Befriending Your Elephant
“Try to determine how long an impression lasts by means of a stop-watch”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“One must know before one can see”
Ludwig Fleck
Our relationships, of all sorts, are where we will learn to become our self. They are also where we can come to see ourselves if we learn to understand the signs.
“When we feel most private, most deeply ‘into’ ourselves, we are in some other sense most deeply connected with others through whom we have learned to become a self” Stephen Mitchell
In the beginning is the relation
Our early relationships are formative. They shape how we understand the world, how we come to know ourselves, and understand where and how we fit. They even shape what we think the future can hold for us. These early relationship experiences play a substantial role shaping what we come to focus on in all of our relationships - what we choose to notice and pay attention to and how we chose to participate in making our world what it is.
Our focus of attention can become guided by habit, leading us towards relationships and activities that help us connect with others, engage in self-preservation, that help us develop our closest relationships. It shapes how we see things, and what we think is possible. At the same time it causes us to miss other parts of ourself, others and our world that hold important and even more influential information about who we are.
You may have had the experience of wanting to be just like a parent, caregiver or mentor. You may have also had the experience of wanting to be as far from these people as possible. Either way you are being invited by your shadow towards a life project that is not really your own.
Many of us become enrolled in projects to help our caregivers deal with their own grief and loss about the lives they never lived. While the greatest burden you give to your kids is the life you talk yourself out of - we often talk ourselves out of it because of the burden our parents left us with. This may have shown up in their early experiences through the caregiving of someone who was unaware of their own shadow. Their judgements and reactions made an impact on us that started us on our way. In many ways the start of our shadow had little to do with us.
Some of us are not as aware of the ways we carry the unlived or shadow parts of our parents. We are blocked in the way that our parents were - perpetuating their world view or behaviours. We may be living in stark contrast with this and actively running away from this shadow experience, no more in charge of the life we are building.
We lose the spontaneous, adventurous and hopeful parts of ourselves in service of another’s shadow and find that our life loses the vitality and colour it had. It’s often from this place that we begin looking for others to take responsibility for this loss in our life.
“Don’t get rid of your pain before you learn its lessons”
Richard Rohr
Relationships are the ground of our self-discovery
Relationships are often the place where we play out our conversation with shadow. Through judgment, conflict, reactivity - or our need to be attached - we play out our patterns in ways that pull us further into rigid ways of being and relating to others. The longer we live here, the more inflexible we become.
When we begin in a new relationship, we often burden the other person with the weight of our past experiences. Often asking too much of our close relationships, we come with agendas, hopes that our partner will heal us, or pull us out of ourselves- even if we do this in ways that escape our awareness. We come with patterns of relating that often don’t fit our union or will grow tired over time.
Sometimes we are looking for our others to step into a role of responsibility with us. The awareness it takes to resist this is surprisingly hard to sustain. Slipping into habits of being and relating that seem harmless. Your partner starts to take up a role or a pattern in response to a need not borne of necessity but of unconscious habit. This can shift relationships and how we connect dramatically. We don’t only give responsibility to our significant others. Sometimes we burden our kids with it, our therapist, our boss, and even our peers.
Where we let our fear of loneliness and the project of working to redeem other peoples burdens drive us into relationships, we will find narrow ways of being in the world. The roles we find ourselves in are often this way.
Dependence, or asking others to be responsible for you often pulls us into a routine way of relating that shapes our expectations and behaviour. We may do this out of a sense of wanting security, or to reduce the variability in the behaviours of those we interact with, which is often a way we fall into a slumber and call it trust. Our desire to make our relationships fit for sustaining whatever self project we are engaged tends to be born from fear, or shame or anger and typically results in more of the same, but now we have someone else to blame for it all.
We don’t make a habit of asking questions that require more of us than from our relationships.
What am I asking of others that I need to be asking of myself?
How can i be more responsible for myself in order to let others in my life be more who they are?
Where can i find the courage to live with the unknown in others to allow something new to find life?
“I only know me in terms of you” Alan Watts
Patterns Happen and Shape Your Stance
How you learned to be you is a confluence or blend of so many different people trying to make sense of who they are and where they are in the world. For you, it may have started with your parents in an instrumental way, or in ways that we have come to talk about as attachment. If we take this idea of who we are as being sort of completely relational then when we get ready to do our inner work we have to think at least in part in terms of the relationships that made us who we are.
