I think a tremendous amount of what you might regard as shadow integration,
which in the parlance of behavioral psychologists,
would be something like assertiveness training.
It's training and how to stand up
for yourself and for your for your better self,
which would be the self that you could use productively over a medium to long period
of time that would be of use to you but also of use to people around you.
So, it's a self that's bounded by the necessity of taking
care of yourself, but also simultaneously taking care of the people around you.
I think that the simplest way to start that work is to consult your resentment.
It's easy to become bitter about life and to become angry because, of course,
life is difficult and it's full of disappointments.
And people are also subject to betrayal on the part of themselves and on the part
of people that hypothetically care for them.
And so it's easy to get bitter and to be resentful.
And resentment is a very useful emotion, even though I think it's one of the most
damaging emotions if it's not dealt with properly.
So if you're resentful basically means only one of two things.
It either means you should grow up and quit whining and get on with your life,
or it means that you're being subject to tyrannical forces of one form
or another, maybe emanating from you, maybe a consequence of the natural
environment, may be a consequence of society.
You're being subject to tyrannical forces, and you're not putting your own best
interests forward, like in that broader sense that I described.
I don't mean your selfish narrow interests
that only serve the purposes of instantaneous gratification.
I mean your own best interests in terms
of developing your character over the span of your life.
If you're resentful,
it either means that you're immature and that you should grow the hell up.
And so you need to figure out how much of your resentment
is that and maybe allied with the desire to find other things or people to blame.
But the other possible option is that you have something to say or do, right?
Because you're in a situation where you're violating your
own internal ethical standards and you're being required pressure,
let's say, to say things you don't believe or to do things that you believe
to be wrong, and you need to determine...
You need to start to strategize and plan how you can
rectify that, so that you can say what you mean.
Like, if you're negotiating with a marital partner, for example,
and there are issues in your marriage that aren't making you happy.
Well, the first thing is you have to take note of that, right?
To see that you're actually unhappy.
The second is that you have to be willing
to engage in a certain amount of conflict, because in order to sort out what's
disturbing you, you're going to have to lay your concerns
out on the table and say: "Well, look, this is bothering me."
You don't have to say: "Well, I'm right, and you're wrong, and you have to fix this."
You have to say: "Well, I've noticed that this pattern of interaction
or lack of interaction, say, in our relationship is...
Making me resentful and angry."
And the danger of that, of course,
is you're going to take it out on yourself and your partner.
The danger is passive aggressiveness.
You're not going to respond to your partner positively when they do something
good if you're resentful about them,
and you're not going to respond to yourself properly.
So, you have to lay it out on the table,
but sort of in a spirit of ignorant humility.
It's like: "Look, I'm frustrated.
I'm feeling this way about our relationship.
Here's what I think might be going wrong, maybe on my part, and maybe on your part.
And here's what I envision as a possible solution."
That's also really necessary if you're
going to say what you have to say, which is to manifest yourself properly
in the world is you can't just complain about what's wrong.
You have to think, well,
what would my minimal preconditions for satisfaction be?
You have to offer that to the person that you're negotiating with.
Then you learn to abide by the truth
to the degree that you can do that, and no one does it perfectly.
It's very useful because you're not storing up a whole sequence of memories
about how you were unfairly treated and abused and betrayed.
Instead, you're trying to stay on top of it and to note your unhappiness
and dissatisfaction when it manifests itself and to accept that that's the case.
And then to analyze that to see if it's your problem.
Like I said with regards to maturity,
or if it indicates that there's an injustice in the manner in which you
and the world are interacting, and then to work to set that right,
even in small ways.
It's a matter of character logical development and
that makes you stronger over time.
Partly what you need in order to do
that is you have to really understand... and we do this...
This is why we built...In the Future Authoring program
we built this section where you have to outline your most dismal future, right?
What your future would be like if you let
all your bad habits and character logical weaknesses have the upper hand.
And the reason we did this is because
you can't straighten yourself out merely as a consequence of hope.
Let's say you lay out a vision
for the future and you think about what you'd like your life to be like,
and then that makes you hopeful, and it motivates you because it gives you
something worthwhile and higher order to work for.
And that's useful. That's positive emotion working for you
because positive emotion is experienced in relationship to goals.
But it's not as useful as also being chased by something you're terrified by.
And if you have a good sense of how you would fall apart if you stayed weak
and just exactly what kind of hell that would be, then when you determined
to do something like to tell the truth and to say what you think and to not do
things that you hate,
then you're going to be pulled along
by the purpose that your vision has provided for you, but also pushed along
by your desire to avoid the worst forms of hell that you've already outlined
for yourself personally.
