Connie Zweig, PhD: Working with the Shadow
Connie Zweig is a Jungian therapist and author who has focused much of her career exploring and teasing out the implications of the shadow, which is how Carl Jung referred to the unconscious. Chances are that you’ve been hearing more and more about shadow work—it’s having a moment—in part, I’m convinced, because it’s a concept whose time has come. As I’ve written about a lot in my Substack newsletter, we are swimming in collective shadow, unable and unwilling to process our share of it. When we don’t take on this unconscious material, or darkness, our tendency is to project it onto other people and groups, to get away from it as quickly as possible. But, of course, it doesn’t work like that—our shadow is ours. It’s our blind spot. When we’re willing to face our shadow, to access it, to allow it to emerge, we often find that it’s full of gold. In fact, Jung believed that the shadow is the source of all of our energy, the main mechanism for growth—ask anyone who has gone through hard or dark times and they will likely tell you that the experience propelled them forward in unexpected ways, often for the better.
Connie and I explore all of these concepts and then some, as she’s one of the most prodigious writers in the space. She co-authored Meeting the Shadow and Romancing the Shadow, which are essential anthologies and texts, and then more recently wrote Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path, which explores what happens when the shadow, or darkness, is unresolved in spiritual and religious communities. She’s also the author of The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, which is an exploration of the shadow of aging in our ageist culture. I’m hoping she comes back to the podcast soon so we can discuss that book at length. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: I'm thrilled to talk to you and thank you for your work. It's funny knowing a little bit about you, I've listened to you on a handful of shows. I loved Meeting the Shadow, obviously, because it's so many thinkers that I love to read. But I loved the introduction. And so I'm thrilled that now I know you did that book a while ago, but that you from that point on started writing your own books.
CONNIE SWEIG: Yeah, Meeting the Shadow was a collection that came together when I worked in publishing and we published it at our house and then later I ended up getting my PhD in depth psychology. And I had had a career as a journalist, so I was really familiar with writing. So, Romancing the Shadow was about the method of shadow work that I developed with my colleague Steve Wolf and wrote the book with him. And it's about how we can work with these parts of ourselves in relationships, romantic relationships, friendships, workplace relationships, parents, kids, and so on. That part of us that sabotages us, that acts out, that might get lost in addiction or depression, criticism, moods, habitual patterns that we feel we lose control of. Those are unconscious parts of ourselves that are emerging spontaneously and often repeatedly in relationships. And so I really wanted to kind of wrestle with that and romancing the shadow and later I wanted to extend that into these other arenas.
ELISE: Yeah, well, I'm pretty sure that everyone listening is familiar with Carl Jung and shadow, and you gave a bit of a definition there, but do you mind defining the shadow for people or blind spot or however you like to do it?
CONNIE: so when we're growing up and we're seeking the love and approval of adults in our lives, we notice that certain traits or behaviors get love and approval and certain ones don't. They get disapproval, maybe even punishment or abandonment. And so we learn very quickly and unknowingly. We're just little sponges and we're taking in these messages: that's good. That's okay. Be polite. Look happy. Be generous. Take care of your mother, whatever it is that you get rewards for. And then we also learn what doesn't work. So, don't cry, don't get angry, don't touch your body, don't act out at school, don't rebel, don't question authority. And as we're growing, our conscious personality, what we call the ego, takes on all those traits that are approved of and rewarded. And everything else gets stuffed into the shadow, the personal unconscious. The shadow is the name that Carl Jung gave to the personal unconscious. So the ego and the shadow are developing in tandem. And the process is inevitable because we can't express everything. We can't live out every trait and every talent and every feeling that we ever experience.
And so there's bound to be a certain amount of material that goes into the shadow. And people tend to think that it's negative, but it's only negative in relation to the ego, in relation to what the ego feels and judges about it, right? Whether it's shameful for the ego. So our natural talents can go into the shadow if they are not rewarded by the family. So if the family only approves of academic performance and someone is naturally artistic and really wants to paint or draw, but that's devalued, then that talent gets repressed. It gets buried in the shadow. So all kinds of things, all kinds of treasures can be hidden. Their feelings, the full spectrum of feeling is rarely explored in a family, right?
