Coming out sideways

In A Little Book on the Human Shadow, Robert Bly described a long, invisible bag that each of us drags behind us. He called it the shadow bag.

We arrive in the world with our full personality intact, and then, piece by piece, we put parts of ourselves into the bag. Our anger goes in. Our sadness goes in. Our sexuality, our wildness, our power, our vulnerability. Whatever earned disapproval, whatever risked disconnection, into the bag it goes.

Bly believed we spend the first twenty years of life filling the bag. And then we spend the rest of our lives trying to get everything back out again.

The problem, he said, is that what goes into the bag regresses. It becomes more primitive, more charged, more volatile. The anger you stuffed away at age seven doesn’t emerge at age forty as a neatly expressed boundary. It emerges as road rage. Or a slammed door. Or a frozen silence that people have to tiptoe around.

It comes out at the people around you.

It comes out sideways.

It comes out as a passive-aggressive email at 11 pm.

It comes out as humiliating someone in a team meeting and calling it “direct feedback.”

It comes out as the resentment towards a peer who has received the recognition we deserve.

Debbie Ford, who spent decades working with Jungian shadow, described it as being like holding a beach ball underwater. You can keep it submerged for a while. But the moment your energy drops, your guard slips, your stress peaks, it erupts to the surface.

The workplace is a particularly fertile environment for this. Hierarchy activates our oldest stories about power and approval, belonging and exclusion, status and recognition, bringing up parts of ourselves we have long stuffed into the bag.