Embracing the Shadow (The Beauty in the Beast)

Sometimes, I wonder if I was given Philip as a way to gain access to my shadow. Living with his larger-than-life personality, the parts of me that my upbringing had taught me to repress were activated. In response to his stubbornness, I dug in my heels. His need to be in control prompted latent rebelliousness. My shadow included intense feelings, not-nice-girl urges, and unacceptable (to my upbringing) emotions like anger, willfulness, desire, and self-centeredness. Before Philip, I’d learned to lean into the even-keeled and compliant sides of my nature, the parts that my parents and teachers approved. Discouraged from expressing strong emotions by parents who preferred living in calm, unruffled composure, (cool as a cucumber was one of my dad’s favored expressions), avoiding my shadow had been relatively easy. That is, until I was inexplicably drawn to live next to someone who turned toward every feeling and walked into every response –positive and negative– without hesitation.

Life with Philip was like living with a highly-strung wild horse; he was skittish and oversensitive, ears pricked, primed to react intensely to whatever came his way. Alternately, he was inclined to fall into heavy funks of despondency. To live beside this nervy, hypersensitive creature, my lesson was one that went against all I’d been taught about appeasement and avoidance of the shadow. Instead, I needed to willingly dive with him, to sink, muck about, settle in. In other words, anything but trying to cheer or bring him around.

Giving the shadow time and space rather than resisting and refusing it turns out to be more effective than running scared. It’s also more compassionate to ourselves and others. When I learned to sit with discomfort or pain, I also learned of my multifaceted wholeness; I am light and dark, up and down. Learning that we can and do survive the dark teaches us to trust … in ourselves, in others, in Life. In their book Romancing the Shadow, Connie Zweig and Steve Wolf suggest this kinder, more accepting engagement with the shadow. They say we learn most from all the hidden, ignored, and wounded parts of us. And in the process, we find greater emotional richness, resilience, and vitality.^.Vitality because energy exerted (and wasted) in avoidance or repression is freed. In accepting our wholeness, we become more alive and more ourselves.

In Abu Dhabi, when Philip began to have more intense anxiety, when full-blown panic took over his body and mind, I wondered if he was playing out the shadow for both of us. Was my Abu Dhabi survival mentality, my desperation to maintain a light and constructive perspective, creating an imbalance that landed on his shoulders (in his psyche)? We are much more complicated than we tend to acknowledge or admit. Energy is shared in a marriage, whether we know or intend it to be. There are stories of one family member carrying the psychic burden for the whole family: the black sheep, the highly sensitive person, the worldly failure. Philip was that person in his birth family. In my Abu Dhabi effort to survive, was I overloading my struggles and darkness onto him? Was my need to stay afloat dragging him down under the weight of my unacknowledged and unaccepted shadow?

In myths, fairy tales, and folk tales, the heroine (or hero) struggles against dark forces to overcome the obstacles standing in their way. These forces are metaphors for the psychological shadow. In many of these stories, it is only when the wolf is vanquished, the dragon slayed, and the wicked witch defeated — that the heroine moves forward in her life. Jung calls this the journey of individuation. In this journey, by braving the dark, we are given the opportunity to liberate ourselves from familial and cultural conditioning and move into the essence of authentic, spiritual being. As a child, my favorite of all the fairy tales was “Beauty and the Beast.” In this story, the heroine’s path to individuation is to uncover the inner beauty of the Beast, to reveal and release the totality of his essence by loving him. Beauty is also The Beast. The Beast is also Beauty. I am both beauty and beast. Loving the shadow transmutes the darkness into the light of a beautiful prince. The beautiful prince is beautiful because he contains both light and dark. This was the journey Philip invited me to take with him, to dare to struggle with him. It was the struggle and the life to which I belonged.

Together and independently, we struggled, dared, and changed. We moved closer to each other and our souls. The struggle with our dark forces is not the pretty part of the fairy tale, but it makes the entire tale … the entire life … infinitely more authentic and whole. Today, on the tenth anniversary of Philip’s death, I thank him for holding out his hand, his heart, his darkness and light to meet and embrace the whole of me.