Parents can't tolerate it if kids lose control, whether in anger or sadness. So a lot of feelings get sacrificed into the shadow. So this is an inevitable and a natural process. It happens with everybody. Every human being developmentally as we grow up and we notice, you know, as teenagers, kids often become more rebellious and act out some of what was forbidden before that and at midlife, some of us have experienced time is running short and there's so much I haven't lived out. So I'm going to crash and burn my life, leave my marriage, leave my career, and move my location and completely live out a different life. That's the shadow material erupting in a midlife crisis.
And often a similar thing can happen in a late life identity crisis when we're in our 60s or 70s, for example, and we begin to feel regret about the life we have not lived. And we begin to go seek out different kinds of self expression. So this process is with us all through our lives, but nobody really guides us on how to recognize unconscious material and how to work with it to make our lives deeper and richer.
ELISE: That was beautiful. Thank you. And, you know, this idea that it's negative. I mean, Freud held that belief, right? That the shadow of the unconscious was negative. Was that one of the reasons that there was a schism between Jung and Freud, where Jung was like, actually, this is maybe the most important stuff of life, what's in the unconscious that's begging to emerge, be integrated, be come part of who, well, it is part of who we are, right? Because I think that's how so many of us operate. Like, I can just project it. I can disown it. This is in my shadow, in my blind spot, not perceptible to me, even though it might be glaringly obvious to anyone who's sees you, right? We just drag these trash bags along behind us, convinced that we're not those things.
CONNIE: Yeah. So the poet, Robert Bly, beautiful, great poet, described the shadow as that long bag we dragged behind us. And if we spend the first half of life filling it up and the second half of life taking things out. Yeah. Nice, quickie image for us to get the process. He was good at that. You know, there's a sense of, between Freud and Jung, there were a number of issues that they disagreed on vehemently. One basic one was how they viewed the unconscious, and Freud tended to focus on sexuality and sometimes aggression, Jung was sort of much broader than that in what he thought was unconscious, but there was also the idea of the collective unconscious and mythology and, you know, Jung ended up exploring that more, and there were other disagreements, but I would say that, you know, none of psychology Would have happened without Freud. He was a unbelievable pioneer and Jung, in some ways, stands on his shoulders and just expanded the terrain, as did other people, as did many of the early psychoanalysts that each went in their own direction.
ELISE: Yeah. So there's the collective unconscious, and as you mentioned, that's sort of where our mythology comes from, these archetypal images, stories that we can locate in our own lives and in the wider culture. And in your mind, is that the same as sort of the cultural shadow? Or different because maybe every era feels this way, but it feels like we have some major cultural shadows to that were dragging around looking to figure out who the enemy is, who's the bad person, who can we project all of our anxiety, dismay, bad feelings, discomfort, lack of certainty onto. Are those different concepts?
CONNIE: So, you know, the personal shadow or the personal unconscious forms it's embedded in a family. So there's actually a family unconscious. So if you look at families and their secrets, you start to see how as little universes, they carry their own unconscious process, and then the family is embedded in a community. It could be a neighborhood, it could be a church or synagogue, it could be all different kinds of community, an ethnic community, and those groups have their own shadows: what's forbidden? What's unacceptable in that community that gets hidden? And then those communities are embedded in larger, let's say, California or the West or Moscow and the Soviet Union or some kind of national shadow. Israel has its own shadow issues. Palestine has its own shadow issues. And then there's global issues in terms of humanity as a species and what's collectively in the shadow, unexpressed, hidden, outside of awareness. So there are these layers and most individual humans like me can't really perceive all that stuff directly. You know, it's too complex. It's bottomless, really. It's too complex.
Jung wrote about objective evil when he was trying to understand the collective dark side. I don't use that language. I think that that language, because it's theological, is really charged and kind of dangerous. So you mentioned projection a couple of times, Elise. So projection is when we unknowingly attribute this unconscious part of ourselves, it's in our own shadow, to somebody else. And we walk into a party where we don't know anyone, and we look at that person and we say, Oh, wow, she's really seductive. Or, he's really lazy. Or, he looks like an alcoholic. Or, she looks like XYZ. And we attribute to them something that's in ourselves that's in a blind spot. And so they become a mirror for our own shadows. And when we begin to work with our projections, we begin to learn a lot about ourselves. So groups do that too. And we can see this playing out really intensely all over the world right now. In Ukraine, in Israel, archaic, timeless, enemy making, where groups, communities religious tribes, cultural tribes are projecting, demonizing, turning other human beings into other so that they can then kill them and feel no guilt. And so shadow projection takes on these huge dimensions and these political consequences that can be really startling and tragic. The immigrant is carrying a lot of projection in our culture now. You know, people of different races project onto each other. Ageism is another unconscious bias that carries the stigma of projection. Homophobia. So this is all, from my point of view, shadow projection. And it leads to a lot of our cultural and social justice issues.
