When Darkness Falls

Keep your face to the sunshine, and you cannot see a shadow.

- Helen Keller

A typical hero story begins with a detailed picture of the ‘villain’. Who they are. What they want. The danger they pose.

Before you undergo your hero’s journey, you too must understand the extent of what you are dealing with. It is also necessary to question your concept of what a villain is in the context of narcissism. That will come later.

For now, let us take a deep dive into the mind of the narcissist. Their psychology. Their relational patterns. How they see the world, and warp it to their design. Above all, we will consider your place in this landscape, along with how you can defeat this so-called villain, and chart your way back home to your True Self.

Which seems as good a place as any to begin.

The True Self

A core tenet of Christianity, Islam and Buddhism is the ‘purification of the soul’. Through ethical conduct and spiritual practices such as fasting, meditating and praying, one aims to achieve a state of oneness. Christians call it ‘eternal life with God’. Buddhists: ‘Nirvana’. Muslims: ‘Tawheed’.

In a world where the mind dominates, and we are bombarded with social media content and advertising, it is easy to lose sight of this state. The concept of religious purification is therefore useful, as it conceptualises the core of our humanity via a process of deduction. By releasing negative emotions, thought patterns, behaviours and other ‘sinful’ influences, we aim to get to the essence of our True Self.

The ineffable True Self has no form. Yet within it lies the seed of who we truly are, and who we can be. Our personality, our strengths, our weaknesses, our ancestral lineage, our very destiny is written within the True Self — if it remains unobstructed.

Religion argues that only through consistent alignment with God can we grow to our fullest expression. Religion also argues that there are many forces at play in the world that get in the way, many of which come from within us.

The id

The True Self is divine in its mission. Like the sun, its goal is to shine brightly and participate in the game of creation. Yet much like the sun, the light of the True Self casts a shadow.

If the True Self is an ever-shining, always-expanding star, the other aspects of the psyche can be seen as its solar system. The True Self lies at the centre, photosynthesising and fuelling our development. Driving this universe toward manifesting into the world is what Sigmund Freud called the id.

The id is the True Self’s pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, being driven by urges, desires and needs. Our need to be loved and seen, our desire for sex, our urge to avoid abandonment, all of these drives and more lie at the heart of the id.

The id is powered by what Freud referred to as the life instinct, which operates on the ‘pleasure principle’. When you are hungry, you eat. When thirsty, you drink. When you want attention, you demand it. If you like something, you take it.

Yet that is not all. If something is uncomfortable, the pleasure principle dictates that we avoid it. When someone bothers us, we get angry and push back. In this way, the id thrusts us away from what Freud called the death instinct.

The life instinct compels us to survive, pursue pleasure, love and care for others, cooperate, reproduce, and self-actualise. The death instinct, in comparison, has a magnetic pull toward a desolate state which the life instinct must overcome. We all experience this when we struggle to get out of bed, or get caught in negative thinking, or procrastinate, or fall into apathy and depression. Behind these inhibiting acts of self-sabotage is the death instinct, continually working to return life to its original, inorganic state.

However, so long as our basic needs for food, shelter and connection are met, and as long as we have purpose and meaning in our lives, the life instinct can thrive — despite the pull of the death instinct. What Freud referred to as the ‘pressure toward death’ is then overcome, and our journey can progress.

This thrust toward life cannot go unchecked, however. While the id is blind in its pursuit of gratification, it must still deal with the consequences of its actions.

The ego

Our drives can clash with others, and our environment does not always accommodate us. To get what we want, we sometimes have to resist our urges. Instead, we might need to first analyse, predict and understand the world around us to know how to safely fulfil our drives, which is a task for the mind. With each experience, we eventually form a map in our brain for how to best navigate our environment.

As we move through the world, we begin to notice differences between ourselves and others. Some people seem confident, others more hesitant and withdrawn. Some are more powerful, others subservient. Furthermore, how people treat us seems to shift based on how we act or do not act. By withholding certain drives, we notice we get better treatment. Other instincts, on the other hand, are welcomed. In time, a concept forms in our mind of how accommodating the world is, and who we are in it. This idea of who we are and, above all, who we could be, is our ego.

