{"id":1569,"date":"2026-08-31T15:12:48","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T15:12:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/?p=1569"},"modified":"2026-09-02T15:15:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T15:15:39","slug":"shadow-sun-self","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/?p=1569","title":{"rendered":"Shadow, Sun & Self"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Carl Jung on the Shadow and Second Half of Life<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Years ago, while I was in the PhD program at Gonzaga, a fellow traveler in my cohort spoke to me about shadow work\u2014the Jungian idea that there are parts of ourselves we push into the shadows of consciousness because they don\u2019t fit the person we have learned to be or have chosen to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I knew Carl Jung. I had read his works, watched documentaries about him, and found myself agreeing with much of his thinking. I understood the concept intellectually, but I didn\u2019t go much further. Perhaps at that time I wasn\u2019t supposed to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently, I returned to Jung through his 1930 essay The Stages of Life<\/em> and encountered his description of life as having a psychological morning and afternoon. This time, something felt different. The material itself hadn\u2019t changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jung believed that the morning of adulthood is necessarily spent facing outward: establishing ourselves in the world, building careers and relationships, creating families, assuming responsibilities, and developing identities. We spend those years answering some version of the question: Who am I going to be?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can see now how much of my own morning was spent doing exactly that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roles. Relationships. Responsibilities. Experiences. Countries. Stories. Becoming a wife, a mother, a volunteer, a traveler, a writer, a person others could depend on. Some of those identities were consciously chosen. Others I inherited. And some, I suspect, I constructed because the world\u2014or my own history\u2014required them of me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of them were false, but perhaps none of them was the whole of me either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jung warned against entering the afternoon of life with the same assumptions and ambitions that served us in the morning. His metaphor feels remarkably simple to me now: the sun has shifted position, and so have I.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The psychological work of afternoon isn\u2019t simply to continue accumulating. It is to turn inward and begin asking different questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is actually mine?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What am I still proving?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What have I outgrown?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What parts of myself did I leave behind while becoming the person I needed to be?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where shadow work suddenly makes sense to me in a way it didn\u2019t years ago. The shadow isn\u2019t merely our darkness. It can hold the unlived parts and pieces of us\u2014the desires, anger, creativity, instincts, contradictions, and truths we learned to suppress because they didn\u2019t fit our carefully constructed identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe the second half of life isn\u2019t about becoming someone new at all\u2026 it\u2019s about becoming whole. And for me, this is where the paradox enters, one I recognize most clearly in myself: my morning was largely about addition; my afternoon has increasingly become about subtraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Less performance and less proving\u2026 and less tolerance for relationships sustained solely by history. My favorite is less willingness to set aside what I know to preserve what I once believed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Disturbances have come and will come along the way. Some painful, some bewildering. Things I once would have regarded as simply losses, failures, or ruptures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now I wonder whether some were also developmental. I have used them that way, at least, as stepping stones for personal growth. They forced me inward, prompting me to question old assumptions, examine inherited patterns, acknowledge my shadow, and begin distinguishing between the life I had built and the self living within it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jung named this process: individuation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think of it more simply as the morning asking me to build a life. The afternoon is asking me to understand the one I built\u2014to look backward without living backward, tracing what shaped me, what I chose, what I inherited, what I tolerated, what I loved, and what I mistook for mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps a kind of reverse-engineering is happening here. Not to take a life apart or wish any of it away, but to finally understand its architecture. To recognize which pieces were necessary for the woman I was becoming and which no longer belong to the woman I am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I couldn\u2019t have done that work when my fellow traveler at Gonzaga first spoke to me about the shadow. I could read Jung then. I could understand the words. But I hadn\u2019t yet accumulated enough of my own life to recognize myself in them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now I have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The disturbances, the losses, the relationships, the countries, the people I have loved, the identities I have inhabited and eventually outgrown\u2014none of them feel like wasted chapters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They were my morning, and they brought me here, which is what I understand now, though I couldn\u2019t then: I don\u2019t want my morning back. I want to know what it was preparing me for. The sun has changed position\u2026 and so have I.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carl Jung on the Shadow and Second Half of Life Years ago, while I was in the PhD program at Gonzaga, a fellow traveler in my cohort spoke to me about shadow work\u2014the Jungian idea that there are parts of ourselves we push into the shadows of consciousness because they don\u2019t fit the person we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1570,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,66,57,49,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-identity-inheritance","category-life-living-essay","category-personal-reflective-narrative","category-psychology","category-reflective-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1569"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1571,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1569\/revisions\/1571"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}