And that can also help you be brave enough
to stand up in a situation that would require conflict,
because if you have something to say and you have something to negotiate about
with someone, then there's going to be a certain amount of conflictual dialogue
that accompanies that to lay out a set of problems and to describe the fact
forthrightly that those problems characterize a relationship and then
to seek for solutions, is quite stressful in the short term,
and it's really easy to avoid, and so people avoid it all the time.
And then they store up grievances across the span of the relationships,
and eventually, the grievances mount to the point where they return
in monstrous form and just eat everything up.
That's where you get divorces,
or that's where you explode at your boss and end up fired.
Or that's where you develop high blood pressure over 15 years because you can't
stand all the accumulated monsters in your closet and you drink yourself
into oblivion because you can't stand your life.
That's all very counterproductive, but it's easy to avoid that necessary
conflict on a moment-to-moment basis, because it's very stressful to speak
forthrightly about genuine conflicts, especially when you're dealing
with important parts of your life, but otherwise you don't straighten them
out, and then you have to carry all that forward.
So you need to be terrified
of the consequences of not speaking your peace, and that can counterbalance
the terror of actually trying to have a conversation.
And you also have to look with regards to the shadow ideas, like...
You have to get in touch with the depths of your anger.
Lots of people are resentful about all sorts of things.
They're resentful about women,
and they're resentful about men, and they're resentful about
the patriarchy, and they're resentful about the left wing, and they're resentful
about the right wing, and they're resentful about politicians,
and they're resentful about the cataclysmic force of nature and its
ability to make people sick and suffer, and they're resentful about their own
inadequacies and about their bad parenting and, God, like the list is just bloody endless,
and that can make you very, very angry.
That's part of that resentment.
And cynical, and bitter, and dark, and full of fantasies about destruction,
and the desire to bring things down, and the wish that everyone else suffered,
and the desire to shake your fist at God, all of that's really dark.
Jung said, well, the shadow, the human shadow extends all the way down to hell.
And he really meant that. All the terrible
things that people are motivated to do are associated with that shadow domain.
And none of you are Saints, in any likelihood.
You have a terrible capacity for destructiveness.
And when you start to consult your resentment and to see how angry you are,
it can terrify you to see the depths of that anger.
Sometimes that will manifest itself
in very destructive fantasies which you might not want to become conscious of,
because they're so brutal, let's say, and so aggressive that you can't even
believe that you generate them... The nice person that's you.
So it's quite frightening to open the door and see all that.
And that also associates you with the entire dark shadow of mankind:
the satanic elements of the human character.
But it opens the door to understanding as well, to understanding how people can do
terrible things, because you can see yourself as one
of the people who can do terrible things...that's really useful.
Well, then maybe you start to be motivated
to be the sort of person who wouldn't do terrible things if you can really come
to terms with the fact that that's part and parcel of you.
It also is some in perverse sense,
it's also a discovery of your own strength, though,
because if you have that desire for aggression,
that desire for destruction and that ability to fantasize
in that aggressive manner, it also means that you can incorporate
some of that into your speech and into your actions so that you're a lot
more immovable and a lot more of a force to contend with.
It can give you some respect for yourself
when you realize that you're a force of destruction as well as creation.
And then you're also more likely to treat
yourself with a bit more intelligent caution.
To know that part of you is a ticking bomb in some sense that could go off.
And so you tread a bit more lightly around yourself.
And maybe you encourage people to tread
a bit more lightly around you as well, which isn't such a bad thing.
All the people that I really admire, that I know...
Have a clearly dangerous side, and you don't want to get...
You don't want to have that activated any more than necessary,
but it's also what makes them
respectable and strong, especially if they have that under control.
Oh, that's a bit of a dialogue about shadow integration.
It's a very challenging undertaking... To pull in that dark side
of your character, and that would be all the things that you've repressed or failed
to develop as a consequence of trying to be a,
let's say, a harmless citizen who looks virtuous on the surface.
That's the Jungian persona,
and you need that because everybody needs a mask that they wear in public,
like a suit so that we can tolerate seeing each other on the street.
We don't have to look right into our depths.
Every time we interact, we need that persona.
But that has to be transcendent.
And the way to transcend that
is to integrate the darker parts of the character.
They're very useful.
That aggression, that sexual demand,
for example, all of that is very difficult to socialize.
That competitiveness but unbelievably useful in terms of force of character.
If you can manage it.