ELISE: No, I agree very much and have tried to sort of dig at this and in newsletters and otherwise, I definitely think, you know, there's a lot of projection against white women as well and the carnification of our culture. You can just find groups, right, who tend to hold the trash bag for other people who become safe targets for all of our dismay. On the personal level, how do you know When you're projecting? I wrote a book, it's called on our best behavior, it's about women and the seven deadly sins and the way that we've been conditioned for quote unquote goodness and I didn't really realize it at the time, but another Pacifica Youngian was like, Oh, this is kind of a book about the cultural shadow of women and everything that we've been conditioned to disown or disassociate from. And then we tend to judge and criticize other women who are, as you said, seductive, sexual, lazy, gluttonous. Is the way to determine if you're in a projection or you're projecting when someone is just irrationally chafing your hide, when you have that discomfort in your body that you then, there's a passion that you want to get rid of? Is that how you can tell?
CONNIE: It's an exaggerated, irrational, emotional response that's not based on knowing someone, so if you have a reaction to a stranger or someone in the media or someone in politics or someone, who's just providing this kind of blank slate because you don't really know him or her, then it's a projection. And yes, there's often a sensation in the body that's negative. It could be fear, it could be distrust, it could be disgust, right? And then there's the flip side. There's positive projection, which happens in the spiritual universe a lot. When someone is looking for a charismatic leader, then they're going to project their own awakening, their own compassion, their own wisdom onto the leader, the clergy person. So the content of the projection can be anything, what we view as negative, what we view as positive. It's almost like we all have a little bag of quivers on our back and every once in a while we shoot out an arrow and it hits the target. And sometimes the target fits, right? That person really is wise or really is lazy. And sometimes the target doesn't fit, right? And the arrow like falls off. And you have to go, hmm, okay, maybe I have to rethink this and I'm not perceiving it correctly, right? But the point is, we're giving something away. When we're in projection, we're giving away something in ourselves. So when we fall in love, and we think to ourselves, Oh, this guy is never going to do what my father did. Right, whether it's leave me or yell at me or whatever it is. This guy is different. He's present. He's available He's committed, right? He's smart. He's kind, right? And so we have all these positive ideas about this guy after six months of knowing him and we get married and what happens? The man gets triggered. The man gets triggered, and he's angry, and he's verbally abusive, and oh my god, she's with her father again. And, you know, so there's a perfect fit between her shadow and his shadow. There's a fit. This is what romancing the shadow is about. And so, you know, from my point of view, that's the reason that so many people get divorced. We have such a high divorce rate, because Everybody's triggering everybody's shadow material and nobody knows how to work with it.
ELISE: Yeah.
CONNIE: Nobody knows how to make a conscious relationship and a commitment to accountability for our own shadow material, an understanding of the other person's shadow so that we can communicate about it in a way that's constructive and not hurtful.
ELISE: Yeah, I mean one of the things I don't know how much time you spend on social media I try not I try I'm trying to increasingly move away is, I wrote a newsletter about this last night actually about how There's this instinct right now, and I mean you can tell me, But maybe as depth psychology becomes less and less and less available to people We're getting more increasingly ill equipped to deal with this, but I'm seeing a level of policing And again, it goes with the positive projection and the negative projection around wanting the world to conform to our preferences and our opinions and our views. And then a level of aggressiveness around how dare you not feel or think the same about every single issue as I do. I would like you to conform to my preferences. It's really interesting, but it's terrifying too when we think about how our world only seems to become increasingly complex, and there's so little within our control. Certainly not other people. Other people are not within our control, but it's, to me, alarming. I don't know if you've seen an increase or if you think that this is a through line and maybe I'm just more conscious of it.
CONNIE: I thinK that Western, post modern, post industrial culture is being more and more tribalized. And that within our tribe, we want everyone to be a perfect mirror of us. And that's a kind of narcissism.
ELISE: Yeah.
