L13 · Lens
Shadow integration
Acknowledge rejected drives such as anger, ambition or assertion and channel them consciously instead of suppressing or projecting them.
Use: Anger, timidity, self-sabotage, projection onto others.
Boundary: Integration is not acting out; it is conscious ownership.
Cues
Showing 10 of 10 cues
“In the darkness of the unconscious a treasure lies hidden, the ... “treasure hard to attain” ... the fight against the paralyzing grip of the unconscious calls forth man’s creative powers ... it needs heroic courage to do battle with these forces and to wrest from them the treasure hard to attain. Whoever succeeds in this has triumphed indeed.”
“It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world ... The unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits. But my family, and the knowledge: I have a medical diploma ... I must help my patients, I have a wife and five children ... these were actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again and again that I really existed.”
“To “give style” to one’s character - a great and rare art. It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.”
“The difficulties of our psychotherapeutic work teach us to take truth, goodness, and beauty where we find them. They are not always found where we look for them: often they are hidden in the dirt or are in the keeping of the dragon.”
“What our age thinks of as the “shadow” and inferior part of the psyche contains more than something merely negative.”
“You can completely lose track of incredibly positive things about yourself - your beauty, goodness, strength, and virtue ... the so-called Golden shadow.”
“We fear our highest possibilities. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments ... We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves ... And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities.”
“This state of inner attunement is not always joyful or serene ... Sometimes it involves feeling with devastating intensity the conflicts, the rages, the intimations of mortality we have been trying to deny ... Yearnings, rages, jealousies, dependencies, and estrangements can be safely lived through when the persons upon whom we might wrongly (or dangerously, or foolishly) unleash them are absent.”
Wholeness includes brokenness
Wholeness is the goal, but wholeness does not mean perfection — it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.
PrincipleThe shadow and repressed drivesCharacter and moral integrity2 more related links
Lenses
Modules
The daimonic passions
Rollo May defines the daimonic as any natural drive (sex, love, anger, rage, desire for power) able to take over the whole person. Amoral in themselves, they enliven us when integrated or turn demonic when suppressed.