Just One Question | Connie Zweig: What Does It Mean to Romance the Shadow?

Chris Rock: Hello and welcome to Just One Question from Insights at the Edge. I’m Chris Rock.

Mallory Corbin: And I’m Mallory Corbin. We’re producers at the Sounds True Podcast Network. We work with Tami on Insights at the Edge to bring you transformational ideas from teachers around the world.

Chris Rock: And every week on this show, we pull out some of the most inspiring, most transformational ideas from those hundreds of conversations, and we bring them to you in the form of one question and one answer.

Mallory Corbin: Thus the name, Just One Question.

Chris Rock: We hope you’ll enjoy.

Mallory Corbin: This week we’re featuring someone who’s considered one of the world’s leading experts on the shadow, Dr. Connie Zweig. In fact, her episode is called “Meeting One of the World’s Leading Experts on the Shadow.”

Chris Rock: Very nice. Very on the nose.

Mallory Corbin: Yeah. It’s because she and Tami are actually meeting for the first time during this interview.

Chris Rock: Oh, interesting.

Mallory Corbin: She’s a retired Jungian therapist and the author of several groundbreaking books, including Meeting the Shadow and Romancing the Shadow, which have recently been republished. Her work is so timely right now — there’s been a real resurgence of interest in the shadow. The term “shadow work” was actually recently trending on TikTok, which Connie explained was a major motivator for republishing these works for a new generation.

Chris Rock: I’m still learning about this whole concept of shadow work, but it makes total sense — the idea that there are these hidden parts of us, and those can influence what we do and how we feel, and we should really be aware of them. I just think that’s super helpful.

Mallory Corbin: Totally. And in this segment, Connie is answering a question that I think a lot of people ask when they pick up her book, Romancing the Shadow, which is: what does it mean to romance the shadow?

Chris Rock: This is Just One Question with Connie Zweig.

Mallory Corbin: Stay with us.

Tami Simon: I want to understand more what you mean by romancing it. Part of the question I’m working with is: in your model, is the goal to become aware of the shadow content, and that’s good — check, I’m aware of it? Or is there something else? Once I’m aware that this lives in me and was repressed, and I can see it kind of peeking out, and I’m aware it’s there — is that good enough, or is there some other set of steps that are needed?

Connie Zweig: Yeah, so romancing the shadow is the name we gave to the method. There are some other steps. I think most people — for example, with addiction — most people have awareness of their addiction and still can’t do anything about it. So awareness is a step, but it’s necessary, not sufficient. Let me articulate my method quickly.

Let’s use addiction. Let’s use food addiction, because I think that’s kind of common for people — and for our listeners, you can relate this to sex addiction, drugs, alcohol, love, any kind of compulsive behavior that you feel like you can’t control.

This client came to me and said, “My boyfriend is unavailable, and every night I’m waiting by the phone and I’m eating ice cream. I’ve gained ten pounds and I don’t know what to do. I can’t stop eating ice cream late at night.” So we began to explore, to slow down the process and bring awareness to it — what is going on in this process?

I said to her, there are three cues I want you to look for: What are you saying to yourself? What are you feeling? What are you sensing in your body just before you go for the ice cream? This takes some time — some self-reflection. You have to slow down opening that fridge.

She said, “I’m saying to myself, if only I eat, I can wait for him to call.” She was feeling sad and empty. Her body was getting tight around her shoulders and her neck, and her belly felt empty. So now she had three cues for this particular shadow character — I call it a shadow character, because we can’t work with the entire personal shadow at once. It’s pretty unbounded — it’s kind of limitless. So what we do is begin to pick a particular behavior or feeling and personify it. When you have the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of that shadow, you personify it by giving it a name. She called it “the foodie,” and gave it an image — a big open mouth.

Then you recognize that this is not who you are, because part of what happens with the shadow character is it grips you, and you get lost in it and overpowered by it, and you think, “Oh my God, I’m this angry monster,” or this foodie, or this crybaby, or whatever it is. So you practice beginning to observe it.

Most people can do this with a centering practice — if you have a meditation, or a mindfulness or belly-breathing practice, you learn how to watch your thoughts as they move through. Of course, listeners to Sounds True will be familiar with this. So she began to watch the foodie.

