Conversations with a Soul (28 page)

Christine Carpenter represents a long tradition in which withdrawal from the world offered the chance to deal with the dark side, with our personal shadow side, our individual and communal Mr. Hyde, our
dark personality
.

Hermits and anchoresses have practically disappeared, yet the tradition out of which that movement arose is still alive and has evolved away from punishment and withdrawal and towards service. All over the world men and women sublimate their dark, shadow side through a commitment to feed the hungry, tend to the dying and educate the illiterate. Monasteries and convents provide a source of nurture, community, reflection and prayer, but those who choose this path remain ascetics, committed to transform the body and mind by exercising restraint.

At the same time there are others whose approach to the
dark personality
seems rooted in medieval times! The need to control and inhibit the human spirit seems to drive them and inform their dealings with their fellows. Their approach to the shadow side is to make no apology for repressing whatever urges might be torn from human interaction and imprison them in prohibitions. Conservative politicians and preachers still believe that stronger bolts, thicker doors and harsher penalties might do the trick. Some religious sects call their adherents to abandon the world and retreat to segregated communities. Reinforced with prayer, retreats, isolation, meditation, and confession, Bible study and good deeds we might just keep the beast locked away.

And it’s not all 'stick' for we are offered carrots as well. By forcefully guarding against the hints and urges and questions that arise from the occupants of our personal dungeons we are rewarded with respect and security.

This is how we safeguard civilization and protect ourselves from yielding to our primitive selves; this is how we keep our souls pure and vigilant; this is how we do the right thing for our families and those who depend upon us; this is how we live as excellent employees, good providers, loving sons and daughters, faithful and predictable spouses.

Keep it locked up and buried because if once you allow your dark side to become incorporated into your personality who can say where it will all end?

This approach to our dark side views it as the
repository of our wild, some would even say, 'depraved,' certainly uncivilized, animal urges
.

Of more recent times, probably in the last 50 years or so, we have been living through a quiet revolution. Men and women, but particularly men for whom the journey is much harder, have come to question our evangelical repudiation of the dark side of our personalities. We have discovered that myths and fairy tales are far more powerful than the stuff of pantomimes and children’s books. Stretching back for hundreds of years' they tell of the sagas of darkness and light, and they invite a journey of discovery.

Poetry too has given voice to our dark side that longs to be acknowledged, rather than punished; that yearns to be embraced rather than hidden and shunned. Repentance might be appropriate, but not for the darkness that needed to be isolated but for the isolation itself.

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.

And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.

I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self

and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help

and patience, and a certain difficult repentance,

long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself

from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
⁷⁹

This revolution nurtured in books, in gatherings of men and in a rediscovery of what it means to be a man, or a woman, has initiated another approach in how we work with our dark side. It is the simple recognition that the daemons that inhabit my dark side are, after all, a part of me, no less sacred than any other part of me. Whatever primitive urges reside deep within, are fearsome simply
because they are locked away
, and denied the light of day, imprisoned by the demands of others.

In our reluctance or inability or fear to face our dark side we do an injustice to ourselves. The 'howling wind' that bespoke all manner of terror roaming the desolate places caused a man to double check that the door was locked and bolted. Yet the wolf that howls does so because he is in pain deep
within the man’s Soul.

Like a smooth pebble that sits comfortably in a man’s hand and usually finds its way into his pocket is the old adage,
truth denied becomes toxic, truth embraced leads to wholeness and renewal.

Two friends of mine, a husband and wife team, both work in geology. She is a geologist and he, a geological physicist. When I first met them she had no difficulty in explaining precisely and logically what she did during the day. He, on the other hand, had to make use of several examples, toys, stories, and illustrations so as to admit me into his world, although I am still not
exactly
sure what a geological physicist does. It seems to change from one application to another and goes far beyond merely collecting different kinds of rocks.

Conversations about the psyche, about the things that go on inside of us, also demands that we use different models and toys and illustrations to create a bridge across which we can cross in dialogue and begin to understand one another. Elizabeth O’Connor, as we shall see in a moment, wrote about “our many selves” to describe what she thought was going on inside of her.

We are all familiar with this process whereby we make use of similes, stories, examples, imaginative structures in order to make available what would otherwise be hidden.

Robert Bly has written extensively about the
Shadow
and in so doing has gifted us with a very potent and useful model with which to work.