CONNIE: We want the reflection back that our beliefs are correct, our positions, our values, we want the validation. That then allows the people in the other tribe to be the bad ones. And this has been, you know, very exacerbated by Donald Trump. I mean, it's one of the consequences of his sociopathy that's emerged. So, you know, in Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path, I write about spiritual communities. And one of the reasons that people are drawn to spiritual groups is what you're describing, they want to be with people who are like minded and like hearted and live with less uncertainty and less doubt and less anxiety, because their values and priorities are being mirrored by the teacher and the group. And so they feel okay about themselves. They feel a sense of belonging a sense of fit in those groups. And one of the reasons that that makes people susceptible to spiritual abuse and religious trauma is because that need to belong is so intense from childhood, it's a really early unmet need in a lot of people. And when it gets met or the possibility of it gets met, people can't leave.
ELISE: Yeah.
CONNIE: They can't stand up and speak out. They don't want to rock the boat. They may witness some kind of physical or verbal abuse or some financial abuse, and they can't stand up because they don't want to lose just what we're talking about, the mere reflection of their own psyche, of their own values, of their own beliefs. It's too daunting a risk to take for most people. And so, some of these groups develop cult like qualities, where nobody's questioning authority. Nobody's doubting the teacher. And the teacher then begins to attain more and more power. And part of it is because of what we were talking about before, about projection.
So projection goes two ways, right? So the student is projecting onto the teacher, he or she knows more, wiser, kinder, more evolved, right? And then the teacher is carrying all that projection. And in some cases, It's dozens of people projecting, and in some cases it's millions. In India, there's millions of people projecting onto teachers. Imagine what that feels like after a while. There's an incredible burden in carrying the projection of spiritual leader on from other people, whether this is a Catholic priest or a shaman in a psychedelic community or a Roshi in a Zendo or a rabbi in a synagogue, it's the same dynamic of projection of sending and receiving the projection.
And often what happens is these clergy people don't have peer support. So they don't have someone they can go to and say, you know, I'm getting depressed, or I'm getting depleted, or I'm having sexual fantasies. They can't express their own needs. And so they act them out. Then the shadow takes over and they act them out and there's incredible harm done. And so I wrote about these kind of allegations in dozens of communities around the world that are happening right now. Because I needed to understand, I needed to really research this to understand how is this possible?
ELISE: Yeah.
CONNIE: How is it possible that people in advanced stages of spiritual development could still act out so much shadow material? Power shadow, sexual shadow, money shadow, how is this possible? So, that's why, you know, I wrote Meeting the Shadow and the Spiritual Path. And it's a lot about what we're discussing, this dynamic between the believer's shadow meeting the teacher's shadow and falling in love, right? And finding that match, that feeling of fit, that feeling of belonging, and then somebody acting out.
ELISE: It's a fantastic book. And there are so many people as you obviously know who have suffered spiritual abuse. There's so much guru energy in our culture of that sort of outsourcing of authority outsourcing of decision making to someone else. And you mentioned Jung talking about evil and avoiding that because of its theological bent, but I think what often happens, right, in spiritual communities is this idea, particularly in our culture, that's so fixated on this sort of ascension, dissension, like, we can get out of here, we're going to evolve out of here to somewhere better, that there is an escape, from evil, right? When evil is out there or darkness is out there, there is this absolute goodness or light, which isn't the point. But I think that's so embodied, right? People fail to see that we're all full of darkness. We're all full of shadow. That's who we are. We're human, right? It's our job to do this processing, do this mixing, do this metabolizing, rather than disavow it. There's no other way through. Is that one of the mechanisms that certainty of goodness, the certainty of moral righteousness, the certainty of some assured path to salvation that you think, is what pulls people? You know, that we don't have to live in this nuanced duality that we can cut right to the front of the line with our spiritual teacher. Is that the pull?
