Wrestling with My Shadow:
Willing from My Heart

"... the extraordinary power a person has to heal just by summoning the courage to act from the heart."
    -- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross from her 1997 autobiography, The Wheel of Love

Psychosynthesis has successfully focused on the positive, helping us to sing our song, to express transpersonal qualities, to seek our purpose. Our literature and our practice has often avoided the other side, and I challenge myself here to wrestle with my shadow, which often appears when I see something that needs to be confronted, and I feel afraid to speak. I find it especially difficult to speak my truth when it opposes prevailing mores, or I fear someone may not "like me" or may "disagree with me." How do we find the courage to speak out against abuse, neglect, disrespect: in our families, in our communities and in the larger world?

Like thousands of others, I read about Michael Dorris' suicide and the cover-up of his presumed child abuse by his wife, Louise Erdrich. Struggling to understand her silence, her failure to protect their children, brought me to my own life of silence. I've known for a long time that I suffered abuses and neglect as a child. But I hadn't realized that I had been carrying the burden of responsibility for it. Not having been protected, I didn't know how to protect myself (or my inner child) or my children; and now that my children are parents, I realize that I hadn't taught my children how to protect theirs.

I did what I knew how to do: to be a victim without awareness of it. I lived with, and in, my shadow and thought that my rose-colored glasses were keeping me in the light. Rarely feeling sorry for myself, I usually lived inside an independent, competent and tough subpersonality. I relied on "strong will" to survive. My "self-talk" went something like this: "you can't count on (i.e., don't deserve to have) anyone to protect you, so just give to others and hide your unworthiness." Sometimes I would commiserate with other victims, but more often I was impatient, even disdainful. I judged others who failed to cheerfully act selflessly as I thought I did. While I judged Erdrich's silence and failure to protect her vulnerable children, I saw that I had done no better. I had been neither empathic nor protective. I had treated myself harshly. What I'd been teaching my children, my grandchildren, and my clients about abuse was to ignore it, keep silent, never experience that you need or deserve anything, and trust only yourself. I had modeled a wounded will and a lonely heart.

I don't know if I know what the will is. I don't know how the will functions to move us from awareness to action. But I experienced a need to translate my new awareness into honest, protective action. I needed the will to speak! My questions about the Dorris/Erdrich family showed me my similar behavior. So I have begun work to heal my will-by using it in response to my awareness. The first thing was to honor what I had kept in shadow: I began to feel my feelings and to listen to the messages from parts of me silenced for fifty plus years. This was hard work! I felt great sadness and regret for myself as a child, and not far behind were my pain and sadness for my children and theirs. So what to do next? I looked at our culture and history. As a culture we have not advanced much beyond the time when reality was that women and children were the chattel of their fathers and then their husbands. And still today the safety and self-respect of women generally depends on their silence and their conspiratorial acceptance to protect the image of 'their man.' Currently on the bestseller list is Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Angela's Ashes, a memoir of his miserable childhood. With my new awareness, I am infuriated that Frank accepts and fails to speak up about the cruelty and poverty he experienced in his unprotected childhood with an alcoholic father and a silent, helpless mother. Did he see and feel the abuses? Does he see how the abuse affects him in the present? Where is his shadow? Is his forgiveness real? How did he forgive without first acknowledging and speaking out against the wrongs? Does he have children? And if so, how has he abused or protected them?

I looked for therapeutic wisdom outside myself. Prevailing family therapy structures guide parents 'to stand as one,' to establish boundaries, provide stability and a floor of safety/security for children. What kind of stability or safety do children experience when one parent abuses them and the other is silent? What do children learn about their shadows? Their parents?

In her courageous 1984 text, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, Alice Miller, an ex-Freudian psychiatrist, wrote: "We have been taught to respect those in authority and to protect them from any criticism and at the same time to 'educate' those who are weak and helpless and dependent.... As a result, victimized children in our society must be content with the knowledge that they will not be protected but will be blamed and humiliated while those who abuse them will be defended.... In order to protect the culprits, the 'authority figures,' from the accusations of their victims, our society, including professional experts, stubbornly denies or glosses over and minimizes the connection between what was endured in childhood and later symptoms of illness." So back to myself. Although necessary, experiencing feelings and having 'aha' awarenesses are not enough.

