Get Control over Your Shadow Self & Learn to Embrace it
How Knowing Your “Dark Passenger” Will Help You Find Wholeness
“We are all fractured creatures trying to become whole.”
-Plato
Of all the places to extract wisdom, the above quotation came from an episode of Dexter. Yes, that Showtime series from 15 years ago about a likable serial killer who, under the tutelage of his adopted father, becomes successful at hiding in plain sight, living as a normal person despite his proclivity toward murder.
Sometimes my writing borders on the morbid. Death is part of life, as my father told me when my great-grandfather passed away peacefully. I don’t shy away from the subject because wise ones always point us toward this subject if we want to know about immortality.
The soul is immortal. And the soul wants to be whole.
We will eventually remember this wholeness whether it’s in the afterlife when we rejoin our loved ones who’ve passed over, or if we choose to do the inner work to rectify this split self from having incarnated into a body and ending up in this baffling human experience.
I’m drawn to books, movies, and TV shows exploring human nature and psychology. I’m fascinated by the question:
How did we get the way we are?
That seems to be the overarching theme that runs through the origin story of Dexter.
The only way he could have become “America’s favorite serial killer” is if he had some relatable human struggles. His need to belong and be seen for who he is stands out.
The series explores this through his relationships with women. While he did marry on the show, his wife didn’t know his alter ego and therefore could never truly see him for who he is. She knew him through his social mask and his contrived interactions to appear normal in their domestic life.
The interesting relationships on the show are when his love interests also recognize their “dark passenger” and, for a time, decide to engage in seedy behavior with him to satisfy their primal urges.
Awareness of the Dark Passenger
This dark passenger is what Jung called the shadow. It doesn’t mean we are all serial killers. But it does suggest we all have dark desires. Some people act on them; others repress and hide them.
When we suppress and repress the shadow self, what will inevitably happen is that it rears its head to get our attention. All those things we’d rather not tend to surface in oftentimes unpredictable ways at inopportune times. Many politicians and their affairs featured in the news are a great example of how this manifests.
The key is to be aware of the dark passenger. To be aware of its desires.
And also to be aware of the soul’s pure desires that will manifest with more ease once we’ve healed the split self.
This is no easy task, however.
The Killer Inside
“There is a second self inside you — an inner, shadow self. This self doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t love you. It has its own agenda, and it will kill you… It will kill you to achieve its agenda, which is to prevent you from actualizing your Self, from becoming who you really are.”
— Rabbi Mordecai Finley
Any creative out there knows this force we’re speaking of.
This negative force is often called resistance and it’s the nemesis to your neshama, which means soul in Hebrew.
Your soul is seeking to be whole through experience in this lifetime. Sometimes we must engage those dark desires to gain the experience our soul needs.
The Dynamic of Choice
You see, the dynamic of having choice, or free will, is biblical.
It’s said that God gave us this power of free will — as a gift to us — in the Garden of Eden. The caveat, however, is that great power comes with great responsibility, as we heard in Spiderman.
We all know the story of Adam & Eve and the power of choice coupled with the consequences of our actions.
We don’t want to be condemned so we try to be good and kill our bad side.
If we were all to run around as serial killers our world would go into chaos. The power I’m pointing to is called Self-Responsibility. This is when we own our choices and take responsibility for how our actions affect not only others but ourselves.
Choice, or the ability to choose, arises out of our connection to our needs and values. The “beauty of needs,” as the late spiritual teacher Robert Gonzales referred to it, points to our recognition of what we need as humans in this experience and how that can lead to a beautiful expression of those needs.
If I need intimacy and connection, but maintain a hard shell around me and choose to isolate, that doesn’t allow me an open pathway to have the experience I want and that my soul needs.
What are You Hiding?
“The reason for doing shadow work is to become whole. To end our suffering. To stop hiding from ourselves. Once we do this, we can stop hiding from the rest of the world.”
— Debbie Ford
We know what Dexter is hiding. A despicable lust for blood and a need to kill. But we still watch with curiosity. Why? Because in our psyches, we are looking for wholeness. Those who can’t or won’t act on their shadow side must, in effect, see it acted out in some way.
