are the devil’s workshop!” and “Good girls do not roughhouse
with boys.” In order to win or keep our parents’ love, we try to
rid ourselves of these unwanted instincts and energies. But
those “discarded” parts of us never completely cease to exist.
Instead, we hide them in our long bagof unconscious material,
which we then drag along behind us throughout our lives.
Those disowned parts become our shadow self.
At each successive new stage in life, we learn to put more
and more parts of ourselves into this bag. In kindergarten
teachers tell us: “Stop crying,” “Be tough,” and “It’s not nice to
get angry.” So into our bags go our uncried tears and anger.
Later, perhaps in high school, we learn from our friends that
certain things, like perhaps helping the weak or disabled, are
simply “not cool” and so our compassion may go in the bag as
well. Soon our shadow bag grows larger and larger.
Of course not all of us receive the same messages as we
grow. Those particular parts of ourselves that get stuffed into
our shadow bags vary depending on the culture in which we
were raised. For example, Christian cultures tend to repress
sexuality and spontaneity.
By the time we’re in our twenties, much of our original
wholeness has been stuffed into this bag. The complete and
whole being we once were as a child with all its varied and
sometimes mysterious facets has now shrunk to a mere sliver
of itself. And life has myriad ways of letting us know how
shrunken we’ve become. Consequently, we often find our-
selves wondering, “What’s wrong with me?”
Having spent the first quarter of our life stuffing much of
ourselves into a bag, we often spend the majority of the rest of
our lives searching for those “lost” parts. And many people
never learn where those parts went or how to retrieve them.
Not surprisingly, having parts of our personality that we
know little or nothing about can cause us all kinds of trouble
— until we become reacquainted with them.
As with many aspects of psychological wisdom, the exis-
tence of this shadow self has been known for a long time. But
“The cure of the shadow is
on one hand a moral prob-
lem. That is, recognition
of what we have sup-
pressed... On the other
hand the cure of the
shadow is a problem of
love.”
James HilmanSelf-Discovery Through Film Characters — The Self Matrix 145