The ego is a construct the mind uses to negotiate and interact with the world on our behalf. It determines how we can behave in the world, not just how we want to. Over time, this concept of our capabilities evolves based on the messages we receive from those around us. If we are constantly celebrated, loved and encouraged, our ego believes us to be inherently good and worthy of love, as well as capable of growth. If we are neglected, ridiculed or abandoned, however, we see ourselves as inherently bad, and learn to repress who we are.

The shadow descends

Beginning with our parents, there will be a specific set of drives which the world deems unacceptable. In some families, crying is not allowed, nor is protesting or getting angry. Curiosity and excitement can be crushed by an intolerant parent. This creates enormous tension between a True Self that wants to energetically expand, and an ego which was taught to deem that instinct as ‘wrong’. If our drives clash with the world enough, the tension gets too much. To cope, we reject these impulses outright and determine them to be bad. Yet they do not disappear. They remain within us, in an area of the Self which Carl Jung called the shadow.

The shadow contains the urges, desires, traits and needs we were unable to satisfy or express. Because they were rejected by our world, and because their rejection was so painful, we dissociated and pushed these parts deep inside, and ‘forgot’ them. In the conflict between gaining approval or being authentic, we sacrificed core parts of ourselves to be accepted. As we grew, we developed amnesia to ensure we never had to face these ‘flawed’ parts, unaware that the past would eventually come back to haunt us.

The great escape

Between a rigid ego and a bloated shadow lies unbearable tension. The healthiest form of release is to satisfy our urges by cooperating with one’s environment. Yet when we have determined those drives to be bad, the tension remains permanently in place. We are then forced to vent through addictive substances, acting out, overworking, binge-eating or binge-watching, and other forms of escapism.

Another powerful way we release the tension of the shadow is through what Melanie Klein referred to as splitting. Reality consists of complexity and ambivalence, which a healthy person processes using reason and common sense. Yet this is only possible when the nervous system is calm and the True Self is free to expand.

If the tension in one’s shadow swells enough, the ability to process reality is compromised. This leads to the person dealing with the world with an extreme polarity — either someone or something is all-good and ‘amazing’, or they are all-bad and threatening. If someone or something is deemed all-bad, they become the target of the ‘split’ person’s anger, hatred and contempt. If the split person deems someone or something as all-good, however, they then feel free to express their positive drives and emotions unconditionally.

In the case of someone living in a repressive environment, the ‘good’ things in life such as love, happiness and connection are in short supply. Expressing negative emotions is a no-go, while remaining in an ‘all-bad’ mindset is deeply uncomfortable. To help deal with such a frustrating reality, the split person dissociates and resorts to fantasy, using their imagination to paint over their painful world, turning it into an ‘all-good’ version instead.

Using fantasy, we can numb our frustration and create the illusion of satisfying our drives. We can imagine a perfect person who will save us from our prison of agony. We can idolise the people who hurt us and pretend that they love us. We might daydream of our circumstances magically changing, or visualise going to another place where life is better.

Fantasy can also alter our ego concept of who we are. If we are constantly rejected, neglected and mistreated, the tension of the resulting pain leads us to compensate by imagining ourselves as all-desirable, all-valuable and superior. While this can provide relief, it inevitably clashes with reality. And much like a drug, when fantasy runs out, we need a higher dose to get back to where we were. Furthermore, the stronger the shadow, the more powerful the fantasy must be. In extreme cases, when enough of the True Self is cast into the shadow, it becomes lost. Fantasy then becomes the only ‘reality’, where imagining oneself as superior crystallises in the ego and forms into a grandiose, ‘all-good’ false self — a construct detached from reality.

Meanwhile, the shadow lurks, ready to burst out unexpectedly. A Cold War emerges between the ‘all-bad’ shadow and ‘all-good’ grandiose false self, ready to turn hot at any moment. The ground then becomes fertile for narcissism to grow.