Karen Nilsen

Owning Your Shadow Part 3

link to YouTube video: https://youtu.be/gAjtDY-Y6t4

While in the throes of the creative process, have you ever tried to force a creation to turn out a certain way?  Have you ever tried to force a story to follow a particular path?  Probably you have.  Probably we all have.  I know I have.  Now, have you ever tried to force a dream to turn out a certain way?  Probably not.  I know there’s such a thing as lucid dreaming—which sounds like wonderful fun if you can manage it—but most of us can’t do that.  And although being able to guide an occasional dream would be entertaining and possibly therapeutic in the case of repetitive nightmares, I don’t think I would want all my dreams to be lucid.  Not even close.

Why is that?  Because I consider dreams to be messages from the subconscious, and I already exert my conscious will over my subconscious in waking life quite enough as it is.  We need our conscious will to maintain some semblance of sanity and manage our everyday lives—it’s impossible to act in the world and relate to others in a productive and peaceful way if we lack a conscious will.  However, if the conscious will grows too large and overpowering, with a loud, bossy voice, it becomes a bully, desperate to control all our impulses and ideas, particularly those that originate in the subconscious.  The conscious will is plan-ful and goal-directed; it likes to know what’s coming next, and it hates surprises.  It doesn’t gamble.  It doesn’t take risks unless it knows the outcome, which defeats the definition of risk, but the conscious will doesn’t understand that irony.  The conscious will believes in the illusion of safety and security, believes that if you follow the steps properly and do task A and task B and task C correctly and in the right order, that you will always receive the proper reward for your efforts.

The conscious will just wishes the subconscious would go away.  The subconscious is the unknown and therefore unpredictable, and the conscious will always views the unpredictable as suspect and dangerous.  To the conscious will, the unpredictable will always be the shark, the earthquake, the killer in the dark alley.  The conscious will has no curiosity and no notion of adventure.  The conscious will is Bilbo Baggins at the beginning of The Hobbit .

But always, seething under all this peace and safety and predictability is the subconscious.  The subconscious knows the peace and safety and predictability is an illusion, fine enough in its way, but a bit boring.  And it can’t last.  It can never last.  No matter how plan-ful you are, no matter how well you follow the rules and check off the approved tasks, death and chaos will still come knocking at the door one day.

The conscious will blinds itself to this dread eventuality, as it should.  The conscious will is a necessary tool—we need it to navigate the outer world and interact in a predictable and productive way with our fellow human beings.  The illusions of security and safety it provides allow us to move forward, mostly unaware of larger realities—in a strange way, in all its plan-fulness and goal-setting, the conscious will can be the Fool of the Tarot deck, blissfully going forward over a cliff because it has done everything correctly and trusts ticking all the proper boxes will guarantee its success no matter what lurks at the bottom of that cliff it doesn’t see.

The conscious will would deride this comparison.  Clearly, the Fool is that pesky subconscious.  Anything foolish and reckless and bad belongs to the wicked subconscious, always leading the poor beleaguered conscious will astray.  That’s how the conscious will sees it anyway, because the conscious will is a master of projection.  An outsized conscious will can take its bullying, lack of understanding, lack of nuance, its black and white thinking, its irrational belief in the illusion of control, and project it all on the subconscious.  The conscious will seeks to escape its anxiety over the unpredictable unknown by immediately categorizing and labeling everything it encounters.  It cannot tolerate mystery.  It cannot tolerate blurred edges.  It cannot tolerate the past or the future.  Mystery, blurred edges, the past, and the future indicate places where the conscious will cannot exert even an illusion of control.  What the conscious will cannot control, it cannot understand.  The conscious will experiences these places as terrifying voids, an all-encompassing and devouring darkness.  Why would anyone want to understand such a frightening place?  Is it any wonder the conscious will projects all its unacceptable impulses and wicked ways onto this dark unknown?  What it cannot control, it rejects and demonizes—or rejects and idealizes.  Demonization and idealization are opposite sides of the same coin.  Neither process cares about the actual truth, but about what the conscious will wants the truth to be.

