story further emphasizes the real burden that Black Americans endure as they seek to remove the disowned parts of other people from their psyches. While never denying that he also has his own shadow to contend with, Kwame emphasizes the disorienting experience of needing to meanwhile sort out, within one’s sense of self, the shadow parts of others that should never have been in the first place.

“Carrying the projection of the Shadow has greatly affected my sense of comfort. To this day I find myself extremely paranoid when I am in an environment populated by whites. I feel like an outsider, as if I do not belong, like everyone is looking at me and wondering, ‘What is he doing here?’”

You may know Kwame from the groups he’s led and the presentations he’s delivered at The Salome Institute. If you don’t yet know him, Kwame has a PhD in Mythological Studies and is the director of an award-winning non-profit, Alchemy Inc., which provides soulful mentorship through the use of myth and storytelling to urban youth. (It’s a program that, in my utopian society, is incorporated into every school system.) Yet despite Kwame’s many successes and accolades, he’s not been able to fully shake the experience of growing up with the projections of an entire nation forming his sense of self, and sense of belonging.

When I read those words of Kwame’s experience in white spaces I was reminded of the profile of a twenty-four-year-old African-American woman named Naomi, included in Rachel Aviv’s extraordinary book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us. As part of a much larger story, Aviv recounts one fateful day in Naomi’s life in which she was pushing her twin boys in a stroller in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and began to experience the whole world being against her. As she walked through the crowds, she looked for a smile to feel like she wasn’t an outsider. She searched among the sea of white faces for just one other Black mother like herself but “sensed that people were asking themselves, ‘What is she doing here? She doesn’t belong here. This is our place.’”

What is he/she doing here?

The mirroring of others is core to the development of the self, but projection has the opposite effect. To mirror a person is to witness and reflect back a person’s innate being through subtle gestures, smiles, words, and a tone of present engagement. Healthy relationships involve a great deal of mirroring, and, as with projection, we’re mostly unconscious of participating. When this natural inclination that each of us have towards being mirrored is twisted, and rather than finding recognition of ourselves in another’s eyes, we see something negative, something false, something that is not ours to be reflected, the results can be shattering. And when a person has experienced a great deal of, let’s call it “projective mirroring” instead of authentic mirroring during their self-development, they may experience significant developmental trauma. It can be hard for them to ever fully parse through what is theirs and not theirs.

When we explore our shadows, we’ll ideally steadily withdraw the projections we’ve placed onto others in our lives. As we examine and take back aspects of ourselves that we’ve forced others to carry, we not only have space to repair and mature relationships, but to meet formerly distant parts of our own creativity, intelligence, and emotional lives. The goal is ultimately greater wholeness and improved satisfaction in life.

Racism, sexism, ableism, fatphobia, and so many more abuses and biases have roots in unconscious agreements of what is “good” and what is “bad.” When we unconsciously project what is “undesirable” onto others, whoever they may be, we not only cause harm to them but lose parts of ourselves in the process and become more lopsided, more prone to continued judgment, rigidity, and fear. In any kind of shadow work, it’s valuable to take note of how we’ve engaged in acts of collective projection, as well as how we’ve been forced to carry the projections of others. It’s not uncommon. Shadow work is not always such an individual affair.

• You can hear more about Kwame’s work through his conversations on This Jungian Life, with

  Elise Loehnen
  on Pulling the Thread, and in his presentation at The Salome Institute.

• You can hear more about Naomi’s story in Rachel Aviv’s conversation with Elise on Pulling the Thread.

Have you experienced carrying someone else’s shadow? What thoughts does this spark for you?