Finding Gold in our Shadow: Psychotherapy and the Shadow Syndrome

Yaro Starak, Gestalt Therapist & former Lecturer, University of Queensland Millions of people who attribute their daily life problems to bad parents or low self esteem or lack of will power are in part struggling with a shadow syndrome.
J. A. Ratey and C. Johnson, Shadow Syndromes Random House 1997.

Sandra is a client of mine. She came to work with me because she found that Gestalt Therapy was helpful to her when she began her treatment for alcoholism and severe depression some six years ago in Sydney. Now Sandra moved to the Sunshine Coast of Queensland and wanted to continue her therapy with me. After several sessions, I discovered that Sandra is very capable of deflecting her issues by taking on a character. At times she played a co-operative subject, after awhile a raging angry woman and sometimes a needy helpless child. We became aware that we were stuck at an impasse. At that time I suggested to Sandra that she join my group therapy program. We meet as a group for 10 weeks for 2 hours a week. The purpose of the group is to explore ways of healing our inner wounds using the group resources and support. Sandra quickly established herself as an active member. She would role play any situation that demanded dramatic interactions. She was able to engage herself fully in group activities and became a popular group energiser. However something was missing. All her activities were dramatised and felt hollow, somewhat staged and without much depth of feelings. At one point the group decided that we spend a full day in session. Sandra was excited, she wanted to work on her hidden parts she said to the group. In the morning of the day session, after some minor group interactions, Sandra volunteered to work. She sat in a soft bean- bag and looked at the group members and said I want to share with you my story of sexual abuse and began to cry and shake all over. I suggested that a female group member sit in front of Sandra and hold her hands while I encouraged Sandra to tell us her story. Sandra spoke briefly about her father, his alcoholism and her fear of his raging behaviour and later her sexual encounters with him as a 9 year old child. In between each word Sandras body would shake and she kept saying: Im afraid, Im afraid. I kept responding to her statements It is an old fear Sandra, an old fear. Soon her shaking followed with a sudden verbal gibberish with words and sounds that could not be understood. The group was fully alert and supportive of this process. Article written by Yaro Starak starakister@gmail.com 1 Gestalt Art Therapy Centre www.gestaltarttherapy.com

After awhile Sandra recovered her speech and her body stopped shaking. She spoke slowly and carefully of the memory that came to her for the first time in 30 years. She said I remember my mother telling me you are the devils spawn! Having said that Sandra began to shake all over. I suggested that she make a list of what exactly her mother said to her as she remembered it now. Sandra took a sheet of butchers paper and wrote a list stating: I am evil, I am horrible, I am despicable and so on. When she stopped writing the list I suggested she take another sheet of butchers paper and write out the same list but change only one word from I to You and then entitle the page DEVILS SPAWN. Slowly Sandra transported the words You are evil, you are bad, you are horrible and so on. This simple change of one word seemed to transform Sandra. She began to feel stronger and more present in the here and now. I suggested that she walk around the room and contacted each group member physically. Sandra did that and seemed grounded and not acting out her behaviour. She didnt smile nor was afraid. When she came to me she held out her hand and said, Your words It is an old fear kept me going through the darkness and helped me to bring back the horrible memories. I thanked her and said something feels unfinished for me. The group agreed. We all looked at the two pieces of butchers paper and when I saw the words Devils Spawn written on them with a long list of exclamations You are I suggested that we take the paper outside and burn it. Sandra asked the member of the group that held her hands to take the paper and we all walked to the nearby park. Sandra started to light a fire but it wouldnt burn. I noticed that the paper was still in the hands of the group member. I suggested that Sandra place the paper on the ground and light it. She did this and the fire burned. As it burned, Sandra pointed at the burning black remains and said, I see a claw there like a dark hand stretching. The whole group was speechless. Out the burning black remains a hand like claw was emerging. I suggested that we all take a piece of the black remains and spread it in all four directions. As we were doing that the wind blew the remains of the Devils Spawn north, south, east and west and we calmly came back to the room to reflect on this experience. I call this shadow work. Many ask: What is the shadow? This term was coined by Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst. He described the shadow as a phenomenon that affects our lives but is hidden from our conscious self. We are not aware of this phenomenon until it is detected by observing certain behaviours e.g.: a sudden rage at some insignificant life situation. Feelings of envy, greed, judging, blaming and shaming others. It may also be hero worship, guru fundamentalism, grandiosity, abuse of power, various addictions and so on. This paper will explore one aspect of shadow work which is often overlooked. It is the potential or gold that is hidden in our shadow bag. Article written by Yaro Starak starakister@gmail.com 2 Gestalt Art Therapy Centre www.gestaltarttherapy.com

