Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.
-F. Nietzsche
Have you ever had the feeling like “There are two of us”?
Did you ever catched yourself doing something on behalf of someone else that a part of you disapproved of ?
Or - and this one happens most often of them all - have you ever experienced a thought or even a temptation to do something - that would make you hate yourself, but still felt an urge to do it?
If any of these cases seems familiar to you, congratulations!
You’ve briefly encountered what’s in the psychology known as The Shadow.
A part of your psyche, that like a shadow, lurks in the darkest parts of your being and follows you wherever you go.
Shadow psychology is mainly known thanks to the exceptional works of psychologists like Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung and last but not least the philosopher and our ultimate mentor Friedrich Nietzsche.
The Shadow is an unconscious aspect of your personality. It usually consists of repressed thoughts in your mind. Thoughts, experiences and beliefs that the other part of you, a conscious part called ego, doesn’t want to acknowledge.
Put simply, the Shadow embodies all the things you refuse to believe you’d be ever capable of, particularly the “bad” ones.
You think you’d never kill or steal. But if WW3 or any kind of Apocalypse started and everything got closed from one day to another? What if suddenly during a night someone assaulted you with a knife? Do you really think your moral standards would be stronger than your biological urge to defend yourself?
Of course, these are rather borderline examples, but they all have their roots in Shadow psychology. The more frequent and less dramatic demonstrations of our Shadow can happen when for example someone else comments negatively on the work we did and suddenly we are shouting back to them and calling them names (names much different from Luke or Matthew).
That’s a very common example of the Shadow taking over our mind.
Ok, now you know what Shadow is and how do you recognize it.
But why did it emerge in the first place?
And is there anything you can do about it to take back the control?
These are many other questions we’re going to explore in the upcoming Shadow series.
Comment below any questions you have regarding the Shadow and I’ll incorporate them into the next episodes!
Thank you for reading,
and until next time, fellow thinker :) !
In the meantime, you can check our newest video on The Values of Übermensch where we take a deep dive into 4 types of Independence and how to achieve them.