My Animus Problem — Part IV: The Good Girl’s Golden Shadow
Being a Good Girl has been my stock-in-trade, which was inadvertently responsible for creating consequences I didn’t understand. That is until I started to get curious about how to create or “manifest” more authentic expressions of my uniqueness and individuality.
As I wrote in The Stone Witch Series, my midlife crisis was in full swing during the pandemic, which led to a three-month separation from my husband Dan in the fall of 2020. The feelings I had that precipitated my need for time and space away from our marriage were heavy with a lost sense of self. I felt that I was giving everything away, and not receiving back what I needed from my relationships. I had started to resent being in the role of wife, daughter, sister, stepmother, community member, etc., all of which made me feel like I wasn’t free to be myself. I became preoccupied with feeling like my life was a suite of roles I was playing rather than being an authentic, natural, and spontaneous expression of who I was and what I valued. I had been lost behind the roles I was playing and wanted out. I longed to be free to be myself, come what may.
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I was somewhat ashamed that I was still struggling with my sense of identity at fifty, and I was determined to find my way out of the maze. I knew I had the potential for higher-quality, more intimate, and mutually satisfying relationships and a terrific, loving marriage, but I had to first free myself of the unspoken rules and expectations that came with these roles I’d been cast in. It wasn’t that I was miserable in my relationship with Dan as much as I was miserable feeling stuck in a limbo of being unseen, unrecognized, dismissed, and undervalued (not just by him but by everyone, it seemed).
What I figured out over the course of my “time-out” was that others were not responsible for my stuck and negative feelings about myself. It appeared that others were placing me in these roles and not seeing me for who I was as an individual, separate and distinct from them, but in truth, it was I who wasn’t recognizing, acknowledging, seeing, honoring, and valuing myself.
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That was nearly four years ago, but a deeper insight came into full view recently while researching images from my photo library for the “Bad Boy” essay (Part II) in this series. As I reviewed photo after photo from the early years of our budding life together, I began to notice that month by month, and year by year, I was taking on certain aspects of Dan’s Bad Boy persona.
At first, I was happily reviewing these photos, having pangs of nostalgia for days gone by; such as the time I got my first (and only to date) tattoo; or when I sometimes smoked a cigar with Dan and later began smoking marijuana with him, too; when I became a vegan, like him, for a few years; how I started riding motorcycles and got my own bike; and, adding to the growing list of attributes that I emulated in Dan, I’ve now become an artist and essayist.
Me with my second motorcycle, a sleek and sporty BMW I got after our move to Mexico, 2017. Photo by Dan Piraro.
However, as the realization that I had been adopting certain aspects of Dan’s persona began to dawn on me, and the waves of nausea and swells of cringing at the signs of my obvious weak character settled, I began to look more deeply at my behavior. That willingness gave me the opening to see another perspective. A fluttering gestalt suddenly illuminated my mind and I could see the creative way I was attempting to liberate myself from the mental prison of thinking I had to be good in order to be loved, and teaching myself to be in balance with the essential parts of myself I was dismissing. Or rather, the way that Dan was unwittingly teaching me to be more of my whole self, albeit, through an unconscious path.
Dan Piraro, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, 2014. Photo by Christy Higgins.
When I felt the embarrassment of my apparent mimicry of Dan, one of the truths I needed to see about myself was that he had things I wanted: self-confidence, a strong sense of identity, and ego strength to spare. But even more than that, Dan was someone onto whom I had projected my own positive qualities, albeit disowned and living within me only as unmanifested potential.
It had been as if I needed some kind of psychological permission to be myself through the men with whom I was partnered, but not only that. Since I couldn’t consciously give expression to what I’ve been calling my "bad girl” side, I had been looking to my significant other to be a type of “badness” surrogate. (In truth, however, the only thing that makes anything “bad” is that our culture has defined it as such.) What I really needed from Dan wasn’t his “badness” as much as I needed his strength, courage, and confidence to navigate the world more successfully, creatively, and boldly; the ability to stand on my own two feet and hold my own, psychologically speaking.
In Jungian terms this is known as the Golden Shadow. The idea of the Golden Shadow is that we not only project our disowned negative attributes onto others (our Shadow energy), but we also project our disowned, dismissed, and neglected gifts, talents, and positive attributes onto others (often disguised as “falling in love”, feelings of envy, hero worship, and putting others on pedestals).
Oriole, 2014. Photo by Christy Higgins.
Certainly, I was swept up by infatuation with Dan during the honeymoon phase of our love affair; I readily placed him on a high pedestal during the early years of our relationship, which, of course, he needed to come down from if we were to have a truly loving and mature marriage. In true magnetic fashion, I had unwittingly attracted someone to my life that would teach me about self-confidence and carving out my own identity, eventually even from him (in fact, particularly from him, given my over-identification with him). Learning how to recognize, let alone enforce, my boundaries with Dan without going into a rage to be seen and heard has been a monumental re-wiring job; a painstaking task, but one well worth the effort to learn how to resist unleashing the Stone Witch (where I used to go when I felt my boundaries being violated) and learning a new way of being with myself that gives me what I’ve been unsuccessfully seeking to gain through my romantic relationships with men.
The Cowboy God at the Corner, 2017, by Christy Higgins. Prints available.
