Leap of Faith.
"Usually when we speak of material we have disowned and placed into the unconscious, we're referring to less-desirable experience such as fear, rage, shame, and despair. The shadow is seen as the dark repository for our so-called negative aspects, i.e. unhealthy dependency, unacknowledged narcissism, unmet hopelessness, and the looming ghosts of our unlived lives.
But it is not only negative material we dissociate from. Many of us have lost the capacity to access, embody, and ...express more “positive” experiences such as contentment, pleasure, creativity, sexuality, intimacy, and aspects of our own uniqueness, especially if to do so would conflict with the psychic and collective status quo.
But it is not only negative material we dissociate from. Many of us have lost the capacity to access, embody, and ...express more “positive” experiences such as contentment, pleasure, creativity, sexuality, intimacy, and aspects of our own uniqueness, especially if to do so would conflict with the psychic and collective status quo.
While it is more difficult to imagine, we can also disconnect from the simple experience of joy, that spontaneous feeling of elation at being alive, a sense of our basic goodness which is not in need of improvement.
For example, if our embodiment and expression of joy triggered anxiety in those around us or led them to shame or pull away from us, we learned that the natural, human experience of joy is not okay, and even potentially dangerous.
We begin to associate joy with a neuroception of “I’m not safe” which can be incredibly confusing to a ripening nervous system.
As a little one, we learn to disown any state of mind which has the potential to disrupt the tie to critical attachment figures.
This capacity of repression is intelligent, creative, and often protected us from overwhelming dysregulation.
But many of us long to know joy again, feel alive, and fully participate here.
We sense we may no longer require such protection and long to remember the simple pleasure and delight in pure being.
To re-train ourselves is not easy as we will have to step back through the disorientation and sense of annihilation that repression has served to keep us out of.
But it is a path well worth exploring.
To allow ourselves to see the ways we have placed not only “negative” material into the shadow, but how we have split off from the positive as well. To take that sort of risk, to remember, and to participate fully in the bounty that has been laid out before us."
Matt Licata
For example, if our embodiment and expression of joy triggered anxiety in those around us or led them to shame or pull away from us, we learned that the natural, human experience of joy is not okay, and even potentially dangerous.
We begin to associate joy with a neuroception of “I’m not safe” which can be incredibly confusing to a ripening nervous system.
As a little one, we learn to disown any state of mind which has the potential to disrupt the tie to critical attachment figures.
This capacity of repression is intelligent, creative, and often protected us from overwhelming dysregulation.
But many of us long to know joy again, feel alive, and fully participate here.
We sense we may no longer require such protection and long to remember the simple pleasure and delight in pure being.
To re-train ourselves is not easy as we will have to step back through the disorientation and sense of annihilation that repression has served to keep us out of.
But it is a path well worth exploring.
To allow ourselves to see the ways we have placed not only “negative” material into the shadow, but how we have split off from the positive as well. To take that sort of risk, to remember, and to participate fully in the bounty that has been laid out before us."
Matt Licata
