Who's in Charge of You?

The masks we wear over time tend to crumble, don't they?

All of us, by being human, exist as a whole with different and sometimes opposing aspects of our psyches. Full disclosure, I'm not a psychologist but psychology is an interest of mine.

In the study of psychology, Carl Jung called these aspects archetypes. Every archetype has a shadow, which is the part we don't tend to like. Anyone who is a healer or a mystic, for example, is called to examine their shadow parts and come to terms with them before they can progress. If we don't acknowledge those shadow parts within us, there's a very good chance they're in charge. We just aren't aware of it yet.

"The way in which we most immediately experience the shadow is as we project it on to other people, so that we can be fairly sure that traits which we cannot stand in other people really belong to ourselves and that we are trying to disown them. While difficult and painful, it is important that we work at owning our shadow to bring it into relationship with our persona, and so provide some integration of these two complexes within our personality." (https://www.thesap.org.uk/articles-on-jungian-psychology-2/carl-gustav-jung/jungs-model-psyche/)

Based on the above quote, is there something you can't stand in others that just might be a clue to your own shadow side? Who's in charge of your life? I had to examine my own life and it was painful to realize who was in charge. I recognized the orphan child from an early trauma and had active judge and shape-shifter traits.

Everyone has a predominant child archetype. I knew I exhibited most of the characteristics of the Orphaned Child. From a very early age, I remember feeling so different from my family and started to believe that I was adopted. I didn't fit in. I also isolated myself from my family and tended to try to solve my own problems. The great part was I could rely on myself a lot of the time. The flip side was I didn't mature as quickly as others did at certain ages and tended to look for surrogate 'families' to adopt which also hampered my maturity.

In confronting my shadow orphan child, I stopped trying to find a substitute connection with others to create the familial structure I longed for but didn't have in my own family. Knowing and accepting who I was on both sides of this archetype and much forgiveness work helped. (See the last two posts on Ho'oponopono here.)

The next archetype I discovered operating within me was the Shape-Shifter. This one started off innocently enough, but as I grew older, the shadow side pulled me away from positive growth and sabotaged relationships. In deciding to go it alone from an early age, I also found out that I could protect myself by hiding and fitting in with whatever was around me. Hiding myself and shapeshifting came with certain risks as I matured into adulthood. I couldn't stand phony people and could spot them a mile away. I had no idea that by hiding and adapting like a little chameleon, I came across as a phony and a flake, too.

We don't tend to talk about archetypes unless we're in a field of study that expects to do that work. Who talks about what archetypes we embody growing up? I certainly didn't know about them until I was well into middle age adulthood. Anyone who knew me as a child would recognize I loved to read and had an insatiable curiosity which drove me to learn about all sorts of things at a much deeper level than I was required to in public school. I embodied the Student then and still love to learn. Its shadow side speaks about never moving beyond the student role to develop mastery and wisdom in one area. I couldn't stand willfully ignorant people when there's so much to know but I could be an ignorant judge of those people, too.

The Dreamer in me was and is still highly active. I used to spend hours daydreaming so being bored was never an issue as I'd just check out and enter my world of imagining. Later in life, those dreams began to inform, enlighten, and encourage me to grow into a visionary as I began to see beyond the obvious. The shadow side of this archetype can be to alter visions to make them more palatable to others. I'm always aware of this most human tendency especially with my shape-shifter archetype. I also have an insatiable drive to know more about truth, how people bend and alter it for their own purposes and why.

Discovering different types of truth such as relative truth, universal truth, and mystical truth blew my mind. I couldn't stand people who told half-truths. You know, the kind of person who sounds like they're telling the truth because they know how to spin it into what they want other people to hear, not what's necessarily true. Wasn't I doing that, too, by changing who I was to fit in?

I think we all have to revisit our archetypes as we mature and ask ourselves who's running our behavior, who's in charge of our lives? My shadow parts were largely based on beliefs I adopted to make sense of a trauma at birth. The feeling of being alone and adopted, the chameleon-like hiding, dreaming to check out of reality were all identifiable patterns and were definitely running my life. At some point, though, wouldn't it be great if we all did this work and graduated into healthy adulthood?

The most amazing gift of studying archetypes for me was finally getting to know myself so I could be more authentic with myself and others. Of course, I don't think any of us knows all there is to know about ourselves, but I now have a much deeper understanding of who I am and what my strengths and weaknesses are. I've developed a less judgmental attitude toward myself and humanity as who among us is better than the other? It's been a long road so far but I can say, without a doubt, I know who's in charge of me, and I love her deeply.

Who's in charge of you?