When we are children some of us learn that we don’t belong and take it to heart so much it shapes our feelings, behaviors, and relationships for life. Having parents who are highly disengaged and neglectful emotionally is one way to learn this lesson. Having parents who overtly favor another sibling and tell you straight out that you’re unacceptable because you’re not like him is another. Being a person of color, being LGBTQ, being obese, being very short, being a refugee from a foreign nation, having a disability or being in any way unlike the dominant group at school can have this effect as well.
New York psychiatrist Phillip Stutz says that the childhood experience of sensing disapproval from your parents, peers or both gives rise to two psychological entities that dominate our subjective world in very different ways. He calls one of them the X, which some other therapists call the inner critic. The X is like a broken record that condemns us over and over and grinds us down for being defective in a particular way. X might say you’re too _________ for anyone to love or even like you. The adjective that fits in the blank could be: short, fat, ugly, stupid, weird, lazy, cowardly, clumsy, bad with the opposite sex, etc. The X is confusing because the people around us may not perceive us in these ways at all and may do their best to talk us out of believing these distorted thoughts.
The other entity Stutz identifies he calls the shadow which, like the Jungian shadow, is the hidden image of ourselves that we stuff down and have no conscious connection with because it represents what is unacceptable about us. While no data on percentages are available, a substantial number of people have a shadow that represents a physically unappealing image. America is extremely weight conscious and shape conscious. Kids who were plump, overweight or obese may wind up hating themselves for their appearance. As adults they compensate for this self-hatred by means of career success, wealth, power or celebrity, and yet no matter how much they achieve or acquire they experience an inner emptiness and low self-esteem that they do their best to conceal.
In the Netflix documentary Stutz that Jonah Hill made with his psychiatrist Dr. Stutz, Mr. Hill reveals that he was a “very fat kid” who felt horrible about himself, who did everything he could to compensate for that to get away from self-hatred, but who day in and day out was terrorized by his X who told him he was a worthless nobody despite all objective evidence of his talent, popularity, and success.
I recently worked with a patient who had no weight issues as a kid. He came to me because he sensed that he could not be present, vulnerable or intimate in any of his long-term relationships with women. Intimacy terrified him. His X told him that if anyone got to really know him, they would see he was nothing, just empty space behind the curtain of flesh. His X told him he was not worthy or fit to be in a real relationship and prevented him from ever feeling safe in one. When a wife or girlfriend spoke words of love this man’s mind wandered all over the place, everywhere but where he wished it would be.
Once we identified his X as an accuser who made him wander the earth like an eternal stranger who is not welcome anywhere and not able to settle down with anyone, we began to explore his shadow. It turned out to be a very sad, lonely boy whose parents ignored him because they were so busy fighting. These parents prevented him from ever experiencing friendship or community by moving frequently and causing him to be the new kid at multiple schools.
The story is quite poignant. My client grew up with an alcoholic father who was dissociated, withdrawn, and disengaged in their interactions. His mother was very angry, frequently attacked his father verbally, and occasionally discharged her anger at father by slapping my client across the face as a boy. He certainly did not feel a sense of belonging in his nuclear family. It was no better at school. His parents moved frequently so he was always a stranger. Still worse, his birthday always came at the beginning of the school year when nobody knew who he was, so there was no celebration with friends.
When my client came in contact with his shadow he asked if the best he do was to be an eternal stranger and just accept his fate. I suggested something else entirely. I suggested that he form an image of his sad, lonely child self, and then pour out all the love in his heart to the boy while reassuring him that he was welcomed and loved by my client. Embrace him. Give him a permanent home in your heart. Your love will be the balm that heals his sadness, loneliness, and sense of being excluded. In EMDR this is called seeing the wounded child through your own loving eyes. In IFS it’s called bringing compassion to the exile within. Kristen Neff, PhD calls it self-compassion. Whatever you label it, there is no better medicine for healing the unwanted shadow self and integrating it to become whole. The eternal stranger is one of many archetypes that can be used by therapists to help their clients get a clearer sense of their shadow and heal their trauma.
The final thing my client and I learned is that his X wasn’t a monster. It was trying to tell him something. It was pointing at his shadow side so he could find it, explore it, process it, and integrate it. It was only when he stopped running from his X and asked it questions that he found relief. The X seems like an antagonist, even a mortal enemy, and yet the reason it keeps repeating the same thing is because it is not very articulate and is doing its best in clumsy language to alert you to your shadow and from there to healing.
