Shadow Work 3: Using Images to Explore Your Shadow
https://www.drmiletic.com/blog/using-images-to-explore-your-shadow
This is the 3rd entry in the Shadow Work series on my blog. To read the first two, click below:
There’s no way around the fact that shadow work is tough. It makes us look at precisely those parts of ourselves that we dislike and even downright hate. We are also afraid of our own shadow because we can sense its presence, but we don’t understand its substance. The process, therefore, can’t be easy and painless. Just because something can’t be painless, it doesn’t mean that it has to be tortuous. To show we can explore an aspect of our shadow and hopefully not make it into an hour of self-torture, I decided to call a friend yesterday evening and use him as a guinea pig.
It was actually a happy coincidence: my friend is a psychologist but he doesn’t work as a clinician. Instead, he works as an HR specialist in a mid-sized corporation and isn’t too keen on his job. In the past few months, on more than one occasion I listened about all the facets of the evil that emanate from his boss whenever he shows up in a room without having to say or do anything. This has SHADOW written all over it, so I thought it might be useful for him to explore it, on the condition that I am able to write it up, or at least most of it. I did promise a more specific way of uncovering the shadow, so here it is…
The gist is the following: my friend’s boss is apparently a money-obsessed hateful devil. My friend has one job: to optimize performance and reduce expenses. His boss has no understanding for not meeting his seemingly arbitrary criteria and blames my friend, not only for his failures, but also for anything that goes on in the team even parts of it that my friend doesn’t control or supervise. Or at least, I should say that my friend feels as if he is being blamed. We are talking about projection here, so it’s useful to be precise and not malign his boss without good reason. My friend feels singled out and bullied, even though he is quick to point out that his boss isn’t a bully. My friend, in a way, knows that there’s something else going on: he knows that he has a bad boss, but he also knows it’s not all about his boss. And with two needed for tango, it only leaves one option: some of it could be about my friend and his shadow.
I decided to use images for this. I like art, my friend likes art, so it seemed like a good choice. All the images that you see below are works of Deborah Koff-Chapin that she created using a method of painting that she calls “touch drawing”. These images are printed and published as decks, and I have no idea what they are meant to be used as (the little booklet that comes with them offers many possibilities most of which I don’t understand) but this is what I use them for and they are very useful. What I like about them is that they are abstract enough that we can project a lot onto them, but they contain figures so we can also tell stories by looking at them. Perfect for anyone who needs a psychological tool.
Step 1. Identifying perspectives
I ask my friend to find 4 images:
How do you see your boss?
How do you see yourself?
How do you think your boss sees himself?
How do you think your boss sees you?
This is what my friend selected. The images are in the following order with respect to the questions:
1 2
3 4
Step 2. Weaving the narrative
I ask my friend to tell me about each image.
Boss
The image he chose for his boss is how he imagines the devil. The figure doesn’t seem alive to him. It has dead eyes. Like a zombie. All a zombie wants is to eat human flesh. All his boss wants is to eat money procured by his human minions (my friend included). He is dark and cold, insensitive. His gaze robs you of your humanity.
The image below is how his boss sees himself – of course, according to my friend. For this, I asked my friend to use his boss’ self-descriptions, his own words. Here’s what my friend said: “Oh, he’ll say things like ‘I care about this team’, ‘You guys are good, you just need to put in more effort’ or ‘All I want is for us to do well’. He thinks he’s some kind of a saint. Can you imagine, he actually thinks he is the one sacrificing something? Too bad you don’t have an image of Mother Teresa in this pile!”
For the second time that day, although to a different person, I had to point out that while Mother Teresa certainly was a devout Christian, she was also capable of incredible cruelty, just ask the people she “helped” in India. She could have used some shadow work herself. Funny how her name is often invoked with a bit of irony or sarcasm – very telling!
My friend concludes: “For him, I chose this half-smiling, mild mannered figure; blue is such a calming color. That’s how he speaks – calmly. Like Miranda Priestly. He would think of himself not as the devil but as a regular Joe. He is ridiculous like that.”
My friend
“I chose this image for me because I like the color green. It’s a grounded color. I have my feet on the ground. The face on the image is looking up, and that’s what I want at work. In life too: to have ideals, to strive for more, but not to lose ground. This image feels kind. He sets his sight high, but he is still approachable.”
For how his boss sees him, he chose the figure with a five-pointed start on her forehead. It’s because he feels like his boss treats him like he is his slave, his property – so he’s visibly branded. It’s black and white because he doesn’t see him in colors, he doesn’t see him as a person, he is just a worker to be pushed around.
Step 3. The Light
Immediately, I notice the following: The “light” aspect contains colors, the “shadow” side of things is black and white. This reflects how my friend thinks about his boss. It’s very much black and white. One figure is male, the other is female. My friend identifies as male, and from what I could tell so does his boss. Yet we have this gender difference on the images. Both images are black and white and he describes both as being dead or zombies or slaves. I put them side by side:
“This is what we need to explore together”, I said.
“A dreadful couple, isn’t’ it?, my friend replied. Then he made a curious comment by referring them as a couple in an unhappy marriage. We’ll come back to that, but surely you see where this is going.
Before diving into the difficult, I wanted to explore the “light” side of things. So I put the other two images and asked him to go through the rest of the pile and to put everything that he can emotionally connect to on the table: how do you imagine a perfect work relationship like? The relationship between how you see yourself and how you imagine your boss sees himself?