If, on a dark street, you were to shine a flashlight on me, you would probably illuminate enough of me to know that it was me. You would, however, create a shadow in which all the parts of me that you could not see were hidden. If you shone the light on my face, the back of my head would be in shadow and not visible.

So, whenever we are bathed in light we cast a shadow.

In a similar way, our being, our personality, the person other people see has a shadow-self cast by our visible self.

Using that model, we might say that
my shadow self consists of all the parts of me that cannot be seen, sometimes not even by me when I focus attention on my person
. Prominent in that shadow would be all the parts of me that were lopped off in the process of shaping me into the person my parents and others wanted or needed me to be. (Yes, even the urge to pee on the flowers!) Yet the parts live on and I must engage them and do 'the difficult repentance'. Failure to do so will leave me a stunted person, crippled in so many ways by the injustice done to me as well as my continuation of the injustice.

Bly uses the graphic image of a
bag
which we all carry around and into which we have stuffed our unacceptable parts, the shadow parts. The more we toss into the bag the heavier it becomes, the greater the effort to carry it about and the more it influences our being. The greater our reluctance to deal with the contents of the bag, the more violent our shadow self becomes. No one ever sees the contents of the bag for it is always in shadow until we begin to  'unpack' the bag and work with what we find.

In analysis the small and lonely child that is hidden behind his achievements wakes up and asks: ‘What would have happened if I had appeared before you bad, ugly, angry, jealous, lazy, dirty, smelly? Where would your love have been then? And I was all those things as well. Does this mean that it was not really me whom you loved but only what I pretended to be? What became of my childhood? Have I not been cheated out of it?’
⁸⁰

She was the first born, child of a loveless marriage. By the time she was ten years old the gulf between her parents had become a chasm. She tried everything she could to bring them together because she loved them both. Finally, divorce made legal what had already happened between them.

Her mother had no friends and so the pain and anger and despair with which her mother waged a war, which should have been shared with other adults, were shared with her daughter. Too young she assumed the role of counsellor, confidant, priest, nurse and mother to her mother. She discovered too young an adult’s world made bitter by loneliness, and made empty through the debris left behind by destroyed hopes and dreams. She learned the hopelessness of trying to fix for an adult what cannot be fixed by a child, but still she tried.

To do so meant she needed to set aside the ancient call to
‘come out and play and engage the wondrous magic of the forest’
and in that denial she deposited parts of herself in a bag which she would carry throughout her life.

She was robbed of her childhood and cheated out of the carefree world which is every child’s right, and the bag held her stifled laughter and the bag accommodated a life denied a child’s world of wonder - but no one ever knew. She was forced to look at the world through the eyes of an injured adult and walk away from a childhood to which she could never return.

Meet her today and you would be touched by how considerately she lives her tidy life. Everyone who knows her proclaims how caring she is. Nothing is too much trouble for her. She takes on too many responsibilities and lives to make other people happy yet for some reason she shies away from long term commitments and would have the greatest difficulty is telling you what brought happiness into her life.

She is unable to abandon herself to playfulness and fears that somewhere within there is a wild person who wants to engage in crazy, wild things, but she denies herself such extravagant explorations. It sometimes seems to her that her friends have little difficulty saying “no” to what they don’t want to do but she can never say no without suffering pangs of guilt and remorse, consequently she frequently feels unappreciated and taken for granted. When this happens she feels great rage. Hers is a world ruled over by never ending obligations.

In one respect she is lucky because she is a woman and women seem to have a much greater ability to deal with the psyche. If she is lucky enough to find someone who will stand with her and allow her to unpack that shadow self she will discover the roots of her anger, and if she finds enough courage to face her shadow self, call it by name, and practice new behaviours she will experience a resurrection.

Men, on the other hand, typically, have the greatest difficulty talking about the shadow and the contents of the bag. Talk about fishing? No problem! Talk about a yearning for a father’s touch?

Silence!

This is probably why poetry has come to play such a central role in Men’s Groups. Poetry lends us a means of opening up and sharing what goes on in our shadow selves.

My mother never forgave my father

for killing himself,

especially at such an awkward time

and in a public park,

that spring

when I was waiting to be born.

She locked his name

in her deepest cabinet

and would not let him out,

though I could hear him thumping.

When I came down from the attic

with the pastel portrait in my hand

of a long-lipped stranger

with a brave moustache

and deep brown level eyes,

she ripped it into shreds

without a single word

and slapped me hard.

In my sixty-fourth year

I can feel my cheek

still burning.
⁸¹