An example of this would be our obsession with doomsday scenarios, both religious and secular.  The future terrifies us because it’s ultimately unknowable and unpredictable.  To deal with this terror, my conscious will could take practical action in the present moment to make it less so—for instance, I could have a month’s worth of emergency supplies on hand.  A month’s supply seems like a reasonable amount, an amount that will allow me to go out in the world and not worry so much about a future I cannot control.  However, if my conscious will is outsized and louder than it should be, this month’s supply will not quell my anxiety about the future.  Instead, I will fantasize many disastrous scenarios, each worse than the last, and because it’s impossible to prepare ahead for every possible outcome—our brains are far too puny to handle such a multiverse, our mortal lives far too short to encompass every outcome—our consciousness falsely attributes various causes to various effects in an attempt to control the uncontrollable and often conflates correlation with causation.  We see the fallacy of this most clearly in mental health struggles such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, in which sufferers attempt to assuage their anxiety by controlling their physical environments in various ways, which can include just about any ritual, from checking the locks on the doors three times before going out to washing one’s hands five times after cleaning the litter box.  Ultimately, it’s impossible to control anxiety this way, resulting in yet more strange rituals and more frantic attempts to exert conscious will where it has no real power.  In doomsday scenarios, people make all sorts of dire predictions for our future and then offer simple explanations for complex phenomena, simple fixes for complex problems, their version of checking the locks three times before leaving the house.  Simplicity appeals to the black and white thinking of the conscious will.  The world that confronts us is infinitely complex, far too complex for us to comprehend in our current existence.  In the face of this bewildering slew of information and emotion, is it any wonder that our conscious minds retreat to demonization or idealization?

So what does this push-pull between the conscious will and the subconscious have to do with creativity?  Conscious will can become outsized in many ways, and all of these ways can destroy creativity by distorting the conscious mind’s connection to the subconscious.  Every artist and writer I know, including myself, has struggled with this.  For all their creative output, I even witnessed this happen with both my parents at times.  My dad, who was a talented sculptor, a master carpenter, a hard worker, and quite a perfectionist, grew up during the Great Depression on the family farm.  He was the only child of his mother, who sickened and died while he was still a teenager.  These experiences molded and scarred him in many ways, some good and some bad and some mixed.  For instance, he often devalued his beautiful woodcarvings and bronzes if they didn’t sell quickly.  He had tied the worth of what he created to its monetary potential.  From a dispassionate perspective, there are many reasons a creative work doesn’t sell that have nothing to do with the worth of the work in question.  Finding perspective buyers for a particular work requires being in the right place at the right time, which involves a fair amount of luck.  No matter how much work you do to promote your creations, no matter how good those creations are, you may never be lucky.  It helps if you take as many opportunities as you can (which Dad did) and produce as many pieces as you can (which Dad did), as each opportunity and each piece provides another chance for luck to land, but there’s still no guarantee that will happen.  It’s incredibly frustrating when it doesn’t happen, and it’s no wonder people give into bitterness or blame themselves or get creatively blocked after they’ve poured their hearts and souls into a work of art or a novel or a piece of music, only to have it fail to find the right audience.  Despair tempts the conscious will into believing all sorts of fallacies.

In Dad’s case, his fallacy that a piece of art was only worth something if it sold, drained joy from the creative process.  He’s been gone from this plane of existence for over a decade, and writing about this still makes me cry.  He created such beautiful sculptures—I have one of his wood cravings of a girl on a horse, and the folds of her skirt seem to whip in the wind, the horse’s mane blowing back.  It’s so realistic and perfectly proportioned that it seems alive, and it hurts me that he may have lacked any joy in its creation because he was worried about it selling.  Thank God it didn’t sell—aside from the carving of a cougar he gave my mom, it’s the only woodcarving of his I have.  I hope he sees and knows where he is now how many times people have approached me and let me know how much they value his art and his other creations.  He left an amazing legacy, despite his conscious will’s inability to understand that.

Part of his legacy is the example he set me as a creator.  His work ethic still humbles me.  I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who worked as hard as Dad did.  And even though he really didn’t enjoy reading fantasy—he was a realist through and through—he supported my writing in so many ways.  For instance, when I was in college, I had a bad experience with a dishonest literary agent and called my parents in tears.   Dad went out the next day and found a local freelance editor for me to work with, a lady who helped me figure out my unique writing process and guided me through the labyrinth of publishing.  He led by example, the best way to teach your children anything.  Observing both him and Mom working on their art affected me greatly from a young age—some of my earliest memories are in their studios.  I witnessed the whole creation process from beginning to end, over and over, and I feel so fortunate now to have had such experiences.  For example, I generally find it quite easy to enter a creative flow state.  My dad described these states as “trances” in a 1980s interview he did with a Canadian wildlife magazine; to know that my tough, practical father could admit to going into a trance state while carving a horse or wolf or screech owl tells me a lot about how unusual my childhood was.

