Embracing the shadow

We Americans are a living example of the power of the shadow

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Carl Jung

Jung had a set of principles that seem custom made for the USA in the 2020s.

One premise was that, for a healthy individual – or nation -wholeness includes both the admirable and the uncomfortable aspects of the self.

We are in a state where acknowledging any failure, weakness or moral lapse, in our national history is something like a crime against the state. Denial has become America’s first and primary principle.

Denial does not melt away when we ignore it. It saturates our attitudes and souls. And we see what we repress everywhere we look.

When we encounter traits in others that we fear, judge, or have an intense reaction to, we may be seeing aspects of our own shadow reflected back to us. Jung described projection as a defense mechanism in which individuals attribute their own unconscious impulses to others.

Someone who suppresses their own inclinations might view other people as corrupt, crooked or deception. Jung called this the mirror effect—the world reflects what we reject internally.

The world of corrupt, evil oppressors and exploiters is all we can see – precisely because we project our own vile imaginations on every landscape where we set our eyes.

Denial is a survival strategy.

Denial of trauma helps us get past it. Or at least deal with the shock and insult we are left with.

I found out not long ago that one of my father’s ancestors was one of thousands of Scots exiled to the British colonies in North America.

I don’t know how old he was. He could have been a soldier under the King of Scotland. But he, and thousands of others (including children) were taken from their homeland – and families - and sent as indentured servants never to see home or family again.

If Carl Jung were to look at the USA in these troubled times, he would see many familiar patterns.

Trauma is not forgotten. Either by individuals or by communities or cultures.

We Americans, normally, or at least previously, saw ourselves as upbeat, creative and helpful, currently find ourselves afraid, suspicious, with enemies everywhere.

For whatever set of reasons, America’s shadow is finding fertile ground and emerging, as shadows must.

Other nations have had histories of government authorized slavery. Few, if any were as cruel – or as purely raced based as the US version.

Emerging Jungian shadows are mindlessly, impulsively, almost instinctively cruel and destructive.

Emotional overreactions often signal the shadow at work. Consider the typical raging rantings of racism. Where does that all consuming passion come from?

It doesn’t come from the person of color at their desk or trying to go to school. But it is projected – like an IMAX image on the world around the one consumed by – even held captive by – their shadow.

The men who were transported to the colonies as rebels or criminals were sent mainly to Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas.

I don’t know the fate of my Scots ancestor. But many of his fellow traumatized companions found themselves in the slave states where they, as a cruel coping mechanism, found that they could treat others as cruelly as they had been treated.

But cruelty offers no relief – in fact it compounds the grief with guilt.

We might imagine that being the victim of violence is bad, but being the perpetrator of rape and enslavement, of violating the humanity of others, of profiting and finding pleasure in the pain and terror of others takes – or creates - a peculiarly numb and dead soul.

Denying the shadow only gives it greater strength and power over us.

Those who have experienced, or even witnessed, the brutish rage of racism know that some kind of force takes over the person and that, by whatever name, it is somehow within the person, and, as horrible and appalling as it might be to witness, it is a small consolation that it inhabits that person and not us.

But how does such a raging fury come to exist within a person?

It takes years, generations, even centuries to bear its vile (and seemingly delicious) fruit.

Watching that rage emerge like a furious cyclone is terrifying. I can see why denial is so essential to one’s mental cohesion. Denied and hidden, it grows and saturates generation after generation.

Rage and blatant racism become something like a default setting – and becomes, as we have seen, a toxic approximation of normal.

But racism is only one expression of a clumsily repressed shadow.

When any situation provokes strong feelings of anger, jealousy, or shame, ask: What part of myself is being mirrored here?

Fears and phobias don’t come from nowhere. They may come from a vague, barely remembered traumatic experience. But, as with physical wounds, one principle holds true no matter what we do – or remember; the body never forgets.

And like the individual physical body, the body politic never forgets either.

In America, we as a body have embraced, submitted to our darkness. Which means, that instead of embracing our light, our generosity, our openness to life in its immense complexities, we have come to define – or at least represent - our worth by what we accumulate rather than what we contribute.

I used to consider the USA the ultimate “contributor” to everything good; from protecting fledgling democracies to food aid to emergency response teams.

But now…

Democracy Perception Index, a massive survey of 94,000 people in 98 different countries conducted by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, founded by former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was released in early May of 2026 - and largely ignored by U.S. media, possibly because it found that “net perception” of the U.S. around the world has fallen by an astonishing 38 percentage points in the last two years.

The USA fell from a plus-22 rating to minus-16. In two years!

According to all those people surveyed, the self-described and marketed Land of the Free was ranked as the third-greatest threat to world peace, after Russia and Israel.

The USA, the world can see all too plainly, has embraced its darkest, deepest, most unrelenting shadow.

The USA has embraced and embodied – even as it continues to deny – its own shadow.

And fear, suspicion, defensiveness and sheer animosity towards any living thing is the barren fruit this denial breeds.

The shadow self, as Jung would say, only germinates in the dark corners of denial.

The question is not how one gets rid of the shadow. Like a literal shadow in the sun, our shadow is always with us.

The question is only of which one is in control, which is the master.

The shadow could be described at the central clearing house for all of human furies; from fear to lust to arrogance to every self-destructive impulse, the shadows surges when we hide it.

And it never stays hidden.

Liberation and wholeness are only possible in acknowledging those dark impulses which, oddly enough, will, as they are recognized, set us free and give us immediate insights and powers of observation and determination we would never have imagined possible.

To see more on the power and potential of the shadow, I suggest starting here.