Being outside grounds me in the moment. Connection to the here-and-now moment offers truth. Truth brings clarity.
We moved into our home in July. Though you wouldn’t know it from looking at the yard, which appeared to be in its fullest glory, the days had already begun to grow shorter. The gradually descending darkness steered us to our first winter in this home.
Now, the evenings are cold. The nights are long. The tree limbs are bare. The ground is soggy. The garden slumbers … mostly.
It may not feel like it as I walk around outside, but each day is getting brighter. As I look closely, I see that some plants are already reaching up in transformation toward the few extra minutes of daily light. Buds have formed. Leaves have begun unfurling. The stage is set for a quieter but glorious act.
Indeed, each day is getting brighter. This is reality.
As a therapist in training, a mentor of mine often said, “Reality is on your side.” This was a reminder to stay on the side of a client’s truth, even when that client was deeply embedded in a world of his or her own lies—convinced, perhaps, of his or her worthlessness or futility. The key to helping a client find the truth isn’t to call to them from the outside as they echolocate their way to us. Rather, it is to join them in the exploration of their shadows.
Therapists can’t do this work without the willingness to know and explore our own shadows. To the extent that emotional regulation requires us to exclude and not acknowledge our shadows, this process of self-exploration, acceptance, and enlightenment is limited. Questioning beliefs about who we are can feel like a life-or-death experience. Research shows such questions light up parts of the brain that indicate a fight-or-flight response.
Our minds form in a society that doesn’t value and honor the processes of emotional regulation. In its place, we have installed within us false ideas of strength, power, and safety. They offer us unstable emotional regulation.
Garden Discovery
When I think I may have found every secret our garden holds, she surprises me with another gift.
Last week, I found this little metal bird right in the middle of the main pathway. I smiled instantly because I knew where it belonged.
Months ago, I found a metal sundial disk. It was rusty and broken, but I thought its color complimented the herbs I had started to grow. I placed it among them. The metal disk looked at home despite its missing gnomon.
A gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts a shadow. When oriented to true North, a sundial’s shadow reveals the time … a truth held within the light. Without this shadow, there is no reference to this truth.
There’s a popular story about having two fighting wolves within us. One is good; the other is bad. One is light; the other is shadow. In essence, the moral of the story is that the one we feed is the one that survives.
In my experience, many people deny their shadow wolves even exist. They quiet them. They still them. They deny them. They present to the world a person with but one wolf.
We tend to project that which we deny in ourselves onto other people. We don’t know it, but as we ridicule our own denied shadows in others, we feed them. We feed them without knowing it and without recognizing our own satiation.
It helps to know what it feels like to feed our shadow wolf. We discover how it feels when we take the time to see and acknowledge the shadows within us. Like the gnomon, our shadow parts help us find the truth in the light.
As I write, I am reckoning with what transpired at the US Capitol Building on January 6th. I am also reckoning that on the same day, more Americans—nearly 4,000—died of COVID-19 than on any other day during the pandemic. There are so many lurking shadows.
There are so many disowned feelings.
We live in a society filled with individuals who find emotional regulation by denying these shadows and feelings. Social media have strengthened these defensive processes. Social media helps us edit and curate the image we present to others. It helps us obscure aspects of our true selves as we both sell and buy the version of “self” we project into the world.
Vignette
A couple of years ago, a female middle school classmate asked one of my sons, “Who do you have a crush on?”
As he recounted the story to me, he said, “Mom, I knew at that moment that it would be easier to lie and avoid embarrassment. I also knew that if I lied, I would have to deal with this bad feeling I get when I do that. The bad feeling lasts a lot longer than embarrassment.” He paused. “So, I told her the truth and said, ‘you.’”
“That took courage,” I said.
I believe that my son’s awareness of his truth and the courage to speak from it grew from our courage as parents to let him lie. It took courage because, ultimately, it required us to give him space and trust his own higher instincts to kick in.
As they’ve grown, we’ve let our children lie and then given the time and space to explore the natural feelings that arose as a result. Rather than yell and shame them, we offered curiosity that what they said didn’t match our experience of the world. No matter how much we knew that “reality was on our side,” we let them explore their experience.
This process has worked with all four children. After lying, they eventually come to us and tell the truth. Then, we usually asked questions about how they chose to admit the lie. We often followed up by pointing out the courage it took to admit the truth. There was no need for punishment because they learned what they needed to know.
Having this space for internal exploration is vital for developing emotional regulation. It helps children learn to tune in to find the truth and to feel emotionally regulated in the process. It also allows them time and space to notice what it feels like to feed the shadow wolf. As a result, they will hopefully become adults who know and are comfortable with themselves. They will project less onto others. They won’t battle the good (self/us)-bad (other/them) splits that are so prominent in our society today.
An alternative to this is what happens too often; children learn to escape punishment and shame through lies. Or they learn that telling the truth leads to the emotional dysregulation that comes with shame and punishment. In this way, they learn to emotionally regulate through the escape of uncomfortable feelings.
In her account of the story about two wolves, a client told me that she wished to starve her shadow wolf. She sought to destroy a part of her that I would suggest is necessary to find her light.
Shadows exist in tandem with light. Like a sundial, knowing our shadows can help us know our light.
Also, like a sundial, shadows can point us to the truth. Or course, for us to look at a sundial and agree on the time, we must have a shared reality and experience of what the symbols on the sundial plate mean. We need a shared experience of reality. That’s actually quite a vulnerable proposition.
If one is open to discovering the time, one looks at the sundial plate in curiosity and wonder. If one insists on seeing the time they “know” it is, one must change the sundial meaning; shift reality. The more people come to believe these shifted meanings, the harder they become to dispute. Furthermore, the extent to which a person believes the shifted reality is integral to who he or she is, the more that person will be activated into a fight-or-flight response when that shifted reality is challenged.
Emotional regulation helps us hold our emotional responses as we sift the shifted for truth.
Curiosity, an openness to discovering what is true, requires emotional regulation. I wait in curiosity to discover and listen to the garden’s next story.
Until then, trust that the darkness we feel can point us to the light.
Know that the light is increasing by the day.
Just like the plants around us, we can yield … and grow.