Fragmented Shadows — the invisible wounds of our time
We live in a very polarized world, where the endless outer disharmony is nothing more than a reflection of our fractured inner states. When we suppress, deny, reject, or disown aspects of ourselves, we polarize and become a match in the outer world for all the things we rejected internally.
Our shadow aspects are best named for their most apparent expression… behaviors, agendas, feeling states and coping mechanisms. When aspects of us, are repressed and put in the shadow, they remain stuck at the same age, developmental stage, and situation as when they were originally repressed. Nothing can grow or mature in the Shadow.
When a company downsizes or lays people off, it is experienced as deep betrayal. This often links back to the formative story of the old parent child complex, where we hoped for security and dependence.
Most school systems are factories in which the raw materials — children — are to be shaped into products that would serve the needs of consumerist industries. Have we been molded into a reality that fragments us instead of guiding us towards wholeness?
People will always treat us the way we allow them to.
What we do for ourselves influences our subconscious mind. If we constantly criticize ourselves, our subconscious will accept that we are not worthy. Our beautiful mind can be the chief problem and it’s important to start with understanding how it works.
Our world is built on polarity. Shadow and light are two extremes of the same energy. When we do the work of bringing the shadow to light, we increase our self-awareness, and strengthen our intuition.
Once we see shadow, we cannot unsee it. It’s there waiting for our courage to face it. It invites us to walk away from the ordinary and incomplete version of who we were before. All our lost pages reunite to form the complete version of who we truly are.
‘No relationship with another person can be more evolved than my own relationship to myself’, said James Hollis. If we are to be better at relationships, the work is on ourselves first, by digging backwards from the patterns in our lives to the formative story we carry.
To be healthy in a relationship with another is to grow up first, meet our own needs, face our fears and limitations, and not dump them onto the other. Yet we live in an anxious world where we are forced to build protective patterns that become a kind of shadow government, where the ego thinks it’s the boss, but the shadow is making many of the decisions.
Everything about who we are, is binary and has a dual nature.
In language everything we say has an opposite counterpart (dark-light, black-white, good-bad, doing-being, ethical-unethical). Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s work points at the idea that we have a divided brain, we live with a mind-body fragmentation, and we are disconnected from our senses (2009).
The divided brain concept is also found in the opposing domains theory (Boyatzis et al., 2017), which highlights the idea that our hemispheres are in an antagonistic relationship that creates a fundamental neural constraint on cognition.
The left brain (Task Positive Network — TPN activation) wants to divide and puts everything in boxes, looking only at logic, facts, figures, and sequences (the linear mind). On the other hand, the right brain (Default Mode Network — DMN activation) is concerned with big picture thinking that takes into consideration emotions, intuition, creativity, and holistic thought (the non-linear mind).
Hunting for a deeper truth in our lives it’s a hero’s journey that takes courage to face and unravel. Richard Rudd distinguishes truth in layers:
The Opinionated Truth stage is about hunting down the part of our mind that has divided, over-simplified or polarized our views — these are the shadow views in our own mind.
The Personal Truth goes a layer deeper, beneath the surface of our opinions and preferences. It’s a version of truth that make us feel inwardly stronger. It’s like a deep inner YES that gives us grounding and self-empowerment, rather than feeling like ‘not enough’ to someone or something outside ourselves.
The Multi-faceted Truth goes another layer deeper. What would truth look like from another person’s point of view? Is there another nuance of truth hiding here? Could there be two opposite points of view that are paradoxically ‘right’?
The Deepest Truth comes from a place of compassion. It’s a unifying truth that underpins everything. It is not a dividing truth, nor a mind truth… it’s a heart truth.
Cleaning the mirrors of our perception clears the way we show up in our relationship with the outer world. We change a system by changing our own inner paradigm, first. By liberating ourselves from the ways we were programmed.