I need my will to progress. My next step is a vow to myself/Self: to speak my truth, to tell family secrets rather than protect an image that parents are perfect. That lie teaches children that they must be bad, unlovable, and unworthy; otherwise they would be protected.

Whether we are parents or not, healing our inner children requires us to speak the truth to them -- to let them know they didn't deserve the abuse they suffered and that we are sorry we abandoned them to it -- and to promise to protect them with the voice and action of our more adult parts.

Every time I fail to speak against abuse, neglect, or disrespect, I participate in protecting the status quo. As I strengthen my will by using it for my own healing, I am more able to influence the larger world. Every time I speak, I believe I heal some of the abyss of shadow I've been afraid to know is there. I experience myself as more real, more integrated. I strengthen my will and trust that I am contributing to healing the world.

I recently found myself with a small, everyday opportunity to practice my vow. Sitting in a group of craftswomen, each of us doing handwork and talking, one of the women used a racial epithet. No one even skipped a stitch. I felt sick, deep in the pit of my stomach. I was scared even considering speaking, but I resolved to tell her how I felt. I decided not to do it during the group to avoid her feeling publicly humiliated. I have since questioned whether I was protecting her, or whether I was rationalizing my fear of involving the whole group. What do I think about the fact that no one else even seemed to notice? It might have been an 'aha' moment for other people had I spoken in the moment. But I didn't. I called her the next day, and told her that I was offended and that I thought using the word was disrespectful. Her response was defensive, but I felt good about speaking something that was true for me. A tiny practice, a small step to confront my shadow, heal my will and align with a greater purpose.

Reading Speaking Truth to Power by Anita Hill has been inspirational. Her courageous and intelligent book honestly describes her terror as well as her questioning of her own strengths, limitations and motivations. And she articulates the experience of standing exposed to the whole political world. I welcomed this thoughtful book years after the congressional hearings because we all need models of people who risk acting for the right and for truth, when it would be far easier to remain silent. She makes me feel proud to be a woman, and I honor her very significant contribution to the dignity and freedom of women in our society.

In Pocketful of Miracles, Joan Borysenko writes about speaking up when the risk is even greater, but also understanding that each of us is in the process of coming to terms with our own shadows and strengthening our wills: "...Dachau, where many political prisoners as well as Jews were tortured and killed during the Nazi regime. One whole barracks housed priests and other clergy who were involved in rescuing Jews and speaking out against oppression. The courage to speak one's truth, particularly in the face of such horror, takes tremendous faith and spiritual maturity.... Contemplate what it means to you personally to speak your truth. If there are areas in which you don't yet have the courage to speak out, seek guidance ... (for) the strength of God ... who awakens us to our creative purpose and our unique role in the Divine Plan."

Good courage to you in this season -- may we each find the courage to confront our shadows so we can feel, see, and speak.

Rhoda Levin, M.S.W., a National Board Certified Diplomate in Clinical Social Work and a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, certified in psychosynthesis in 1978, is a pioneer in the field of family care when a family member has a life-threatening illness. The founder of Heartmates, Inc., Ms. Levin has worked with healthcare professionals since 1972, training them to address the psycho-social-spiritual needs of families dealing with health crises. She is the author of Heartmates: A Guide for the Spouse and Family of the Heart Patient, The Heartmates Meditation Journal: A Companion for Partners of People with Heart Disease, and she produced a national award-winning videoseries, Portrait of the Heartmate.

Rhoda is completing a major life transition, and will celebrate it this summer by taking a new name, Rachel Freed. (Rachel, her Hebrew name from birth, and Freed the first part of her family name, which is Friedman).

Rachel (Rhoda) can be reached by e-mail at: heartmates@outtech.com and her professional website, with its interactive connections page, can be found on the web at www.heartmates.com