How to Meet Your Monster: When You Reclaim What You Hate, Life Gets Good

There’s a reason you’re frustrated. You’re not living up to your potential. Because you’re afraid of it. Because you know you’re harboring a monster.

You’re a responsible adult, a good citizen, and a conscientious motorist who stays between the lines, just like you do with your crayons. For everyone’s protection, you relegate your more monstrous qualities to your “shadow,” where you hope they can’t do any damage.

In Jungian psychology, the shadow is the unconscious purgatory where you attempt to hide all the traits that conflict with your idealized image of yourself. To banish certain qualities of your psyche does not neutralize them or make them go away. Quite the contrary. Much like your literal shadow, your Jungian shadow has a tendency to follow you around no matter how hard you try to outrun it.

There is tremendous, awesome, sexy potential hidden in your shadow — hidden, most of all, from yourself. (The rest of us aren’t so easily fooled. We have some hypotheses about why you’re frustrated, even if we’re too shy to share them with you.)

When you reclaim your shadow material, you squeeze yourself some juice. It’s the most nourishing and effective way to deal with your pervasive sense of frustration, which doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Perhaps it’ll be easier if we give the shadow a more specific identity. Let’s call it your monster. You can give your monster a name, maybe Milton, Marcia, or Sarah with an “h.” Your monster embodies everything about yourself you fear, hate, or try to hide.

Here’s how to make friends with your monster.

Tail your monster

To understand your monster, go Sherlock Holmes on your psyche and your moment-to-moment experience. Through mindfulness meditation and other, perhaps more esoteric modes of self-inquiry, notice how you really respond to various stimuli, sensations, and experiences.

Snorkel beneath the layers of BS and forget what you’re supposed to be into. Notice, especially, what pisses you off. This is a huge green light on the road to owning your monstrousness.

Get intimate with your monster

Slow-dance with the beast. Feel its breath on your neck, its claws lightly scratching your back, and the way its feet shuffle clumsily as it tries to find its footing. Your monster is shy and awkward because it’s out of practice.

It might resent you for not letting it out to play. That’s okay. You’re working on that. And it’s okay if you don’t fully understand your monster — it’s a weird beautiful mystery that craves not to be understood, but to be perceived, beheld, and appreciated.

What you’ll probably find, as you get to know your monster, is that it’s not so monstrous after all. There are scary monsters, and there are silly monsters. Yours is probably more ridiculous than anything else. And that’s good. It’s not unhealthy to laugh.

The things you really love are probably weird, not evil. Don’t let anyone convince you to confuse the two.

Make your monster your own

Invite your monster to lunch. Make it feel welcome. Make room for your monster in the way you think about yourself, the way you behave, and especially the way you relate to others.

Finally! You can be the monster you’ve always longed to be.

When you have a healthy relationship with your monster, you’ll carry yourself with more compassion and less harsh judgment. And you can make friends with other people’s monsters, as well.

As you get more comfortable with your monster, you will feel more peaceful. You’ll become more productive. You and your monster will finish each other’s sentences. Your monster will get to work in helping you understand, and get, what you really, actually want in life. Your sex life, your creative work, and your sundry spiritual practices will take on exciting new dimensions you never anticipated.

Make peace with your monster

Your monster is strong, sexy, and powerful. A trusting and intimate relationship with your monster is a creative goldmine, a bulwark against self-doubt, and a way to become a better leader, lover, and friend.

Your monster will protect you, empower you, and make you a damned good cup of coffee. As long as you let it know it is loved, in all its sexy, smelly, ridiculous monstrousness, it will love you thrice over in return.

Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your monster riding shotgun. Crank up Ride the Lightning and head for the horizon.