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May/June 2007 Spirituality
Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

by James Hollis, Ph.D.

The shadow may be defined as the parts of our personality that we don't want to own as ours, but for that reason, have greater play in our lives than we imagine.

We first begin to learn more about our personal shadow in the many avenues of feedback that come back to us. We hear the criticism of our presumptive enemies, which we reject as being about them, not about us.

Our loved ones tell us how they experience us in painful ways, and that hurts to hear. We begin to acknowledge, however ruefully, that our excessive reaction to small events reveals not only a complex hiding beneath, but quite often a shadow issue, as well.

As we mature, we are more likely to become able to discern the patterns of our history - the repetitions, the reactivation of old wounds, familiar stuck places - and acknowledge how we are the ones who made those choices, created those familiar outcomes.

Slowly, if we are courageous, or simply driven by events to an accounting, we are asked to come to terms with our shadow. A person who has any level of consciousness in the second half of life will also be a person with a history contaminated by shadow issues, and may even feel crushed by their cumulative weight.

Though I thought I knew the good, I did not always do the good, apparently - no, clearly did not. And sometimes I have to admit that even my deliberated moral position produced consequences harmful to myself or to others. As analyst Lilane Frey-Rohn observed of this paradox, "'Too much morality' strengthens evil in the inner world, and 'too little morality' promotes a dissociation between good and evil."

As children, we learn to "read" the world around us to find what is acceptable, what dangerous. Our genuine spiritual aspirations, our honest questions, curiosities, and intimations of the soul, grow suspect. The by-product of our necessary collusion with the realpolitik of childhood vulnerability is guilt, shame, inhibition, and most of all, self-alienation. We all, still today, reenact these collusions, suffer this shame, and retreat from our wholeness.

Water, under suppressive pressure, does not go away; it seeks an outlet and will attack the weakest point in the container. All violations of our nature ultimately go underground and reappear as symptoms - behavioral, somatic, intrapsychic, relational - for what is denied consciously will only hide for a while and then break through again into our world.

Often what is shadowy in our psychic life is projected onto others, whomever we can blame, denigrate, attack, or accuse of precisely those motives that we have denied. It is a stunning revelation to come to the recognition that what I find wrong in the other may also be found in me, and that I may even have chosen this other in order to enact a shadowy pas de deux. How often do we ask ourselves the confrontative question: "Of what am I unconscious, here?"

As Jung noted in his 1937 Terry Lectures at Yale University:

We are still certain we know what other people think or what their true character is. We are convinced that certain people have all the bad qualities we do not know in ourselves. If you can imagine someone brave enough to withdraw these projections, then you get an individual conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a person knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow, then he has done something real for the world.

We will not find the keys to our psychic house by looking where the light is, that is, where the ego can survey its familiar territory. We can only find our personal keys in the darkest places, just where we lost them some time ago.

Based on an excerpt from James Hollis' Why GoodPeople Do Bad Things, reprinted with permission by Penguin Books. Hollis is executive director of the Jung Educational Center of Houston and author of Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. Visit www.jameshollis.net. Hollis presents a lecture on May 11 at 7:30 pm and a workshop on May 12 for the Oregon Friends of CG Jung at the First United Methodist Church Sanctuary, 1838 SW Jefferson St. in Portland. Visit www.ofj.org to register.