Soulmate and Your Shadow Self For Personal Growth

I was talking to a friend the other day about soulmates and our shadow self.  Our conversation lasted for hours.  Finally, I asked her if she would be willing to write and article and share her experience. The following is her experience with soulmate and the shadow self.

Soulmate Journey

If I knew then what I know now, would I change anything? I still can’t answer that question. The soul-aching devastation I felt when it was over, I wouldn’t even wish on the person who stole my car in 1996 while I was at a Lenny Kravitz concert. It is the kind of pain I still can’t articulate because it has warped my mind a little. We were in love, this man and me, and then it was just me – with an 85-pound chocolate lab licking the salty tears from my perpetually dejected face. What a difference two years makes.

He uttered the words first: you are my soulmate. He told his kids this. He told his mother this. No one had ever said that to me. I have been in love and I am pretty sure I have been loved, but for him to come right out and say it was almost embarrassing. For him to say it so early and often, almost felt like a jinx. I had seen and read Eat, Pray, Love and the soul mates don’t fair very well in that story.

As I saw it then, this lovely man was the person who would complete me. We were two halves who would merge into one love-soaked superhuman and then equally divide into two fully-formed, compassionate, thoughtful and thankful human beings. It’s kind of like of what happens during the teleportation scenes in The Fly, only with better results.

What I have discovered since the relationship came to an end is that he held a life-sized mirror up to me and it reflected my shadow self. Just like the nebulous shapes we cast upon the sidewalk on sunny days, our own shadow selves mostly go unnoticed. However, what we don’t observe in our own shadow may become very clear in another’s.

There are endless variations on this theory. In my case, my shadow has been attracting what I put out into the universe. When I look back at the relationships I have chosen, they each represent how I was feeling on the inside. I allowed these relationships to have perch in my life for a time, and I must have believed in their worthiness in one way or another. Ultimately, I have been accepting the love I think I deserve.

My last relationship is the one that made me aware of the mirror. I have told people that I just wanted a good relationship, not an advanced degree in psychology. But once I started delving into the theory of the shadow self, I couldn’t stop reading about it. I discovered that the man I loved had opened up the dark side of me. There were things I needed to accept about myself: fears, insecurities and my tendency to bury unpleasant memories. He exposed these things all in the name of love. I tried to blame him for the fractures in our relationship brought on by his unceasing projecting and deflecting. I have since realized that what I was seeing – and despising – in him, were qualities that I myself possessed.

In what turned out to be the cruelest lesson of my life, he showed me what is holding me back. I have never had a good relationship with my father. I don’t dwell on it and I certainly don’t talk about it very often. But the demise of this relationship brought forth the kind of memories that made me wonder why I had never sought therapy or at least told my father exactly how I feel about his mistreatment of my mother and me.

The mirror was in full force on the day my boyfriend picked up the puppy he gave me as a gift and angrily threw her out onto the front porch because she didn’t go outside when he told her to. She wasn’t hurt but he had never spent one minute training her. This aggressive act sent me and the puppy to the bedroom for the rest of the day without another word to him. His overreaction reminded me of my father’s angry outbursts with family pets and family humans. And just as I never confronted my father, I never confronted my boyfriend about the incident. I stayed small and didn’t use my voice.

That first time the mirror appeared, I dismissed it almost instantly. But the longer I stayed with the man who placed it in front of me, the more I got comfortable with looking at what was hiding in my shadow self. Excitement begin to build over what I would learn next. Although I’m still dissecting my time with him, here is what the mirror has revealed to me:

• My casual use of alcohol as a crutch is a destructive habit and an outright addiction
• My inability to stand up for myself and confront others in a healthy and meaningful way
• My fear of money and success
• My reliance on looking pretty as a means for attracting others
• My relationships with old friends holds me back
• My tendency to latch on to what I see as the potential of the man, and not the man himself

When I talk to my soulmate again, I will thank him. I will tell him that he didn’t save me, but the mirror he held up showed me how to save myself. Those first reflections were like those you see in a circus fun house: distorted and mind-bending. But my shadow is becoming clearer to me. Every day I am able to perceive a little more of my own beauty and self-worth. So, no, if I could change anything, I wouldn’t.