Below, you will see some of the images he selected. There were too many to fit neatly into the photograph, so I curated them by choosing those I thought were best representatives of what he told me about the images overall. I let him explain each image and associate on its content.
He put the images he selected on the floor and smiled as he was looking at them. I asked him to tell me why he chose each, how it makes him feel and how it illustrates an ideal work relationship. My own reaction to this is that what he chose has very little to do with work, but a lot to do with parental affection, but I kept my impressions to myself. It’s his work, his associations and his emotions.
Here are some of the things my friend felt while reflecting on the ideal work relationship: being taken care of, having a mentor, having someone to counsel me, being seen by someone for who I am instead of having to fake it, being supported and guided in my career, knowing that my boss has my back and my best interests in mind, not having to tiptoe around someone or anxiously wait for his judgment.
Then, we turned to the images that represent the shadow.
Step 4. The Shadow
Some of my friend’s associations to these images were the following: it’s unbearable to the point where your head will explore and you feel like jumping off a cliff, or better yet pushing him, it’s being constantly pushed around, trapped, anxious, there’s always uncertainty, you never know where you stand, what your responsibilities are, you just know that you’ve failed suddenly and you want to scream at his demonic face but you can’t because at the end of the day, he’s the boss and he has the power, his word is the last word.
This is where I shared one of my impressions with him. I pointed out that he doesn’t feel seen by his boss, that he doesn’t feel treated as a human being, but that in return, he also doesn’t see his boss or thinks of him as a human being. In fact, in the course of our exploration, he referred to him as a monster, a money-obsessed zombie, a demon, etc. The dehumanization that my friend feels is something that he also does. He has less power in the reality of the work relationship, but we’re not talking about that reality anymore, we’re talking about psychological reality and in that reality, he dehumanizes his boss because he feels dehumanized by him.
At first, he was reluctant to accept my hypothesis and it made him visibly uncomfortable. He thinks about it for a few minutes and then responds with what I can recognize as a hint of resentment in his voice: “So what if I am? He dehumanizes me, I dehumanize him. Big whoop. He had it coming.”
I clarify my point: but that means that you are like him, at least in this respect. (Uhm, I am known for being gentle and subtle.)
My friend insists he is nothing like him. I concede for the time being because we’re in a very delicate area, so I ask him if it’s possible that he never treated anyone like that even by mistake, even accidentally and he thinks about it and finally says that perhaps he has one or twice. But it’s very much unlike him. Maybe his girlfriend when she becomes really “unreasonable”. I ask him if unreasonable isn’t also a bit dehumanizing? Isn’t labeling someone basically irrational a kind of erasure of their subjective experience, a dismissal at best?
This is why a counselor of some kind is needed when it comes to shadow work. We really want to avoid seeing what we need to see. Because here we have already a second instance of dehumanization: first, his boss and then his girlfriend. But because it’s so difficult for him to acknowledge that he is capable of doing that, he pushes that away, disavows that part of him.
I ask him about this. I say something like this: “I think we can both see that you’re having a hard time with being dehumanized and especially with the idea of dehumanizing someone. Outside of work, have you ever experienced that?”
He talks for about 20 minutes about all kinds of instances where he felt dehumanized all of which fell flat emotionally, until, inevitably, it came down to the parents. Say what you will about the old gentleman from Vienna, but he knew his stuff.
“I felt that way with my father. We all did, my mom and my sister. When he would get drunk, if you walked around the room in the wrong way, he would tart yelling. Or worse. The whole apartment would be tense and silent. You could feel the air pressuring you. Like this – (he points to the image below) “
“When I was little, I used to hide behind the curtain in the living room. We had some thick gray curtains that wouldn’t let the sunshine in. I would stand there for hours until I would hear him snoring and then I would run out. Like this – (he points to the image).”
“So yes, I get defensive when you say that I dehumanize people. Because I’m not that guy. I’m not that guy.”
We stopped here, because it felt like he had pinpointed exactly what aspect of his shadow came to the forefront and it was too much for him to go on at that time. And that’s OK. In therapy (and friendly exercises like this one was) it’s necessary to push yourself, but not off a cliff.
In this little experiment, the use of images took us straight to the core of the issue. His own ability to dehumanize others when he feels under attack was what he had to push into his shadow, because it resembled his father too much, a man he loathes deeply. You don’t want to be someone you loathe.
This is how you can uncover a part of your shadow, but this is not shadow work entirely. This is the entrance to shadow work, it’s where it actually begins. It’s mapping the terrain and what would normally come next is working through – understanding the layers of meaning and integrating that into my friend’s sense of self. If this were a client and not a friend, I would recommend playing around with images like these, even creating them – art can be a powerful tool for work like this. Look how deep other artist’s works took us in an hour, imagine what he could do with the images he creates himself? The more of our shadow that we can symbolize, if not through words than through images, the more control we have. What we can trap inside language, we can consciously reshape to our liking. Images are an excellent transitional state between the unconscious and the fully conscious, present in language.
Shadow seems bad, but it doesn’t have to be. The mere intensity of emotions that these images reveal tell me that there is so much power there. Power is a neutral thing, it can be used for good or for evil. When we don’t know our shadow, it directs us in life. Jacques Lacan once likened our unconscious mind to the magnetic field. It’s a force that affects everything but you don’t see it and you don’t think about it. That’s what our shadow does too. When we shed light on what was trapped in darkness, we can learn how to best use that to our advantage. That’s perhaps a less romantic vision of healing, but it is healing nonetheless that I am talking about.
