what she wanted to see rather than what really was.
Following the revelation of Torvald’s true feelings, she
switches and projects her disowned “dark side” onto
her husband.In addition to the danger of projecting our disowned parts
onto others, those parts represent vital energy that is unavail-
able to us as long as it is locked up inside our shadow bags. The
larger our bag, the less energy we have for living our lives.
When a woman puts her masculinity into her bag, she loses
energy. When a child stuffs his exuberance into the bag, his
decreased vitality is obvious. If we “bag” our creativity, we pay
for it by having less power to solve problems or add meaning
to our life. It is critically important to our psychological and
spiritual well-being that we reclaim this “discarded” portion of
our soul. Fortunately, though in most cases these facets of our
personality are “hidden,” they are not truly lost. We have
numerous clues with which to track them down. The Self
Matrix is designed to help us find those clues. Quadrant IV
shows the qualities we dislike in film characters with whom we
do notidentify. Such traits are difficult to recognize in us.
Evelyn disliked the character Davis in Grand Canyon
(1991)very much because she saw him as selfish, rude, heart-
less, ruthless, and abusing his power. Her strong negative reac-
tion made me wonder whether the Davis character might be
forcing her to confront disowned parts of herself. I asked
Evelyn how aggression was handled in her family when she
was a child. She remembered that no one ever yelled. Most of
the time everyone was nice to everyone else. When Evelyn
tried to express disagreement, her mom told her, “Do not say
anything if you cannot say something nice.”
After some probing Evelyn told us that usually, when her
husband starts a fight, she does not express anger or frustration.
Evelyn hates conflict and believes that she would lose an argu-
ment anyway. Once in a while, however, when her husband
goes too far, much to her surprise, intense anger suddenly150 E-Motion Picture Magic