Midlife is the time when the shadow makes its presence felt. Carl Jung used the term “shadow” to describe that part of our personality that is repressed because it conflicts with the way we wish to see ourselves and be seen by others. It is that part of our personality we are now unaware of, because it was deemed incompatible with our ideal personality and has been conveniently forgotten.
Shadow Formation
Our real self consists of both light and shadow, goodness and ugliness. We have our angels and demons –aspects that we admire and appreciate and feel good about and their opposites. Goodness and evil are both residents of our psyche and soul. As writer Henry Nouwen loved to remark, “Where God appears, the evil one is also present.”
However, we tend to hide our demons and would like to appear all angel. So, we create our “persona.” In our effort to conform to social expectations, we try to present ourselves to the world in the way the world wants us to be. To live up to an idealistic self-image we suppress aspects of our personality that do not fit the self-image. This image of ourselves that we consciously cultivate and project in order to be and seen in a particular way is our persona.
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Fr Jose Parappully SDB