She traced it back in her history — that’s the next step. She realized that her mother used to overeat at night when my client was growing up. She’d watch her mother overeat because her mother was waiting for her husband, who was unfaithful at the time, and she couldn’t speak up and ask him what was going on, why he was coming home so late. So she ate. The behavior had been modeled, and maybe it was modeled for another generation too — we don’t know, because these shadows are really intergenerational transmissions.

So I said, well, what are the consequences if you discontinue this behavior? “Well, I’m going to get more depressed and more overweight and unhealthy, and it’s just going to go nowhere.” So after a couple of months, I asked, “Do you think you’re ready to call him?” She called him up, and he said, “No, I don’t want the relationship, but I didn’t know how to tell you.” She spent a few days really devastated, upset, disappointed. Then she called me and said, “You know, this is such a relief, because I know the truth. I don’t have to allow the foodie to take over anymore. I can move on now.”

So each of these shadow characters has the same thoughts, the same feelings, the same physical sensations, and that’s how you can identify them. You give it a name, you give it an image, and then you romance it — meaning you make a conscious relationship to it. When it emerges from the unconscious, some people paint it and draw it. Some people write letters to it, or from it, or dialogue with it. It’s so interesting, because it expands your self-knowledge. You can uncover these secret, hidden parts of yourself, and each one of them has valid, hidden needs. If you can discover the valid need of the foodie — what was that? It was for her to be able to speak her truth. She wasn’t able to risk rejection, as her mother wasn’t, by asking the question directly, so she was indirectly stuffing her feelings with the ice cream. But that’s a valid need hidden in that addictive behavior, and every single shadow character has that.

There was a New Year’s where I was sitting with friends — I think there were six of us — and we were in a circle talking about our year. I said to them, “I’d like to know how you experienced me. Mirror me for this year, so that I can grow and change.” Five out of the six of them said, “You are too judgmental.”

So I began to work with the judge shadow character, and try to understand that part of myself that was leading to a sense of separateness from people, disconnection from people. It was hurting some relationships, because people were feeling — in a subtle way — less than, or put down, by me. I wasn’t saying things overtly. It was more like an attitude I had really internalized from my father, who was a big superiority guy — smarter than everybody, know-it-all, master of the universe, and definitely sexist — master over the three women in the house. I was shocked to hear that, but it became a really rich exploration for me.

What I saw was these layers of the judge. One was my personal psychology — I had really identified more with my dad than with my mother. I didn’t want to be like my mother when I was growing up. She was depressed, and she was a housewife. She was an incredible artist but unable to bring her art into the world. My dad was powerful and articulate and controlling, and — this was kind of an unconscious process — I identified with him more, so I also absorbed his shadow material. That’s how it works.

So I’m absorbing this superiority trip without knowing it. Then, as I told you earlier, I go into the TM movement, and everybody is superior because they know TM and they’re going to save the world with meditation. So there’s yet another layer of superiority — I used to call it my spiritual superego. The superego is the part of us that’s the inner parent, always criticizing us, getting us to do more or be more. So I had this spiritual superego telling me to be more spiritually developed. Then my career led me into some fascinating places and powerful positions, and that added to this sense of accomplishment and success.

And along with that — what goes into the shadow? All of this was going into my ego, my conscious personality. What was going into the shadow, as a result, was inferiority, insecurity, not-good-enough. Those weren’t my issues — I would hear other people talk about those issues, but I wasn’t feeling them, because I was so defended by the judge shadow character. It was protecting me — first against my father’s “not good enough,” then the TM world’s “not good enough,” then the career’s — wherever those messages could have come from. I was Teflon: protected against that. So when my friend said this — I was probably in my forties — I took it on and started to mine this shadow character and see the consequences of it unconsciously controlling me.

One of the painful consequences was that I stayed single for a very long time, because I was unknowingly judging all these potential partners. So if you can begin, as an adult, to meet the valid needs of these younger parts — these shadow parts — they start to change. They start to lose their grasp, lose their control over you. And that’s the bigger picture of what I mean by romancing the shadow.

Chris Rock: This has been Just One Question. You can listen to the full episode of Insights at the Edge that this conversation was taken from on your preferred podcast platform, or at soundstrue.com. Thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you next week.

Tami Simon: The Sounds True Podcast Network.