Problems, symptoms, even diseases are relegated to and maintained in what the poet Robert Bly called the Shadow Bag (R.Bly 1988). When we are born, we bring pure gold with us. However when some of our innocent behaviour and personal expressions are not allowed full freedom or are not supportive are shamed in our childhood, we develop a shadow bag. The shadow bag contains many aspects of our personality that were considered forbidden, sinful or inappropriate by our parents or guardians. Later in life we learn to put into our shadow bag other parts of ourselves in order to preserve a certain faade to the world. This may be a perfect student, a good parent, a pillar of society, a loving partner, an honest judge and so on. After a time, the denied, split, forgotten, avoided parts of our sub selves become projected on the outside world, people or events. We believe that those behaviours are not me they belong outside of me. In Gestalt Therapy we call that projection. Projection is an intrapsychic phenomenon whereby a person unconsciously (or unaware) attributes his or her own negative (bad) or socially unacceptable behaviour onto other persons, groups or objects. Projection also involves the attribution of positive feelings and behaviours on others. Projection elements can also appear in fantasies, dreams, accidental events, synchronicities and so on. Paradoxically, when we embark on a journey of discovering our shadow and do shadow work we will find a great source of healing and transformation on that path. Sandra (not her real name) was an alcoholic, she filled her void and her depression and low self esteem with alcohol. Initially helped her to forget her childhood trauma and sexual abuse. A prolonged treatment for alcoholism helped her to recover enough to be employed but her shadow bag was so big that she blocked all memory of her early childhood. To keep away from alcohol, which her led her to deep depression bouts and binges Sandra developed (after treatment for alcoholism) socially acceptable roles. She could easily play a good an intimate friend, a careful listener, an alive and active participant in a group etc. She even began to change her career and become a counsellor to help others with alcoholic problems. In therapy I confronted Sandra with her role plays and she soon acknowledged that in spite of her successful treatment she felt sad, angry, hollow and dull inside. She wasnt able to discover a make contact with her inner trauma until the group work session described above. Sandras inner trauma was created by her parents. Mother accused the young child of being born evil calling her the Devils Spawn. She was not a wanted baby. A childs response to adult behaviour goes through a number of stages. The first one is to hide forbidden behaviours and act out roles to please parents. Sandra pleased her mother by acting out a substitute wife to her father blocking out all her negative feelings to sexual abuse. Article written by Yaro Starak starakister@gmail.com 3 Gestalt Art Therapy Centre www.gestaltarttherapy.com

This process was so traumatic that she felt a deep void as the ultimate price for being obedient. Second to fill this void Sandra created a false self (H. Hendrix, 1991). A false self is a character structure that serves a double purpose. It camouflages those parts of the person that has been repressed and protects from further injury. Sandra was caught in a double bind she protected herself from further injury by complying with her fathers sexual advances and at the same time was blamed by her mother as bad and evil. To cope with this double bind and fill her inner void, Sandra began to drink to forget until she needed alcohol rehabilitation therapy. Thus the shadow syndrome emerged. Only in a Gestalt Therapy group Sandra began to eat her shadow by re-owning her projections and rediscovering her full self Sandra began to take responsibility for her role play as her own role play and not her real self. This created deep feelings of physical emptiness and pain. In the safety of the group in exaggerating her painful physical symptoms in the present moment, Sandra discovered hidden memories of her abuse by both her parents. Paradoxically she discovered her gold. In Gestalt work the first step in recovering our gold is to become fully aware of the process (phenomena) of our avoidances. Sandra became fully aware how her body shook all over with the negative memories. How her speech changed and in the supportive environment she could feel the full horror of her experiences as old fears and not her present fears. The ritual of writing out the words she heard from her mother on paper was a way to depersonalising or putting outside herself the shadow material and seeing it for the first time, as not her own. By exaggerating her symptoms and feeling them fully Sandra was able to recover her early experiences and integrate them in her body, mind and soul. According to Jung, the body is the shadow in so far it contains the tragic history of how the childs spontaneous energy is killed and repressed in a hundred ways until the body becomes a deadened object. (p85 J. P. Conger) Gestalt Therapy in a group environment provides the individual with the needed support which she was lacking early in life. Sandra trusted me in the group fully. She held her group partners hands and shook her body without fear. For the therapist this may often be a frightening process and the tendency would be to stop it by talking about it. Sandra confirmed this to me by saying that in individual therapy she would often would come to the point of shaking and her therapist would ask her to interpret what is going on at that moment and then Sandra would take the role of the good client. She would then explain away the whole frightening experience.

Article written by Yaro Starak starakister@gmail.com

Gestalt Art Therapy Centre www.gestaltarttherapy.com

At this time Sandra stayed with the process long enough to connect with her blocked childhood memories and the ritual of eating the shadow promoted a background for the spiritual or Psyche aspects to emerge. Jung in his essay On the Nature of the Psyche stated Since Psyche and matter are contained in the same world and more over are in continuous contact with one another that it is not only possible but fairly probable that Psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. (Jung 1972). Taking the mater (also means mother in latin) of the Devils Spawn and burning it, promoted a ritual dissolution of her memories and finished the unfinished business in the form of a spiritual symbolic or archetypal process. Integration happens at the moment of acceptance of our shadow parts. Sandra not only accepted intellectually her shadow parts but also experientially and physically. She reowned the responsibility for her carrying the shadow bag of her mother and father. Then she rejected (burned) her parents projections on her as the evil one and regained her natural spontaneity and trust in her current environment she did not have to role play again. After some time Sandra rang me from the Sunshine Coast and told me that she went to see her old father in a nursing home. It was the first time in 40 years that she saw him. She said, I was able to look him in the eyes and all I saw was an old, sad man. Forget your profile (role) All that is outer stuff But pay attention to the one Who walks beside you And tends to be who you are not Antonia Machado Only he whose right lyre Has sounded in shadows May, looking onward, restore His infinite praise R. N. Rilke (Sonnets to Orpheus)

Article written by Yaro Starak starakister@gmail.com

Gestalt Art Therapy Centre www.gestaltarttherapy.com

References:

1. Jung, C. G., Collected Papers, Princeton University Press, 1968. 2. Bly, Robert. A Little Book on the Human Shadow, Wm. Booth ed. Harper & Row, CA. 1988. 3. H. Hendrix. Getting the Love You want. N.Y. Harper & Row, 1988. 4. Conger John P. Jung and Reich: The Body as Shadow, North Atlantic Books, 1985. 5. C. Zweig & J. Abrams, eds. Meeting The Shadow. Tarcher, 1991. 6. J.J. Ratey & C. Johnson, Shadow Syndromes, Pantheon. 1997.

Article written by Yaro Starak starakister@gmail.com

Gestalt Art Therapy Centre www.gestaltarttherapy.com