Writing the Shadow: The Shadow in family and relationships

“If you think you’re enlightened, spend a week with your family.”

—Ram Dass

Just as every person has a Shadow, so every family has a Shadow, and sometimes it echoes back through generations.

It doesn’t have to be caused by violence, trauma or abuse, neglect or shameful secrets, although of course, many suffer those things. Even if you had a happy, safe, and loving childhood, you still have a family Shadow, although perhaps it is more difficult to identify.

Examples of the Shadow in family

One of the most powerful and in-depth modern explorations of family Shadow is the TV series Succession.

Ageing media mogul Logan Roy needs to appoint a successor to his empire. He has four children from two separate marriages, each of whom is desperate for his love and hungry for his approval, while also being terrified of his anger. They fear being cast out, stripped of his love as well as their money and status.

Logan has his own traumatic past, overcoming poverty in working class Scotland to become a powerful billionaire with a direct line to the US president. In one scene, Logan is shown swimming, his back criss-crossed with deep scars. He fears death, rejecting advancing age and decline, clinging to power, while his children battle for his attention.

The series is powerful because it explores every aspect of family relationships: parents and children, each sibling to one another, partners and spouses, and even extended family issues. Love, hate, duty, guilt, rage, shame, fear. All laid bare in cutting dialogue that, at times, is more shockingly violent than a physical blow between people who ostensibly love each other.

Many Shakespearean tragedies centre around the Shadow of family. King Lear’s desperate need for love from his three daughters leads to betrayal and madness. Romeo and Juliet are forced to hide their love from their warring families, which only ends in multiple deaths on both sides. Hamlet seeks revenge for his father’s murder by his uncle.

Family conflict also echoes through myth and history, much of which is portrayed in art. I use paintings and sculpture as symbolic motifs in most of my fiction, and I struggled to decide which to use as an example here.

I settled on a dramatic example that remains seared into my mind: Francisco Goya’s painting of Saturn Devouring His Son, which shows the wild-eyed titan consuming a bloody, decapitated corpse.

It stems from the Greek myth in which Saturn, also known as Kronos, heard a prophecy that he would be overthrown and murdered by one of his children, so he devoured each child at birth to prevent his own destruction. His wife eventually hides one of the children, Jupiter (also known as Zeus). Once grown, he indeed supplants his father just as had been prophesied, and indeed, it is a truth of humanity that the child must at some point surpass the parent.

You can see the painting in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, but Goya originally made it as one of the Black Paintings he created on the walls of his house between 1820 and 1823, amongst other religious and occult images. Goya certainly knew how to tap into Shadow for his art.

There are many other potential aspects of Shadow in human relationships. Consider your parents, siblings, extended family, partner or spouse, children, as well as extended family, friends, teachers, mentors, or other people who intersect with your life now or in the past.

Given how personal the Shadow is, perhaps it is best explored through art. As George Bernard Shaw said, “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”

The Shadow in divorce

My first husband Richard left me for another woman — a slim, tattooed, scuba diving instructor who was happy to live on a boat and travel round the world working on yachts with him. They are still together many years later and I wish them all the best — at least I do now.

But the Shadow is not about other people. It’s about how we react to events and process them for ourselves.

I didn’t see anything coming until the day Richard told me he was leaving, and the years afterward were filled with Shadow for me.

I am so stupid. How could I not know something was wrong?

I’m not a good enough wife.

I’m not sexy or attractive or slim enough.

I’m not fun enough.

I’m not enough. Perhaps I never will be.

I wrote as a way to make the darkness visible and externalised my rage and hurt into words. I filled journal after journal with emotional poetry and reams of scrawled anger and misery. I didn’t talk to a therapist because the blank page was my way forward and out.

Eventually, writing helped me figure out my part in the end of our marriage, because there were two people involved and blaming Richard didn’t help me move forward.

I’m ferociously independent, but the Shadow side of that is the tendency to try and control everything. I need a partner who will communicate and tell me to stop rather than let me steamroll away while resentment festers inside, eventually erupting into an explosion from seemingly nowhere.

I’m grateful to Richard because the failure of our marriage helped me learn and grow and incorporate lessons into my relationship with Jonathan. I’m writing this chapter on our fifteenth wedding anniversary, so it’s definitely going better the second time around!

Of course, there’s no guarantee of the future, but I know the time I spent making the unconscious conscious about my mistakes helped me become a better partner.

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”

—C.G. Jung

Questions:

I’ve used ‘family’ here, but you can switch that out for any other word to explore the Shadow in relationships.

•   What do you hide from your family? What do you not want them to know?

•   What are you guilty about? What have you lied about?

•   What are you ashamed of?

•   What fears do you have around family?

•   What duties do you perform for your family?

•   What role do you play in the family when members are gathered together? What patterns do you fall into?

•   Do you feel abandoned or rejected by your family?

•   Where is the conflict in your family and who is it between?

•   Is there competition for love or attention? Do you notice favouritism or inequality?

•   As much as you hate to admit it, how are you similar to your parents? What flaws can you see in them, and are they mirrored in you?

•   Where is the dysfunction in your family history? Can you see echoes further back to your grandparents or other family members? How can you break the pattern?

•   How is your life now controlled by aspects of family? What do you resent? What are you angry about? Where is the repression in your family relationships?

•   How can you move forward in a more positive way?