End Self-Comparison by Integrating Your Golden Shadow

On your weird obsession with projecting your power onto others.

In Jungian psychology, the shadow refers to the qualities we repress and banish into the unconscious to ensure social approval, and by extension, survival.

Yet the classic, eerie shadow also has a lighter side, known as the golden shadow.

Your golden shadow represents the traits in you that are so powerful, so redeeming, yet so remote to your current self-concept that you feel a compulsive urge to project them onto other people.

This compulsion shows up as sensations you label as envy, inferiority, or not being good enough. These are the convenient stories you tell to avoid the hot scary sensations of power.

The hilariously narrow range of sensations you call your ‘self’

From birth, society trains people to act as if their ego represented their entire being.

It’s strange because most people know, at least conceptually, that they have an unconscious mind. But they relate to it like a grandfatherly oracle who supplies some interesting dreams but mostly stays on the outskirts of their lives.

In our ego-fixated state, we habitually identify with a narrow set of pleasing, “good feeling” sensations we recognize as who we are, our identity, our personality, etc.

Because our egos clutch on to whatever will ensure survival, we regularly banish all kinds of sensations to the unconscious.

You tightly clench the sensations associated with your self-identity, whether they’re pleasurable or not. Why? Because the payoff is the same: the comforting range of sensations your ego already recognizes to be safe.

Your ego’s goal is to maintain survival. So starting a podcast, writing a book, or anything that scrambles your boundaries represents death to who you believe yourself to be.

This is why the sensations of expanding power are perceived as heavy and must be transmuted into the safer, more familiar pangs of envy, inferiority, or sadness.

Existential Kink author Carolyn Elliott calls this narrow band of sensations a havingness level, defined as:

“An internal barometer of how much good stuff you allow yourself to have before your ‘too good to be true!’ alarm bell goes off and you start unconsciously freaking out and rejecting that good stuff.”

Havingness levels represent the range of sensations that confirm your story about who you are.

Often the tendency toward self-comparison represents, as Carolyn calls it, a “havingness level freak out.”

You compare yourself to golden shadow figures because they broadcast some underdeveloped potential within you.

But instead of doing the daunting work of cultivating those undernourished parts, your unconscious produces sensations of jealousy, admiration, or inferiority to keep you safe within the boundaries of your existing havingness levels.

How to stop playing Peek-a-Boo with your larger Self

When you feel magnetized toward a specific person, event, career path, instrument, whatever, it represents a nudge from your unconscious, saying: Take note of what’s possible.

In this lecture, Jordan Peterson comments on the Jungian notion of the circumambulation, the idea that growth doesn’t occur linearly but in the act of moving around a sacred object:

You have a potential Self, representing everything you could be. The Self manifests in your present life by making you interested in things. The things you’re interested in are those that guide you down the path of maximal development.

From this perspective, we don’t compare ourselves to others because we’re simply inadequate and unlucky. Instead, the unconscious, larger Self produces sensations like envy, desire, or admiration to flag untapped opportunities.

Your Self speaks to you in the form of interest or the negatively tinged, painful sensations of envy or unluckiness if those emotions lie within your current havingness levels.

Our larger unconscious Self mainly gets in touch with the ego through archetypes, which are:

Inherited patterns of thought or symbolic imagery derived from past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious.

Called “emotions with a plan,” archetypes are patterned fields of being with a campaign, an imperative, or an ax to the grind on your personal psyche.

You know the archetypes working through you based on the people you admire/envy and the situations you seek.

(Examples of archetypes include the Artist, the Visionary, the Rebel, and the Executive. For more on this, read books like Archetypes: A Natural History of the Self by Anthony Stevens or Archetypes: A Guide to Your Inner Net by Caroline Myss.)

All emotions, whether they’re perceived negatively or positively, represent a path of development.

Chances are high that when you mope about something, an archetype is constellating within you, but you’re in some way blocking its entry and expression.

Release self-comparison by creating practical containers through which archetypes can flow

You need a bad first draft of yourself…Symbolically, the jester is the precursor to the savior. You can’t be the master until you’re willing to be the fool. — Jordan Peterson

Integration of the shadow is an ongoing process. But even a small amount of exploration can create radical shifts in your relationship with yourself.

Start by isolating the exact, granular traits in your golden shadow figures that send you swirling into envy. For example, I feel white-hot envy for performers: acrobats, authoritative tightrope walkers, musicians, etc.

My unconscious senses the possibility of a creative, public-facing life. Yet if I continue with my self-isolating tendencies, there will be limited opportunities for the adventure-loving, performance-craving archetype looking for a constellation through me.

Instead of wallowing in my quiet life, I can take the minor, mundane steps of bringing my guitar into a park, playing in coffee shops, recording songs without worrying about who can hear me, and more.

No matter how this goes, I’m likely to feel better simply by giving this archetype a container for expression. This is called archetype activation.

Activating archetypes can be a great way to end emotional blocks. The practice taps you into a more intrinsic, deeper-rooted motivation that can carry you through the tedium and other challenges of your chosen path.

Why? Criticism, praise, or any other type of strain mean far less when you become the container for a pattern much larger seeking to work through you, rather than the precious ego identified with every last drop of feedback.

So, in my case, even if I perform and trade feelings of envy for nervousness or humiliation, I’m going to raise my havingness levels, and my identity will be informed by a broader range of emotional experiences.

By gradually opening to new levels of sensation, levels of possibility foreign to my tight ego vantage point will make themselves boldly known.

So if you do something scary but don’t immediately feel joy and expansion, understand you’re on a spiral journey.

The golden figures haunting you now point to the adjacent possible, the map of transformations balancing on the edges of who you currently are.

As you grow, your golden shadow figures will grow with you. Once you’ve fully heeded the call of the first golden shadow, another will say hello.

Remember that every pang of envy is a nudge from your wise old unconscious, pointing you toward a fresh level of evolution.

Despair is the necessary prerequisite for the next degree of consciousness. That’s absolutely a prerequisite” — Ram Dass