So I learned a lot from an early age about putting the conscious will in its proper place and connecting with the vast underworld darkness of the subconscious.  Keeping this connection open and as clear as possible requires honesty, humility, and an ability to listen carefully and with discernment to both oneself and others.  I fail at all of these on a regular basis, and I believe everyone does, so be patient, yet firm, with yourself, as patient and firm as  you would be with a beloved child who you want to see grow into a happy, healthy, and responsible adult.  Remember, you are your first reader or listener or viewer.  If you connect with your subconscious in an authentic way,  you may feel a surge of energy.  Time will cease, and you will enter a creative flow state, or a trance, as my dad would call it.  I believe these states are when we connect with the eternal, the collective unconscious that unites us all.  We can feel this same state when we read certain stories or listen to certain music or watch certain movies or view certain paintings.  When I feel this way, whether I’m creating or I’m the audience for another’s creation, I know I have a good connection to the subconscious and its power.

I believe this is why story and art and music beguile us—effective stories, music, and art give meaning to the unknown of our subconscious and map out the dark places, showing our conscious wills a way forward even if we can’t predict what’s coming next.  Our conscious wills let go of their anxiety and need to control, if only for awhile, and this is such a relief.

There are many stories that only dip a toe into the depths of the subconscious, and that’s okay.  These are stories for their time, and they have their place.  They may lack originality, but they offer a certain comfort on those days that we don’t have the emotional energy to wrestle with deeper themes and character development.  In order to grow, however, we also need to interact with stories that leave the shallows and confront the unknown world in the darkness under the high seas.  I believe the deeper a story dives into the unconscious, the longer that story lasts in the conscious mind—the stories that do this well become classics and then myths.  There’s a fascinating commentary on the lasting power of originality, honesty, and creativity in the movie Walk the Line.  From my research, I believe this scene is dramatized and not factually correct, but I still think it holds value for anyone struggling with a creative block.  In the scene, when Johnny Cash first auditions for Sam Phillips, he plays a gospel song that someone else wrote and recorded, a song he apparently heard on the radio along with everyone else in the 1950s.  Sam Phillips stops him in the middle of the song and asks if he has anything else he can play.  Johnny Cash gets a bit irate and demands to know what’s wrong with how he played the song.  Sam Phillips replies that “I don’t believe you.”  Johnny Cash misunderstands him and thinks it’s a challenge to his belief in God, to which Sam Phillips says no and goes on to ask, “If you was hit by a truck and you was lying out there in that gutter dying, and you had time to sing one song, one song that would let God know how you felt about your time here on Earth.  One song that would sum you up, you’re telling me that’s the song you would sing?  That same tune we hear on the radio all day?  Or would you sing something different, something real that you felt . . . that’s what people want to hear.  That’s the kind of song that truly saves people.”

Johnny Cash went on to write and record songs that spoke to millions of people, all the way from steady church-goers to prisoners serving life sentences.  Both of my parents and myself have listened to a lot of Johnny Cash music while in the throes of creation.  I wouldn’t say I heard it most of the time—when I go into a creative flow state, the world melts away, and I lose awareness of everything beyond my characters and their reality.  I’ve played whole CDs while I’m writing and heard none of the songs.  But I think having music on in the background is still important—my subconscious picks up on it, and it helps me keep the pathway open between my conscious and subconscious minds.

I struggle to keep this pathway clear.  Modernity sows weeds and bracken of incredible distraction, and if I don’t pay attention, these soon overgrow the path and obscure its edges.  It’s necessary to hack my way through on a daily basis, especially now I have a smart phone.  Technology can be a wonderful tool—there’s no way I could record and share this video with you if I didn’t have a smart phone.  I live in a place where there’s no decent internet, so the smart phone has become my only way to access email, etc., when I’m at home.  However, I also understand now that I have a smart phone how people get lost in them.  It’s so difficult at times to put the phone down and focus on writing.  Sometimes I even turn it off so I don’t hear the notifications.

And technology is far from our only problem when it comes to connecting in an authentic way with our subconscious.  Years ago, when Disney released the live-action version of Beauty and the Beast, I remember reading a rather silly review, a review I didn’t even finish because the reviewer had gotten lost in modern politics and missed the archetypal point of the basic story.  The reviewer implicitly criticized women who enjoyed the movie as having outdated fantasies of falling in love with their kidnappers and not being feminist enough. It’s certainly not the first review I’ve read like that, and it certainly won’t be the last.  This is the type of review that our conscious wills would write—a literal, surface interpretation of the events and characters, with no comprehension that an ancient story such as “Beauty and the Beast” has been around for centuries because it taps deeply into the unconscious.  It’s not about a modern-world, two-income household, who’s taking the kids to school today marriage or even a modern dating relationship or even women’s guilty romantic fantasies.  Such old stories are more akin to dreams than waking reality, and who among us can control our dreams and what symbols pop up in our dreams?  To quote myself in a previous episode, a woman reading “Beauty and the Beast” could see the Beast as her own animus (the masculine part of her psyche) in need of rescue and reform from her more developed feminine parts.  That has nothing to do with an external romantic relationship, except in the sense that a woman who has a healthy, well-rounded animus will be more likely to form healthy, well-rounded relationships with the men in her life.