It wasn’t that smoking cigars, getting tattoos, and giving the middle finger to convention was necessarily part of my unmanifested potential, as much as I needed to learn how to connect with all parts of myself whether or not they were pleasing to me and others. What I needed to do in all aspects of my life—but was most powerfully symbolized by my relationship with Dan—was to come out from behind the shadows of others and assert myself and my sovereignty as an individual (complete with personal rights and well-formed boundaries that protect them). The more clearly I saw that I needed to learn how to become more interdependent (rather than codependent) in my relationship with Dan, the more I saw that this was an echo of something that needed, first and foremost, to be addressed in my relationship with my mother. It was in my relationship with her that the roots of my feelings of being unseen and dismissed by her gave rise to the difficulties I had started to experience in my relationships with men. (I hope to write about that more in a future post on the Mother Wound.)
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From one perspective, it could be said that the first seven years of my relationship with Dan were about recognizing my unconscious projections. I had been attempting to internalize Dan’s masculine capacity to assert himself with his own identity intact; traits and capacities I needed to develop within myself (i.e. his “Bad Boy” qualities of independence, self-confidence, and freedom to be different from others). However, it was during the most intense stage of our separation when I realized that I was in real danger of never living an authentic life. After three months of intense personal inquiry, I understood that if I ever wanted to experience my true, essential self, I would need to stop projecting my finest qualities onto Dan and start claiming them for myself.
Self-portrait, 2020.
This was the crucible of Dan’s and my separation in 2020: Was I going to leave my marriage as a way of asserting my independence from him (or rather, independence from my mother disguised as my husband), or was I going to learn to take responsibility for the projection of unmanifested potential that I was letting Dan live for me? Was this a case of outgrowing a constricting marriage and needing to go my way to free myself from something that was too limiting for me? Or was this about lessons I needed to learn that were woven into the fabric of my marriage? In the end, I realized that if I left my marriage, I might still have the same inner problem or unresolved need on my hands, making me vulnerable to re-creating a similar dynamic in future relationships.
It was then that I began to see the unconscious intelligence behind choosing a life partner who would act as an effective catalyst for the early life trauma programmed into my nervous system to rise to the surface, all in an attempt by the organism (me) to heal itself. It was because I was already an artist waiting to bloom that I was drawn to a successful artist, to help show me how to become an unblocked, successful, working artist myself. That I used to ride motorcycles when I was a kid and have a strong counter-cultural tendency I was afraid to exercise are more examples of the Golden Shadow at work. For decades, I’d had some notion that I was a blocked artist and writer, and yet, I could not allow myself to follow my bliss, as Joseph Campbell urges us to do. No matter where I looked, it was always the same; I needed to learn how to assert my true, essential self whether I was married to a man or not. Even though on one level, I was “trying on” rebelliousness, on another level, I was liberating myself from old patterns and programs that dictated what was and was not possible in my life.
Me on my first motorcyle, a sweet little 50, circa 1978.
Once I came to that deeper understanding of my responsibility for my growing resentment towards Dan, I knew I wasn’t going to leave my marriage. I was, instead, going to use the container of my marriage to learn how to see, acknowledge, honor, love, respect, and advocate for myself in all of my relationships, particularly in my relationship with Dan.
It was in that moment of realization that I made a promise to myself: I was only going to remain in this marriage if I could start living as though my essential self was my first priority, something I wish I had been able to do from the very beginning, but I had needed this relationship to get me to the place where I could even have this realization.
I don’t live that vision perfectly every day, however, I have made huge changes since taking responsibility for living my deepest values and truths above and beyond any bond I share with another person; it’s the bond with my true self that was broken and needs healing first and foremost. After moving back home, I decided I was no longer going to work as Dan’s assistant in his work; instead, I wanted to invest in building a studio for myself in the house so I could take my creative expression to the next level and begin to carve out a living from my artwork and essays. This website and writing project is the result of that promise and, not insignificantly, my first art show is scheduled for this summer. Huzzah!
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I have come to understand that my early life trauma distorted my capacity for bonding with people; as a result, I have always found greater comfort in aloneness, except for a few close, trusted friends and a significant other. (Not happiness, but comfort). I am usually most content when I am alone, where current relationships cannot challenge me through the wounds of previous relationships. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have social needs—on the contrary, I am fed deeply by my closest, most intimate, loving relationships, and authentic connection with others is the only thing that makes me truly happy. But there is no denying that I have some deep-seated patterning that has made me feel, to varying degrees, unsafe to be myself around others, which makes bonding difficult. I have been reticent to admit this about myself—instead, choosing to perform my way through life trying to be the person I think others want me to be.
Thankfully, one tires of this empty and ultimately dissatisfying charade. By mid-life I was rushing back to my uncrafted, natural self with arms open wide, sobbing, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how amazing and important you were. I know now and I’ll never sacrifice you again. You mean everything to me and I will do my best to protect and cherish you for the rest of my days.”
Sounds like wedding vows—and it was, albeit more of an inner wedding. In my case, it’s still the promise and the intention of an inner marriage; I will always be a work in progress, but I am on the healing path. It’s a rare and high psychological achievement to find union within oneself; a union between body and soul, as so beautifully depicted by William Blake in the image below.
The Reunion of the Soul and the Body, 1813, by William Blake (1757 - 1827).
I see this painting as a metaphor for the union of opposites, or the inner balance between all of our contradictory aspects, the good and the bad, the masculine and the feminine, the animal and the angel, allowing us to stand strong, completely safe, and unconditionally loved right in the very ground of our being.