CONNIE: I think that depends on people's level of development. So if people are in the yoga world, or the meditation world, there are a lot of people who are longing for light. For transcendence, for awakening, what's what we now call non duality. We used to call it enlightenment. So there are a lot of people who have this, what I call holy longing, this yearning to go beyond ego and connect with something greater. And a lot of teachers say that if you stay with that, if you attain that, your problems go away. This is a solution to everything. This certainly happened to me in my 20s when I started meditating, and that's what the teacher said, you know? So, now we have a term for that called spiritual bypass. And we recognize that we actually can't bypass our psychological and emotional development through spiritual development. That they're actually separate lines of development. And that some people can be very advanced spiritually and not good at relating, not good at communicating, and not even empathic in some cases because of personality disorders. And those personality character issues don't get healed through meditation. They require psychological work. And then you can have, you know, people who are very advanced spiritually, who are not developed morally, and they may even have written ethical standards, the Ten Commandments or something, but they haven't internalized that in really in their own development. They feel like they can violate it with impunity. So they can, you know, sleep with their students, for example, tell them they will be enlightened by having sex with them, and feel no guilt or shame about it. And it doesn't mean that those teachers are not awake in some level. They can have some spiritual awakening and still be acting out in this very kind of cruel and sexist ways.
Some of it is cultural because a lot of them come from very patriarchal monastic systems. You know, and they haven't, as you say, digested or processed that and moved out of it. They still have patriarchal egos. And so that's how they're responding, even though they're in this postmodern setting. And so the systems in those communities are set up in a way that's kind of colluding with the abuse. Like the Catholic Church. I mean, has anything really systemically changed in the institutional systems of the Catholic Church since all the scandals? I don't know, but I've never heard of it. I've heard of big payouts. And, you know, diocese going bankrupt, but there's no change in celibacy, there's no change in ordaining women, there's no change in hierarchies, some of these smaller communities have similar systemic issues. And I write about two communities that actually took that on to redesign the systems after scandals blew up their communities, you know, so individual spiritual shadow work, which is the second half of the book is about how to really reclaim your projections, how to reclaim your own spiritual light, your own beliefs, your own bodily sensations, your gut wisdom, your range of feeling. I remember in my 20s in my meditation community, I wasn't supposed to look unhappy. I wasn't supposed to get angry. It wasn't supposed to be sexual. I mean, a whole range of my humanity was cut off, right? So beginning to kind of take back these lost parts of the self, whether it's from Catholicism or Islam or Orthodox Judaism, you can read many people's stories now of leaving Christianity. People are leaving the church in droves. The recovery process is very similar to alternative communities, yoga and meditation communities because the dynamic is so similar. So the inner work is quite similar with spiritual shadow work. And then the collective spiritual shadow work on the communities, as I mentioned. So this for me is very personal and I think very timely because so many people are really walking away from institutional religion, Mormonism. I mean, I have people reach out to me, you know, from all over the world, all kinds of organized groups, having been very traumatized, many of them suffering from PTSD, very, very traumatized, and, you know, having taken years to be able to leave.
ELISE: There are two places I want to go with you. One is you mentioned this nihilistic, narcissistic, post modern, highly deconstructed moment in culture. So I want to, I want to explore that with you in this idea of order, disorder, reorder, and maybe we're in the disorder phase of this triangular cycle. I don't know. I'm curious for your thoughts. I want to go there. And then I also want to talk about, I know you're friends with Ken Wilber and you mentioned this idea that I think so many of us have been taught that there's this Horizontal order right that if you can reach a spiritual state then you are inherently enlightened and his point is like that's how you get enlightened Nazis without the sort of concurrent pillars of development: emotional health, mental health, spiritual health, that these things are independent, right, and must be worked simultaneously. So that was a lot. I defer to you, but those are two places I'd love to hear you go.
CONNIE: Well, you know, Ken describes it as growing up is the psychological work, cleaning up is the shadow work, waking up is the spiritual work, and showing up is our service, our contribution. And I think that's a good kind of quickie way to describe human development. It isn't just one of those strands. I'm working with a group called Association for Spiritual Integrity, which is offering webinars and community and peer support for people who are having spiritual breakthroughs, some of whom are teachers and shouldn't be, some of whom are students and want to understand this more, and really exploring how do we include moral development and shadow awareness into this process. So I'm hearing a kind of a bias in you and your speech, you can tell me if I'm right or not, against hierarchy.
ELISE: Oh, I like wholarchy.
CONNIE: okay, so, you know, I've been meditating for more than 50 years. So I can say that there are advanced spiritual states. And a state is transient, it comes and goes. And there are advanced spiritual levels or stages, Ken calls them stages, levels of consciousness, that are more permanent, that are more lived in. My husband lived in a very advanced stage of non duality. And he's still got his neurosis. He's very human, very human.