We live in an extraordinarily repressive, shallow age that has no awareness of how repressive and shallow it really is.  Many modern critics seem to willfully misunderstand stories and interpret them on the most literal of levels—with a few exceptions, I think it’s a terrible crime when I read a novel or a review of a novel, and I can tell you exactly how that novelist or reviewer voted in the last election.  Archetypes don’t care about modern politics or modern sensibilities.  Archetypes don’t bow to the whims of sensitivity readers or the overly scrupulous religious types.  They never have, and our attempts to force them into mirrored boxes that reflect the surface morality of modernity will result in outsized shadows that grow and fester until the darkness eventually swallows us in chaos.

There are some novelists—George Orwell, Ralph Ellison, and Ayn Rand come immediately to mind for me, though there are many others—who write their stories primarily as critiques of society or culture.  I call these novelists theme-driven, as opposed to character-driven or situation/plot-driven.  Of the three types of novelists, theme-driven novelists generally do the best job incorporating contemporary politics into their novels   I consider myself character-driven, both in my writing and reading preferences.  If you’re writing fiction, it’s a good idea to figure out what motivates you to write, as that will alert you to your personal style and strengths as a writer.  I mention this because I have read a number of novels and seen movies or shows in recent years that incorporated modern politics poorly.  Even if I agreed with the storyteller’s politics, I almost always put these novels down or turned off the TV.  Using archetypes as propaganda cheapens their wisdom; propaganda is always about projecting one’s shadow onto others, never about exploring or integrating it.  Such stories leave me feeling as if the writer attempted to manipulate me, not entertain me.  If I wanted a sermon, I would attend a revival meeting.  If you really want to write about politics, become a speech writer or opinion columnist.

This is not to say that modern politics can’t ever be part of a story.  My favorite TV show, 6 Feet Under, explores different characters’ political beliefs and ideas at times, religious beliefs too.  When I watch the show today, none of it feels dated to me, even though the story takes place in the early 2000s.  All of the characters feel like real people to me who actually could have existed at that time and had those beliefs and opinions.  I empathize with all of the characters, and all of the characters upset me and challenge me at different points.  It’s a great story, the best grief therapy I ever could have asked for—I didn’t see 6 Feet Under until 2009, several years after the last episode aired, and it came along at just the right time for me to process my feelings about my parents’ deaths.

The politics in 6 Feet Under works for me because it’s subtle.  Toward the end of the series, one of the main characters, Claire, gets involved with a man who’s her polar opposite in many ways—politically, socially, what have you.  It was so refreshing recently when I re-watched the series to witness this relationship unfold in such a natural and nuanced way.  Claire and her polar opposite boyfriend confronted each others’ shadows, and in the process, helped each other integrate their shadows.  Both had matured significantly by the end of the show because of their relationship.  It feels authentic.  I shudder to imagine how many current day shows or movies would have bungled the portrayal of such a relationship.  I believe many writers today struggle with authenticity because their inner critics and outer critics keep shouting at them and drown out the whisper of the subconscious.

If your inner critic sounds like a sensitivity reader, you’re in trouble.  If your inner critic denigrates you and thinks everything you do is trash, you’re in trouble.   If the inner critic gets involved too soon in the writing process, there is no more effective dam to the creative flow.  The inner critic knows how to deconstruct and point out flaws, which is necessary, but only after the novelist has a finished draft.  The inner critic has no idea how to put a story together and dreads the wild enthusiasm of inspiration.  The inner critic dreads dreaming because it has no control in the dream-space.  Anything could happen there, and the inner critic dreads the unpredictable because in confronting the unpredictable, everyone makes mistakes, and the inner critic hates making mistakes.  The inner critic views the intuitive leaps in archetypal storytelling as dangerous—in the throes of creation, the writer might overturn societal bedrock and reveal the secret truths beneath.  The inner critic will prevent the fledgling writer from ever finishing a draft if it possibly can.

