The shadow is always with us.  It is that dark side that we all loathe and are prone to projecting “out there” on our favorite scapegoat.  Karl Jung and many others have taught the need to “withdraw your projection” and embrace that dark side.

Richard Rohr writes in Falling Upward:  A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life:

Your shadow is what you refuse to see about yourself, and what you do not want others to see….Be especially careful of any idealized role or self-image, like that of minister, mother, doctor, nice person, professor, moral believer…These are huge personas to live up to, and they trap many people in lifelong delusion.

This delusion makes me thing of Emerson’s fear (or was it Thoreau???), that “I will come to the end of my life and realize that I have not lived life at all, but somebody else’s life.” (paraphrasing).

And Rohr does not have any problem with, for example, “nice persons”.  His concern is that a genuinely nice person will need to embrace the shadow side of “nice” and embrace the fact that at times he/she is less than “nice.”  But our pretensions die hard.  They die hard.  W. H. Auden noted, “And Truth met him and held our her hand and he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”