Disowned parts and integration
There is a passage in Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching that I go back to more often the older I get. Chapter 28 reads:
Know the male, yet keep to the female: receive the world in your arms. If you receive the world, the Tao will never leave you and you will be like a little child.
Know the white, yet keep to the black: be a pattern for the world. If you are a pattern for the world, the Tao will be strong inside you and there will be nothing you can’t do.
Know the personal, yet keep to the impersonal: accept the world as it is. If you accept the world, the Tao will be luminous inside you and you will return to your primal self.
The world is formed from the void, like utensils from a block of wood. The Master knows the utensils, yet keeps to the block: thus she can use all things.
Lao Tzu wrote those words roughly 2,500 years ago in a culture that would not have used the modern psychological language of “shadow” or “persona” or “integration.” And yet he was describing the same dynamic that Carl Jung would name in the twentieth century as one of the crucial tasks of adult development. Know the light in you, and stay close to the darkness. Know the parts of you that the world approves of, and remain in relationship with the parts it has taught you to hide. Hold both, and refuse the naive assumption of pretending you are only one of them.
Carl Jung gave us the language of the persona and the shadow, while others name them differently. The persona is the version of yourself you have constructed to fit into the systems and relationships you were shaped by. The shadow is what got left out while you were working so hard to fit in. The parts of you that were inconvenient for the systems, the emotions that were unwelcome in your family of origin, the desires that did not fit the script you were given, or the questions that were too dangerous to ask out loud. All of that got pushed underground when you were young because it had to. And all of it stays there, out of sight, until something in your adult life becomes strong enough to start bringing it back up.
The rupture, the self-betrayal, the refusal of the call, the threshold crossing: Each of those experiences involves the shadow beginning to surface, because each of them involves the persona losing its grip. When the persona is running smoothly, the shadow stays buried. When the persona starts to crack, the shadow rises, which is the raw material of individuation, but it is also the raw material of some of the most damaging overcorrections that people make in their lives.
Here is what the overcorrection looks like. The lifelong compliant person who has been agreeable to everyone for forty years suddenly becomes cutting and contemptuous of the people who probably don’t deserve it. The lifelong peacekeeper starts picking fights with everyone in their life over things large and small. And the person who has been suppressing their anger for decades finally becomes enraged, but it’s unfortunately directed at innocent people and situations. Others become obsessive about the desires they had buried for years, in ways that damage relationships and derail lives.
In each case, the shadow has come up, and the person has flipped from one polarity to its opposite. They have become the shadow instead of meeting it.
From the outside, and even from inside the person’s own experience, this overcorrection can look like liberation. The lifelong good boy is finally saying what he thinks. The lifelong good girl is finally putting her needs first. The person who spent decades being calm is finally getting angry. But if the flipping is complete, if the person has traded one polarity for another without holding both, they have not integrated the shadow. They have just moved into a different one-sided existence. The persona used to run everything, now the shadow does. The person is still not whole.
This is what I think Lao Tzu was pointing towards when he wrote that the sage knows the white but keeps to the black. The point is to hold both polarities at the same time, in a way that lets you draw on either one when the situation calls for it, without collapsing into either one as your only mode of being. Moving from white to black would just replace one one-sidedness with another. Lao Tzu called it being a pattern for the world, Jung would call it integration.
Integration is a different practice than overcorrection, and the difference matters more than most modern psychology admits. Integration is slow. It requires you to sit with the shadow material without acting on it, to acknowledge the anger that is surfacing without unleashing it on the nearest available person, to feel the desire that has been buried without acting out in ways that will hurt people, and to notice the contempt rising up in you without becoming contemptuous in your daily life. This kind of sitting-with is harder than either the original suppression or the eventual overcorrection. It is the middle path, and the middle path takes real practice.
I see this in my office on a weekly basis. People normally come in during the period when the shadow is surfacing and they are afraid of what they are noticing about themselves. They tell me about the wave of anger they felt at their spouse over something small, about the resentment they have been carrying toward a parent they used to praise, or about the fantasy they cannot stop having about walking out of their life entirely. They are afraid, understandably, that if they acknowledge these emerging parts of themselves, they will become them. They are afraid that meeting the shadow will mean losing everything they have built as the good, competent, reliable person they have always been.
What I try to help them see is that the danger runs in exactly the opposite direction. If they don’t meet the shadow, if they push it back down where it came from, it will keep coming up until it does damage they can’t repair. The affair, the blowup at work, the public breakdown, the rupture of a relationship they actually valued.
The shadow that goes unmet eventually acts out, and that’s usually more destructive than the meeting would have been. The person who never lets themselves acknowledge their anger will eventually explode, the person who never lets themselves feel their grief will eventually collapse into it, and the person who never lets themselves see their contempt will eventually spit it at someone who did not deserve it.
Meeting the shadow means giving it a a place to sit inside yourself without giving it the keys to your whole house. You acknowledge that the anger is there and let it inform your understanding of what is happening in your life without letting it decide what you say or do next. The resentment toward a parent gets space to teach you something about what was actually happening in your childhood without turning you into a bitter middle-aged child. The fantasy of walking out of your life shows you what parts of your life need attention, but you hold off on acting on it in a way you would regret.
This kind of practice is slower than the culture wants it to be, and it is more subtle than most people know how to do at first. It requires that you develop the capacity to feel something without acting on it. That capacity is what a good therapist helps you build, and it is what mature spiritual traditions have been trying to teach for thousands of years. Lao Tzu was pointing at it, Jung was pointing at it, and the contemplative traditions of every major religion have some version of it. The shadow is real and it needs to be met, but the meeting has to happen inside the person before it starts to move into the world.
For my own part, I can tell you that this practice never really ends. The shadow is something you meet again and again as new layers of it surface at different times, rather than something you meet once and then integrate for the rest of your life. What changes over the years is your capacity to be with it without either denying it or becoming it. That capacity is slow to develop and easy to lose track of, especially in periods of stress. The disciplines that support it, whether journaling or therapy or something else, are worth developing precisely because they give you a place to meet the shadow before it forces the meeting on its own terms.
If you are in the middle of the shadow surfacing right now, and you are afraid of what you are noticing about yourself, I want you to know that the noticing is the beginning of the integration. What you do with what you notice is what will determine whether you meet the shadow or become it. Give the surfacing material a place inside you to be acknowledged. Speak it to a trusted person or write it in a journal. Notice what it wants and what it is protesting. But hold off on acting on it until you have some understanding of what it is actually asking for, because the shadow’s first ask is almost never the deepest ask underneath it.
Lao Tzu ended the same passage of Chapter 28 with a line that has taken me years to understand. He wrote that if you are a pattern for the world, the Tao will be strong inside you, and there will be nothing you can’t do. I believe he was talking about the wholeness that comes when a person can hold both sides of themselves at the same time, without collapsing into either one. That kind of wholeness looks different from the achievement our culture measures. That wholeness is what integration produces. It is the goal of meeting the shadow, and it is worth every year it takes.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: Grief for the Life You Were Supposed to Want
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