ELISE: Yeah.
CONNIE: We can say that, you know, hierarchically, or in terms of the ascent that you mentioned earlier, he has attained something in the spiritual line of development. He's also very psychologically aware. I mean, he's a psychologist, but he's got his stuff.
ELISE: Yeah.
CONNIE: I think that we have to kind of stretch to hold all of this, and it's a lot, all of this potential for human consciousness. I know, I would say, probably a dozen people who are in very advanced stages of their practice, but it doesn't mean that they don't get angry or they don't get depressed or they don't get mean or they don't get triggered. It doesn't mean that. They're still very human, or that they have very undeveloped skills in some areas. wE spent a lot of time with a man who was really very, very advanced who just didn't know how to handle money at all and ended up cheating us about something. There's this way in which very few people are integrated in their development, you know, are bringing together shadow awareness, spiritual awareness, emotional awareness, and it's More than a lifetime's work. It's a big handful.
ELISE: Yeah. But hopefully that's so relieving for people to hear because I think that so many of us think I will reach a point in my life where I'm unfazed, where I don't get pissed, where I'm always kind to my children and my husband and, you know, we hold this idea of perfection. Which is a lie, right? Rather than understanding where we are.
CONNIE: No perfect human. Perfect is just the wrong word. And it's the wrong vision, right? It's the wrong vision. So in terms of your other question about disintegration and reintegration and Cycles of disorder and order, I don't know that I can comment on that. I mean, it looks to me, you know, like we're in a very dark age right now, that we're in these giant wars again. And there's so much primitive behavior, primitive belief, primitive projection, and there's a lot of fear as a result, and a lot of retreat from engagement, I think, for a lot of people. And it's really sad. And sometimes I cry a lot about it because I feel a lot of grief. I'm grieving for humanity right now. I really feel that. I'm grieving for humanity and it's all for me comes down to humanity's level of consciousness, our stage of awareness. Because it's so obvious, you know, that most people are kind of alligator stage. It's just how it is. And so, I'm not sure what the reorganization is going to look like. I don't know what's going to emerge from this chaos. Nobody knows.
ELISE: Yeah. No, I know. I just read, speaking of Wilbur, his book about truth and the post Trump world and trying to wrap my head around spiral dynamics and this hope that maybe as we see, Yes, the there's so much red and there's so much of that feudal primitive energy and there's so much, I would say green in the shadow. You mentioned my bias towards non hierarchy, actually really think we need order and that knowledge, wisdom, experience need to be revenerated in our culture. Of course, I love sort of the rise of expertise for people who might not otherwise have had an avenue. But it's terrifying, right, that most of us are learning history from TikTok influencers and, you know, being therapized by 22 year olds. So yes, I am craving the re emergence of A nested, holarchical, not a dominant suppression based hierarchy, of course, but order, right? a reverence for the systems and structures that ensure our electricity and access to roads and, you know, I'm not an anarchist.
CONNIE: Well, some of your terminology in this section, I would state as, we need the emergence of the noble elder archetype.
ELISE: Yes.
CONNIE: Because the wisdom and experience is only with elders. It's not with 22 year olds on TikTok. And, you know, the ageism in the culture is another place where that unconscious bias and projection has held people back by the millions and for generations in the media, the way elders are portrayed, in the workplace, everywhere in the healthcare system. So when I was in my late sixties and I was thinking about retiring from my clinical practice, I began looking for things to read about the unconscious shadow and aging and I couldn't find anything. There was not one book. There were lots of books about aging. And where to live, and how to find a mate, and how to do healthcare, and how to do finances, and all that stuff. But there was nothing about the unconscious psychology. And so I wrote The Inner Work of Age, Shifting from Role to Soul. Because it seems to me that we were missing this rite of passage to become an elder. And that's how I wrote the book, so that people can kind of walk through it, through the themes and the practices in the book, to become an elder. And I really believe that we need elders now to step forward, to bring their long view and engage with the crises now, the climate crisis, the democracy crisis, all the interconnected crises that we have that you were describing, like wanting to be sure the systems are in place, the food scarcity crisis, the housing scarcity crisis.