The inner critic, like the conscious will, can also be a master of projection.  Have you ever had the experience of hating someone you’ve never met?  Have you ever had the experience of hating someone who’s not even real—for instance, a character in a movie?  Have you ever loved someone who’s not real?  Have you ever felt that a fictional character understood you and perhaps would be a best friend if you met that person in real life?  Does someone real or fictional annoy you, sometimes to the point of keeping you up at night?  Or perhaps intrigue you to the point of keeping you up at night?  It’s worth identifying why you feel this way.  Perhaps the character or public figure you’re fixated on reminds you of someone in real life, perhaps someone in your family, perhaps someone you have unresolved issues with.  Perhaps the character or public figure is just a bad person or conversely, someone worthy of admiration.  If this is the case, I still challenge you to at least figure out why you feel someone is bad or worthy of admiration.  What specific part of your moral code has he or she violated—or upheld?

Perhaps someone represents a part of our shadow, and that’s why we’re fixated on him or her.  Shadow is any part of us that’s outside conscious awareness.  There can be some real horrors in that shadow, but there also can be some real treasures.  It takes courage and insight to enter the darkness and confront the unknown within.  If you do something or say something or feel something that you don’t understand, shadow may be hiding there.  Shadow is why it’s worth analyzing our reactions to books, movies, games, music, cultural movements, what have you.  Shadow is why I write stories.  A bad story encourages you to project your shadow onto others; a good story encourages you to bring your own shadow into the light and integrate it in a healthy way.

If you’re having trouble thinking about shadow and story and how you might start to explore shadow in a healthy way, I encourage any of you who enjoy reading and watching movies to try this experiment.  Read a book, then watch the movie version of that book.  I was fortunate enough to read both A Clockwork Orange and The Shining before I saw the Stanley Kubrick films.  For A Clockwork Orange in particular, my vision of what the story was while I was reading was vastly different from Kubrick’s vision, although Kubrick somehow mostly captured the spirit of the story in film.  He was a peculiar genius in that way, one of the few directors who can make films I enjoy while still upsetting the authors of the original source material.  Both Anthony Burgess and Stephen King reacted poorly to Kubrick’s films of their novels, and as an author, I can understand why.  I would dread what such a director might do to a story of mine.  If Kubrick films aren’t your thing, there are plenty of other film adaptations of beloved books to explore.  For instance, I love Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.  My favorite film adaptation is the 2006 movie starring Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen.  I watch that movie at least twice a year—it’s one of my go-to movies when I’m feeling blue and want something to cheer me up.  All in all, it’s a great adaptation and manages to fit so much of the story into two hours without sacrificing the emotional depth, wit, and spirit of the source material that the moviemakers should teach a class on adapting novels to the screen.  All that said, I don’t know what Jane Austen would think of it, but I wonder.  In the movie, Mr. and Mrs. Bennett show far more affection for each other than they do in the novel.  Lizzie and her mother even have a few warm moments in the film that are never apparent in Austen’s writing.  Part of this could be due to the casting, particularly Donald Sutherland in the role of Mr. Bennett, but I also think the screenplay softened some of Austen’s edges.  I love both the novel and the movie, and it’s interesting to me to spot where the stories are similar and where they diverge.  It is in these places that I start to glimpse fleeting shadows.

Exploring one’s shadow can be difficult and sometimes dangerous.  I believe it’s necessary for us all, but I caution everyone to be careful and proceed slowly, particularly those of you who have suffered interpersonal violence.  If you are a crime victim, I would recommend seeking out a good therapist.  I have had some nasty material and memories float to the surface in dream-work, in therapy, in my fiction writing process, and even in everyday life.  It’s helpful to have skilled guides when these memories occur, especially at the beginning of working through trauma or when you’re young.  As I’ve aged and engaged in different therapeutic processes over the years, I’ve developed better inner and outer boundaries to contain such material in a healthy way.  I still have a lot of work to do, but I am in a much better, more centered place because of therapy, support from loved ones, and my writing.

I want to end with an excerpt from an unpublished article I wrote about being a crime victim as it relates to shadow and projection: When a loved one has betrayed you so severely and you come to the full realization of that betrayal, which can take years, decades, a lifetime to completely process, the thin ice of order you skate on suddenly breaks and you are plunged into chaos.  People will do anything to avoid that chaos, but once you’re there and can no longer escape it, basic survival instincts take over.

We are none of us all bad or all good.  Those of us victimized by beloved family members live in shades of gray.  Evil walks among us all—sometimes it wears the mask of a stranger, and that makes it easier to push away and contain in a neat cage labeled “other.”  But we do so as individuals, as a society, at our peril.  The more we deny the true nature of the wolf pacing at the door, especially if that wolf is part of us, the louder it will howl, and someday, it will break into our carefully fortified sanctuary of denial.  Then what will we do, especially if we’ve told all our hunters to leave, that we no longer need them?