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Welcome back to Coast to Coast AM. My next guest is connie's Wig. She is a beautiful spiritual author. She wrote award winning book called The Inner Work of Age Shifting the Role, Shifting from role to soul, and she talked a lot about in that particular book about her work on the shadow in midlife and beyond, going from the roles in your life to the soul, and I
remember interviewing her about that book. She has a new book again on the same topic of the shadow, but it's how our search for our shadow or our diving into that shadow wherek can really help us on our path to awakening, to our spiritual path and to really separate from the abuse that we've had or trauma that we've had in our lives. Back to the show, Connie, thanks for joining me.
Lisa, so good to be with you again.
Absolutely, it's just for your body of work is diving into the tough subjects and I really appreciate that you're not afraid to go there because you see such a better way on the other end of the path through darkness. But it's not an easy one, is it.
It's not easy. But the truth is all of us meet our shadows all the time. It's just that our habit is to deny it or defend against it because we don't have the tools.
What's an example maybe of a shadow that one would have.
Yes, okay, so let's kind of start at the beginning and be sure that we're on the same page. So when we say shadow, this is a term that was named by Carl Jung, who was famous psychiatrist in the beginning of the field of psychology, and he used a term shadow because it's that part of us that's not in the light, the light of awareness. It's like a blind spot in our field of vision. And it can be absolutely anything that goes into the shadow. It can
be a forbidden feeling like anger or sorrow. It can be a trait that we don't develop, that goes unlived, like an artistic or athletic trait. It can be a belief that begins early but then gets repressed and doesn't ever get expressed. So anything at all becomes shadow content and the shadow. You know, we know now that the mind and the body are intimately interwoven, interconnected.
Right yes.
So shadow material is not just in a corner of the mind somewhere, which is how people seem to picture it. It's actually in the whole brain, mind, body, in our muscles, in our in our tightness, in our memory, in our feelings. And when we begin to discover or uncover this material, we actually gain energy, we gain awareness. We can reclaim lost feelings that have been buried, we can reclaim talents that were unexpressed because maybe they weren't supported by our families.
So there's a all kinds of gifts. Young called it the gold in the dark side. So the shadow is a is a large topic, and that's why I've written so many looks about it. It's really it's paild my interest for many decades.
Now I can understand why.
Yeah, and there's not a lot of material for people about how to work with it.
Well.
Also, when it's not recognized, it can run your life without unconsciously and cause you to have behaviors that I mean, look at generational trauma. The shadow that is buried repeats itself over and over again.
Yes, that's exactly right. So if any of our listeners have the same fight with a friend or a partner over and over again. That's the shadow erupting. Or you struggle with a self sabotaging behavior, maybe it's overeating or gambling, or making critical statements of the person you love, that's the shadow erupting. There's a part of you that is it is not in the control of your ego, but it's erupting in order to bring information about some valid needs.
So when we learn how to discover the valid need inside of that shadow, I call it a shadow figure. It's a part of ourselves. It's not who we are, it's not all of who we are, but it's a part and inside that part there's a valid need that's actually asking for something. In that self destructive behavior, like say addiction, what is it asking for? And as we learn to uncover that, we gain self knowledge and we gain the consciousness to be able to change those behaviors.
Can you give me an example, because like for the example that you just gave of addiction, it's really about control in some way, right.
Wellet I give you a brief story about a client. So a woman came to me because she had gained a lot of weight and she was unhappy in her relationship and this is what she described to me. Every night, she would wait for her boyfriend to call her, and when he wouldn't call, she would sit by the phone and eat ice cream. And it became habitual night after night, and she was devastated that he didn't call. And as she gained the weight, that symptom told her that something
was really wrong. She couldn't face that something was wrong with the relationship, but she could look at the fact that she was gaining all this weight, and that's what motivated her to enter therapy. She thought that was the problem.
But when we began to do shadow work and we discovered this shadow part that she called the foodie, what we found out was that her mother had also had an unhappy marriage and was always waiting for her husband to come home, and she was overeating while she was waiting. And so Susan had been watching her mother do that all her life. She was keeping the feelings down with food and so the source of that addiction was her inability to communicate her needs and her fear of finding
out what the truth was from her partner. So eventually Susan was able to took months, you know, but she was able to call this man and say, what's going on? You know, you don't seem to want to be with me, and he said, I don't. I haven't been able to break up with you, but I don't want to be in a relationship. So, you know, she she spent a few weeks with a lot of grief and anger and
very upset. And as she worked that through, she realized that she had been choosing someone who didn't want her and using food in the self destructive way, and now she was free of both of those patterns. She wouldn't do that again because she saw the connection between the poor choice of a partner and the emotional eating. And so the foody shadow character began to recede and she was able to communicate. You know, as she started dating, she was able to tell people her needs more clearly.