We need elders now, but that doesn't mean just older people. I mean, you can be 80 and not be an elder because again, it's a stage, not an age. It's a stage of development. It's a level of consciousness and elder awareness requires inner work. It doesn't happen when we get our Medicare card. So that's the connection here with the age book. And I think that there's a lot of intergenerational movements happening now in several social justice areas, which is really inspiring of elders working with youth. And bringing their experience and youth bringing their energy and enthusiasm and that's I think I've never seen that before really in my lifetime when I was a political activist in Berkeley, there were no elders, having our backs. Right. So I think that some of that is really hopeful now, but again, Without the inner work, the social justice work can be reactive, and angry, and not long term thinking, and you know, all kinds of stuff. So, we need our elders now. So to become an elder, we need to know how to do that inner work.
ELISE: Yeah, I'm hoping I can entice you to come back and do a whole episode on the inner work of age and that book and life review because I think particularly, in our culture where we're really missing the archetype of of older women, you know, I think we've long venerated older men but the older women, they're Largely missing from our culture in terms of visibility and I really want to go deep on that with you. I mean, not to exclude men, men are part of this too, but I'm very, I guess curious in some ways about what we've lost. By not having those archetypes present, although I feel like as you were saying, I do think there's an emergence. I think that there's and maybe it's just my own preference as I enter my second half of life and I'm looking for role models, but it does seem like we're starting to correct this or rebalance this or address this.
CONNIE: Yeah, I think in some circles that's true.
ELISE: Yeah.
CONNIE: I don't know if it's true in the larger mainstream culture.
ELISE: Probably not, but someone's got to go first.
CONNIE: Who can you name as an older woman who's a model for you right now? Is there someone?
ELISE:
I mean, I'm loving your work. I feel like Gloria Steinem seems to have endless energy. Same with Jane Fonda, Marianne Williamson.
CONNIE: Right.
ELISE: Obviously, we had Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and I'm frustrated that Ruth didn't retire
CONNIE: Yeah.
ELISE: when, I mean, I think we all are, and then I also understand why she was like, I have to endure. She was one of our only celebrities, visible elders, and why, you know, Dianne Feinstein didn't retire, etc. Nancy Pelosi, I mean, you can see where my politics probably are. I feel like there are some conservative women as well who are emergent.
CONNIE: You know, for me, I didn't have a single positive image of an elder in growing up, not one, not a positive grandparent or aunt or uncle, or it was known in my family that I could internalize that way and say to myself, Oh, I want to be like her when I grow up. There just wasn't. And I can remember, you know, on television, all the sexism and the contempt and the negativity toward women on TV and in the movies and stuff when I was growing up. It's not quite as bad now, but the anti aging messaging is just as bad now.
ELISE: yes.
CONNIE: I mean, around beauty and image. And it's creating a lot of suffering for people. I mean, I had people in my private practice who just really, really struggled with aging and lack of acceptance, lack of acceptance of the body and so on.
ELISE: I really, I hope you'll come back, I want to go deep. I mean, I sort of feel like, for me, like, a Rorsach test in culture was, Martha Stewart doing the cover of Sports Illustrated and my friends were so split between Celebrating this idea of like yes, like at 70 you can be a sex icon and then the people, I probably put myself in this camp, like no judgment towards Martha, But oh my god, when does this end like now we need to be sex icons? Like, no thanks.
CONNIE: Yeah. The continuation of objectification.
ELISE: Yeah. Yes, it's fascinating. I'm so, so grateful for your work and your mind and your books. And I hope you'll come back.
CONNIE: Thank you, Elise. Thank you for your support and for being so prepared for our conversation. I really appreciate it.
ELISE: Oh, my greatest pleasure.
I can’t recommend Connie’s work enough. I’m a mega fan, and I’ve listened to her in conversation on lots of other podcasts, and she’s just one of those people that can spin wisdom and she’s very careful, which I appreciate about where she feels like she has the knowledge to speak but I could really listen to her explain anything. And this is from Meeting the Shadow, which is the first book she did, where she wrote the introduction and did a compilation of really incredible essays and pieces from many of our greatest thinkers and in it she mentions this Carl Jung quote that you might have heard, from 1945, but this is where he said: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” But I would add, and I think Connie’s work attests to this, it might be hard, it might be disagreeable, it might be unpopular, but it’s so essential that we each do our own shadow work, our own piece of this cultural pie, otherwise it becomes an unbearable burden when our culture’s already going through so much. I’ll see you next time.
