The Shadow

We start our lives with our psyche "Whole" but as we encounter life and its challenges and cultural demands we start to split our "Self" by developing our ego through our "persona", this is the side of our personality which we wish to portray to the people around us. However, for every positive characteristic there is a dark side - the "shadow", this is the unwanted even despised part of our personality that we cannot deal with on a conscious level so we push it into the depths of our "personal unconscious". Ok, so what if I have a dark side so long as it is buried in my unconscious who cares?

It isn't so simple because the material making up the shadow has energy/libido and when it accumulates more energy than the ego can deal with it erupts usually in a rage or unpredictable behavior or sometimes even depression. The shadow is an autonomous body within our psychic makeup and its behavior is wholly unpredictable. Let me give you an example: Mr Jones is a day trader who trades breakouts on the S&P e-mini, he has recently modified his system and he is anxiously testing it on the market with real money. The system requires extreme patience to pin-point its entry with 5 green flags required to enter a trade. Mr Jones has anxiously watched the market all day waiting for a confluence of signals to meet the required entry signal. Nothing happened, the day has frustratingly passed with no trades being signaled, Jones has had to sit on his hands all day showing tremendous restraint and respect for his new system all the time itching to hit the trade button. Mr Jones gets home from his day at the office feeling a little drained, but also pretty proud of himself for withstanding all the temptations and being true to his system. He walks through the front door and his young kids run to greet him. He puts his briefcase down and kisses his wife then she says, "Honey can you do Jordan's math homework with him a little later", like a thunderbolt out of the blue and totally unexpected, Jones goes ballistic he has a massive argument with his wife shouting how selfish and demanding she is. LOL - does this sound familiar.

What has just happened is Jones failed to acknowledge the unconscious shadow material that was built up during his day. As I stated in the beginning we start our life "Whole" and then due to the stresses and strains of our personal development in our early years our psyche undergoes many challenges splitting into ego and shadow, but this isn't how things stay forever. Unfortunately for some it does stay split and equilibrium becomes more distorted, but for the most of us and I believe even more so for traders, as we grow older we start working intensely on our own personal development. We start trying to become whole through the Jungian process of individuation or Nietzsche's process of Ubermensch:

"Wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own their own shadow" - Carl Jung.

If you have been paying attention, the shadow doesn't just develop from bad characteristics on their own. Nature works with opposing forces, night and day, life and death, creation and destruction, male and female, up and down. With this in mind even when we do good things, stuff that we bring to consciousness as part of our ego persona we are at the same time creating negative energy that is being deposited into our shadow. As the ego and the shadow come from the same source, you cannot have one without the other. The billion dollar question is how do we deal with this material so that it no longer carries the autonomous charge of a walking time bomb, ready to embarrass us or damage our reputations.

In order for us to live the life we wish for, it is incumbent upon us to make known to ourselves the sides of our personality that we don't like. By acknowledging the shadow we bring to consciousness and diffuse this potent energy; what is extremely interesting is that the unconscious cannot tell the difference between symbolic or real behavior. In the case of Mr Jones a 1-5 minute symbolic ceremony is probably all that is needed to deal with the trading days negative shadow energy.


Michael Berman, Ph.D.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together