Just by recognizing that. Did she have to do specific work or dialogue around it, or forgiveness or was there any more that goes into shadow work.
So this is kind of the method that I developed in the book Romancing the Shadow. So you begin to watch with self observation when this self destructive behavior comes up, what are you saying to yourself? And she was saying I'm lonely and I feel abandoned. And then you watch the feelings that go with those thoughts. So she felt really sad and alone, and you watch the bodily sensations
that go with those thoughts and feelings. And I don't remember what it was for her, but it could be, you know, tightness in the shoulders or the abdomen, or nausea or some kind of physical sensation. So then you have three cues that that particular shadow came character is coming forward, is moving into consciousness, and you give it a name. She called it the Foody, and you give it an image. And the image that she came up with was this giant open mouth. So now she had
all these ways to catch that. What had previously been this sort of amorphous, unconscious feeling that she couldn't get a handle on it was too abstract. Now she had a concrete image, and she gave it a name, and she had something that she could work with and witness every time it moved into her awareness. And in that moment, she had a choice, should I listen to the foody and eat ice cream? Or should I make a different choice,
Because while it's still unconscious, you don't have choice. It's like you're in a trance and you lose your agency. That's what addiction is about. It's a very trance like state.
Right, right.
And so as she moved more and more awareness into the process, she gained more and more choice, and sometimes she might choose to eat ice cream if she felt like it, but this was about learning how to communicate in a relationship, so she wasn't using the ice cream to stuff down her feelings. So it's a process and it takes time. It's not a quick fix.
But you personify the behavior with some type of an image, so you call it to the forefront of the conscious mind, and then you are able to make a little bit more of a clear choice around it.
Now, that's right. I really love you have the opportunity to choose because it's not an unconscious process anymore.
And this is from your book Romancing the Shadow, that process.
Yeah, that book really focuses on method and then as we age. I wrote The Inner Work of Age to use that method for other issues that come up later in life. So, for example, we have I'm in my seventies now. Most of the people I interviewed for the book have a shadow figure called that I called the inner ages, and it's that part of us that either denies or dislikes aging, looking older, feeling older, behaving differently,
and so people lose self acceptance. In my practice that there were people who were just hating themselves for how they look, and so that in internalized agism becomes a shadow character that's unconscious, and when we begin to work with it consciously, we then have a choice of how to respond to our aging and how to do it differently. So that's just one of the shadow characters in that book.
Well, these are I mean, this is fantastic, especially when it comes to giving a personification of the shadow behavior, so it calls it to the forefront. Probably the more obscure the personification of the behavior is, the easier it is to have be the observer of it, right to maybe even make make it fun or obvious or outrageous, so that there.
Can be yes. Some people like to do it that way. I mean, it's you know, the general principle of psychology is making the unconscious conscious mm hmm. And people can do that with dream work. Using dreams, you can find the shadow. You can do it with a creative process. You can do it with free association. So this is a particular method for making the unconscious conscious and forming or as you said, personifying these characters and making them
memorable because their nature is to hide. And so if they slip behind the curtain again and you remember, you remember it because it's eccentric, you know, or wacky, that's great. You have a way to recognize when it comes up again.
Yes, absolutely so. In the book, you talk a lot about various contemporary teachers of Buddhism and Hinduism and Catholicism, and you talk about the shadow in let's particularly talk about Catholicism. Where there's a shadow in a religious or a spiritual teacher, it could be anything. It could be also, you know what we saw recently with the Dalai Lama. Depending on whether or not that was true, there's so many different shadows that are associated with religious and spiritual leaders,
especially when it comes to cults. How does that shadow manifest? Why does someone who has a shadow passed? Why are they attracted to being a religious leader in the first place.
So this is the new book, Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path, And this just kind of extends my work into the religious and spiritual arenas. So it's a continuation of what we've been talking about. But we tend to meet a shadow in ourselves when we're in a religious or spiritual community in various ways. We could meet our own denial. We could meet a projection, we project we attribute something positive to a clergy person that we
deny in ourselves or reject in ourselves. We might meet a shadow in a community, because groups have their own shadows. You know, groups are cultures, and they define what's acceptable and what's taboo, what goes into the shadow, And we might meet a shadow in a teacher, as you're saying, somebody may act out a hurtful, destructive behavior. And in the research for the book, I was really astonished to find how much that's going on now and how little
people are talking about it, you know, not really. I mean, there's the news every single day. The headlines are screaming about politician shadows, and you know, we're all kind of overwhelmed with all of this and the attention and even the Me Too movement, which brought this incredible attention about sexual shadow to the workplace and to universities, it didn't extend it into the religious and spiritual world.
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