It isn’t just our early relationships. As we adapted and dealt with our environment we carried these ways of being into our young adult years. Many of us make significant life decisions out of this adapted way of being in the world but our adapted way of being is typically something we’ve made up and because we’ve made it up we’ve usually done this from a place of knowing what’s acceptable to others. Not only what’s acceptable to others but maybe what moves us far away from those ugly experiences we had when we were young or closer to the ones we dreamed of.
Our life becomes a series of fragments held together loosely by cliche or personal brand statements. When we choose to disown a part of our self or forget a part of our self because of our difficult experiences or discomfort we create a sense in ourselves of incompleteness of lack.
As we get older we become more accustomed - habituated - to being who we think we need to be. We become expert at performing within interpersonal patterns that keep the rejected parts of ourselves at bay and create conversations with others that serve to maintain the biases, blindspots and habits we have unintentionally cultivated. When you notice qualities in other people in your imaginative world qualities that frighten you or depress you, irritate you, disturb you or even fascinate and compel you, these are often shadow qualities. But your way of being has perhaps convinced you that they’re not actually inside you - that they exist out there you’ve externalize them. You’ve become blind to the impact of the parts of yourself you don’t feel comfortable accepting.
“the self is an act of grace” Mikhail Bakhtin.
Blind Leading the Blind
Areas of our selves that are difficult to see or reach with out effort , at work we might call them blindspots. But this is not only about being aware of your environment or how you impact others - it is about being aware of what drives you and influences your decisions. We often don’t even know they are there until we heed the warning signs in our relationships. If you don't heed the warning signs, we run the risk of living on autopilot and not living our most meaningful life. We all have different types of blind spots. There are some general themes or more common ones that we share. See if you see yourself in these descriptions.
You know the right way to do things and can be overly critical of yourself and others when the rules aren’t followed.
You find it difficult to connect to your own needs - a kind of self-forgetting
You work overtime to minimize any data that might demonstrate a vulnerability or weakness in yourself.
You might find suffering or pain to uncomfortable to bear and chose to focus and reframe everything towards the positive.
Knowing it or not, you may focus on what might present a threat. You might confront before it comes or seek a powerful other to help you deal with it.
You might believe that love and relationship is not possible for you and that engaging with people in this way might lead to them overpowering or hurting you.
You might focus on emotional experiences at a deep level and in some ways lose your self to them.
You might find the call to performing to be compelling and it becomes difficult to know the difference between who you are and what others see in you as a successful person.
You might build close and connected relationships and focus on influencing through service - getting angry when this doesn’t mean a return in love and loyalty.
Bringing shadow to light
When we have strong or surprising reactions to others thoughts or actions, we may be living out of the shadow - we are on autopilot. When we believe that what we see in another person is truly who they are - we are sensing the invitation of the shadow. Often when we feel we are ‘falling’ for someone or when we are entirely disgusted by someone - the shadow might be enticing us.
When we have these strong reactions - when people appear to be out of sync or entirely in sync with who we ‘thought’ they should be - our focus of attention is not in the present and is signalling to us that we are living in the shadow. We see or listen at a “lower level” - confirming or disconfirming how people match our knowledge or expectation - we are under the influence of shadow.
It may be that we are surprised that someone we dislike strongly acts with compassion. It may be that we find someone who matches our ideal and we feel attracted to them - in ways that reveal the images we seek, not a presence to real relationship. We may ignore qualities that would otherwise annoy us in people that we are invested in being attached to.
To begin moving beyond these one dimensional experiences where we are ‘shadow’ boxing with our own ideas and expectations - playing out a reaction to what we maybe have not acknowledged in our self - rather than being in touch with what our relationships can be if we show up in them acknowledging the ways they represent parts of ourselves we have disowned. We need to connect with the awareness of shadow.
We must begin to catch ourselves in the act - noticing that we are relating to the darkness in ourselves the ideas and opinions we have constructed to externalize what has been rejected in ourselves.
Seeing the shadow qualities of ourself - and the dynamics with people from our past - distant and closed off fathers, over protective or invasive mothers, trauma filled relationships. What are these reactions in these intense relationships trying to tell us about ourselves?
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing”
Naomi Shihab Nye, Poet