This dates back to the beginning of dramatic theatre in human history where gruesome displays and the worst of human evils were acted out on stage. Even the King, who was obliged to fulfill an official role in the kingdom, needed the court jester to ‘poke fun’ and lighten up an otherwise serious and rigid existence. The jester was the only person granted permission to openly mock the royal figure to provide relief from the constant mask of strength and invincibility that the regals needed to survive and maintain their rule.
In the modern day, we’re still hiding behind masks. There may not be a kingdom held in the balance, but we’re upholding an image, a reputation, a good name, our family name, and our identity as we know it.
Artists know they must be self-expressed. They also know the consequences of not releasing that self-expression healthily.
Look at the pattern revealed over time among young artists and musicians who mysteriously died at 27 (See Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, et al), and you will see which part of them ultimately won.
Integration of the Dark Passenger
Genius-level creativity may have passed through these famous individuals before their untimely deaths, but the question remains: what caused their demise?
All of the above examples had a strong theme of drugs & alcohol running through their tragic lives until their early death.
Perhaps they didn’t know how to integrate the dark passenger?
Perhaps the constant demands of the shadow self-defeated their willpower until their vices were too sordid and ingrained in their identity to make a change.
One thing is for sure: the second self — the inner, shadow self — succeeded in its mission. As Rabbi Finley tells us, its objective is to stop you from actualizing your Self, the true you.
What might have come through these artists if they managed their dark, inner selves with their genius and creativity?
Is the fate of all artists to be tortured with inner conflict that drives them to drink in excess, take risky amounts of drugs, and engage in unhealthy activities?
Can artists be well-adjusted to what Krishnamurti called a “profoundly sick society”?
Expressing through the Whole Self
“Most of the suffering I see in people is the result of their not fulfilling their dreams.” — Debbie Ford
We may take action from our fractured self to ‘heal.’ But an unhealed aspect of you trying to heal itself is like a dog chasing its tail. You must go within, to the center of your Being. There you will gain true in-sight.
Go looking for your shadows and they’re bound to appear in plentitude. It’s tricky territory to go into the unconscious mind and unearth what’s been stored there.
An easier way than diving deep into the unconscious world of shadows and excavating all your skeletons is by letting life happen and responding, not reacting, with awareness of what comes up.
We steer and direct our ship through conscious choice. One can decide what it is they want, whether it’s a fulfilling career or a loving relationship, a stable family life and a nice home, or to be fully expressed in one’s creative endeavors.
Inevitably, when we go for what we love, resistance appears as a negative force — the shadow self opposing the neshama.
If through the power of our minds, we can project our undesirable traits onto others and the world, then conversely through the power of our hearts combined with the energy of the mind, we can create through love.
Creating from Wholeness
The more grounded your base, the more stable and pure your creation will be. The more connected you are to your heart and soul and this thing called love, the easier it is to integrate the lower frequencies that arise in your experience.
It’s a simple alchemical axiom: to use the higher against the lower.
That includes desires, frequencies, vibrations, and even virtues.
Do you think if those artists who met their early demise had balanced and integrated their shadow selves into the whole self, they would have been able to stop their downward spiral?
Aside from Plato’s wisdom suggesting our fractured selves are looking to be whole, he also stated that the soul is a circle.
This is an interesting idea to contemplate. In alchemy, we say that the circle is a powerful symbol that is hermetically sealed off and thus can be defined as we choose.
When I trained with an alchemist, we routinely did “circle exercises” by placing our attention and mental energy inside the circle and defining it. In one circle, you may define it as your “shadow self” and go into that circle to explore its qualities. Next, you may define it as your “Higher Self” in another circle and explore its traits and characteristics.
Ultimately, those two circles aren’t separate. We perceive them to be. This is the phenomenon of duality. As incarnated beings, we forget our wholeness. We became a split self and a split mind.
Fate is what happens to us when we do nothing. Destiny is when you apply your conscious choice to become whole and integrate the split self to become whole.
Robert A. Johnson, in his book, Owning Your Own Shadow, speaks of the place where the two circles intersect. He calls it a mandorla.
“A mandorla is that almond-shaped segment that is made when two circles partly overlap… The mandorla has a wonderfully healing and encouraging function. The place where light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise.”
We’re not here to rid ourselves of our darkness and our dark passengers.
We are here to integrate one into the other. To let them intersect. To find that place where dark and light touch so we can create from that place — from our whole being.
Thanks for reading! Please clap or comment if it landed for you.
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