My Shadow

I got forwarded a WhatsApp video which showed an American girl talking in a very artificial manner and an American man making fun of her accent and telling her that she was not sounding posh when she put on her fake accent. The conversation with my friend on WhatsApp went like this:

Friend: What do you think of this?
Me: Just some video created to trigger people. Why do you ask and what do you think?
Friend: She is putting on a fake accent which is seen in most of the youth today, not just in English, but also in Hindi and Gujarati. You might have observed this in Kannada as well. This artificial machine like accent emerges largely from the longing to be considered of a certain type. If you carefully see how the youth talks to their parents and friends or unknown but urban looking strangers, you’ll see a clear distinction. Such is the case with written language as well. Do let me know your thoughts about this.
Me: I have no opinion about it. The world has many more problems than the tone that people use. I still don’t understand why you find this so fascinating. In short, I am more interested in why you find it interesting than what the phenomenon is pointing to. 🙂

The conversation made me think about the psychological Shadow, the aspect of our self that is its emotional blind-spot. The part of our self that we hide and don’t acknowledge even to ourselves. The part that we hold in shadow but that comes and secretly kicks us again and again and bewilders us. I think the idea of the shadow helps decipher many of our unconscious responses to the complicated world we live in. For those who haven’t heard about it, here is a brief description of what the shadow is about.

The classic example used is of a young boy who naturally tells a lot of lies even though he knows that his father has a reputation for being truthful. One day his father catches him lying, gives him a hit on his head and shouts at him for being a liar. The boy is traumatized and stops acknowledging the lying part of himself—he holds the lying part of himself in shadow. As he grows up, the way his shadow manifests in his behaviour is that he passionately hates all liars. He has an emotional charge attached to liars that most other people don’t share. You see the connection with the WhatsApp conversation above? The people who work in this area say that by the time we grow up all of us have created many many shadows and this is what we carry around with us as we unconsciously react to external triggers. The good news is that we can work at uncovering our shadows, like the boy in the example above, we get clues to our shadows by our extra emotional response to situations, responses that other people don’t seem to share.

In our colonized country we carry the burden of many collective shadows on top of all our personal baggage. For example, the emotional charge around speaking Hindi that many North Indians carry seems like an indication of some deep-rooted shadow. I encourage you to think about and become aware of the collective and individual shadows that we carry. May we reclaim all our scattered pieces and become whole again!