There’s No Delete Button in the Human Psyche—Fortunately
Whatever you reject in yourself is called shadow, and it needs your acceptance.
Updated July 3, 2025 | Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
I recently consulted with a woman who told me that when she was growing up, her parents sent her to her room for any displays of “negative emotions” like tears, anger or frustration. That is, they punished her. Banished her. Even after being assaulted and raped as a young woman, her father’s stern advice was that she simply had to “march on” and leave it behind.
So it’s no surprise that at 40, after a lifetime of repressing half of her emotional repertoire, she’s confronting the legacy of that stunted education by feeling blocked from being her full, powerful self, the one she’ll need in order to become the healer she intuits herself to be. She quite rightly refers to her mission as nothing less than “soul retrieval”—reclaiming the powers and passions, the emotions, she was taught to hold in check.
Whatever parts of ourselves we reject or repress—and were probably taught to by our parents, teachers, peers, religion, and culture—turn into what the psychologist Carl Jung calls “shadow,” and what Robert Bly in A Little Book on the Human Shadow calls “the long bag we drag behind us.” In it are both “negative” qualities like anger, aggressiveness, sorrow and lust, or “positive” qualities like curiosity, creativity and exuberance. Either way: life-force.
Here’s how Bly explains it: When you were one or two years old, you had a 360-degree personality , with energy radiating out from all parts of you. But whatever parts your parents didn’t like—restlessness, rebelliousness, loudness, sexuality , unrestrained enthusiasm—got sliced off the 360-degree pie and put in an invisible bag.
Then you got into school, and in the service of fitting in and getting along, you stuffed more of yourself into that bag, whole slabs of energy and individuality.
Then you entered the working world, and in order to continue winning friends and influencing people, you stashed even more of yourself in the bag, the parts that organizational life preferred you leave out in the parking lot when you punched in—your spiritual life, your emotional life, your personal life.
Thus, out of the round globe of energy you started with, the average 20-year-old ends up with a slice .
You had no choice, of course. It was your soul’s way of protecting you, your psyche’s way of getting your needs met and keeping the precious commodities of attention and approval flowing in your direction. “If the only way to maintain the self is to lose others,” the psychologist Abraham Maslow said, “the ordinary child will give up the self.” And the survival mechanisms of childhood will work against you in adulthood. It’s one of life’s tragic equations: Most people will readily trade authenticity for approval.
But if you spend your life until you’re 20 deciding what parts of yourself to put into the bag, you’re likely to spend the rest of your life trying to get them out again. Because at some level you know that your deepest authenticity and integrity—your sense of wholeness —depends on reclaiming what’s in that bag, in the sense Jung meant when he said that “90% of the shadow is pure gold.” And also because you know by now that what you run from, you tend to keep running into —such as judging others for what you don’t like in yourself.
In fact, the most expedient way to recognize your shadow is to look at what you dislike in other people—and not just what you dislike, but what you envy or worship or become obsessed with; whatever characteristics you associate with saints and sinners.
The beauty and curse of the shadow, of whatever unlived life is in that bag—your authenticity, voice, energy, expressiveness, self-regard, passion, contribution —is that the human psyche is like the Earth. It’s a closed system in the sense that there’s no out as in throwing the garbage out. There’s no away as in running away. There’s no trash icon. You can’t just delete your self.
Whatever parts you push down—anger, grief , vulnerability, narcissism , creativity, passion, power—will just come up somewhere else in your life, urgent and rebellious, continually undermining you by lodging themselves between your intentions and your achievements. There’s no ignoring shadow any more than you can walk away from an angry partner and expect him or her to not still be angry when you come back. As the Mexican poet Jose Frias once said, “I tried to drown my sorrows, but the damn things learned how to swim.”
It may be the nature of the shadow to hide, but it’s the nature of the soul to seek, to try and retrieve what’s been lost and express what’s been suppressed, repressed or depressed , which all mean the same thing: pushed down. So with courage and compassion, consider giving what’s in your shadow a voice, and letting it speak. What does it want, how does it see the world, what’s been the cost of denying it, and what might happen (for better and for worse) if you let it out of the bag?
Making acquaintance with your shadow, and re-integrating it, may mean treating it the way the ancient Greeks treated strangers—as if they might be gods—but it’s still important to keep your wits about you. Embracing your own narcissism or anger, for instance, is different from identifying with it, or giving it license. Treating the devil with respect is not the same as worshipping the devil.
And though you can certainly access your shadow through journaling or imaginative dialogue, if you’re worried about being overwhelmed by it, consider reckoning with it in a caretaking situation like therapy or a therapeutic workshop. You can’t just pull the contents out of the bag like you’re pulling feathers out of a pillow. The shadow is a frightening reality, not a parlor game, says Thomas Moore in Care of the Soul . “Anyone who talks blithely about integrating it as if you could chum up to the shadow the way you learn a foreign language, doesn’t know the darkness that always qualifies shadow.”
Nonetheless, there’s tremendous power in simply naming the shadow, the parts of yourself you’ve denied and split off. Ursula LeGuin’s novel A Wizard of Earthsea addresses this unmistakably. In it, a young wizard practicing his craft one afternoon inadvertently conjures up a demon who’s a bit more than he bargained for, and the book revolves around his attempts to reconcile this situation. At the end, he confronts the demon and realizes that the only way to gain control over it is to say its name—which is his own.
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Gregg Levoy is the author of Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion (Penguin) and Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life (Random House).
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.