interviews

Tom Daly: On the Shadow

Tom Daly is a therapist, writer, a master teacher and personal coach, as well as a nationally respected elder in men’s soul work. He is the founder and Director of The Living Arts Foundation through which he teaches The Inner King Training and The Inner Sovereign Training. These cutting edge programs initiate participants into "their greatest and most compassionate Selves." He is author of "Wildmen at the Border".

Tammie: What led you to do the transformational work you do with men ?

Tom Daly: My work with men began as a personal response to my own feelings of uncertainty about what it is to be a man and a father in this culture. In the late sixties and early seventies, I wanted support in being a single father and I didn’t want to depend on women as I had for most of my life. I started my first men’s group through a local free school in 1971. I have both been in and have led men’s groups continuously since that time.

My passion for trying to understand my own growth process led me to working and learning together with thousands of other men. This work has been one of the great joys of my life.

Tammie: In a 1995 interview, you shared that the common thread throughout your work addresses the shadow at some level. What is the shadow, and how is it significant? Why should we embrace it?

Tom Daly: Shadow is all the parts of ourselves that we don’t identify as our everyday persona, the latent, marginalized, denied, and unclaimed parts. We all come into this world with incredible potential. As we grow, some of these gifts are put into what Robert Bly has called "the shadow bag we drag behind us." For example, we may have been punished for showing our anger, or shamed for our tears, or rejected for showing our natural exuberance. So we put anger, compassion, and exuberance into the bag. We use a lot of energy to hide them and keep them from coming out. Many of our gifts are forgotten, suppressed, left undeveloped, or projected onto other people, individually and collectively.

My belief is that everything we’ve put into shadow is a potential treasure. We often spend lots of time and energy keeping the shadow bag from spilling over and this keeps us from living our lives fully. When we can bring parts out of our bag safely, play with the energies we have locked up and enjoy ourselves in the process, our shadows become a gold mine of creative, useful energy. The personal cost of not owning shadow shows up as alcoholism and drug addiction, depression, family violence, workaholism, "internet-ism", pornography, and countless other dysfunctional patterns.

The social and collective cost of not owning our shadow is equally devastating. By projecting our disowned parts onto others, we make possible the great social "isms" that wrack our world. I believe that racism, sexism, class-ism, materialism, terrorism, and nationalism are the direct result of un-owned shadow.

I believe that by personally owning that which we project and hold in shadow, we can make powerful steps toward health, personally and collectively.

Tammie: From your perspective, why are we so fragmented today?

Tom Daly: While I don’t doubt that we are very fragmented in some important ways I want to discuss briefly the assertion by some that we are more fragmented today than our ancestors were. We have such a tendency to romanticize our ancestors by thinking they lived in a more idyllic age when humans were more connected to nature and more connected in communities. Because we now have a longing to connect more with the natural world and the capacity to imagine such a time, we project that possibility on to our collective past. I believe that it is possible that there are more people living today who feel more connected than there ever were in the past. We certainly are more interconnected globally than ever before. I am not sure that living a less complicated life and closer to the earth equates with living a less fragmented life.

Clearly we are more focused on our connections and responses to other humans than our ancestors were. We now depend more on other humans than we do on the wilderness or the farm for our survival and that is a direction that we as a species have been moving toward for hundreds of years. There is no doubt that the process of urbanization has accelerated tremendously in the last century. Surely this disconnection from the natural cycles of nature adds dramatically to our feelings of being lost and alienated. But what in us has driven this process and what meaning it has for us as a species is something perhaps we can only discover by living the questions.

Many of us who are willing to feel the disconnection from the sacred wildness, sense it as a deep grief. And that very process brings me back into connection. Seemingly that is not a direction that most people want to go willingly. We try very hard not to feel the pain of the suffering around us. We want to hide from the fact that we are the cause of so much suffering. In fact it seems that the more we see and hear about suffering the stronger our desire becomes to avoid it, deny it, suppress it, blame others, and harden ourselves. Essentially we put grief into shadow.

How we got to this place has been the subject of countless books and articles. And the books about how counter this trend are now filling the book shelves, hundreds of titles with themes like: how to live more simply, how to live with soul, how to be happier, and how to find the path to personal meaning, how to reconnect with our bodies and the earth. What I haven’t seen is a serious inquiry into what is it about us as species that has brought us to this point. Something is driving us to become more and more self-conscious both individually and collectively and at the same time has made us more insensitive to the world around us.

We seem to find it impossible to reduce our birth rate by conscious choice, and that alone makes it very likely that we will exterminate other species and ultimately make life very difficult for the vast majority of our own species in the near future.

The relatively new field of evolutionary psychology suggests that we perhaps we are a the mercy of our genes. The prime directive of the genetic code is "reproduce...get the DNA into the next generation anyway possible and try by whatever means possible to protect that genetic investment." This is a bit more ruthless than most of us want to see ourselves and certainly doesn’t fit our model of humans as conscious masters of our own fate. Perhaps our shadow, our arrogant thoughts of ourselves as the most highly evolved species, is what fosters our disconnection and alienation. Whether we will acknowledge our arrogance and come back to a deeper and more soulful connection with our world is an important question of our times.

Tammie: You’ve said that "a lot of the pain and the dis-ease that we experience in our lives comes from our lack of support." In what ways do you see us most effectively healing from this lack.

Tom Daly: It is my belief that much of the pain and dis-ease we experience in our lives comes directly from the disconnection from the non-human natural world that I spoke of in the previous question. This pain is heightened by a lack of support that is symptomatic of our culture. We currently have the idea that we can deny and hide from that which causes us pain. That belief makes it very difficult to question ourselves at a deep level. We are taught that we are responsible for our own pain and that it is up to us to fix ourselves by taking drugs (both legal and illegal), working harder, eating more, taking exotic vacations, and generally doing anything but looking at the source of the pain.

One very deep paradox in this is that vast numbers of us now make our livings by treating the symptoms of stressful modern society. If people were healthier and were blessed just for being alive then we perhaps we wouldn’t need the prozac and cocaine, the big new car, the trip to Bali, the therapy sessions, the vitamins, the cosmetic surgery, and the self-help books. I often reflect on how much my own work depends on other people’s pain and dissatisfaction with life.

As Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher, said, "You can never get enough of what you don’t really need" . We will never get satisfaction in the ways we are trying to get it. What I believe is missing in the equation of modern life is what we most desire...love ...support...blessing...being seen and heard and taken seriously.

My answer to the question of how to deal with the pain created by living in this society is to change our ideas about how to get and give love and support. I believe that if we all got the love and support we both need and deserve, many of our problems would evaporate. And with them, as I suggested above, so might some of our biggest industries. What keeps this economy growing is the creation of artificial need. If we lived lives more filled with love, the pain would diminish, but the engine that drives our economy would also diminish. There are many forces that keep that engine going. Love doesn’t fit in the modern economic equation. A shift to an economy of love and compassion would require a massive "birth-quake" that you have described.

I teach a number of processes that help people feel more blessed for just being and that has been the focus of my work for the past decade. Paradoxically when people feel blessed and supported they often feel more grief about the way the world is going. So in the short run their pain increases.

Part of the process I teach is that when we feel the pain, we can also transform our resistance to it. When the resistance to whatever is causing the pain is diminished, the pain is first more manageable and then becomes something else, often the experience of love and connection. Accepting this particular paradox is, to me, an important part of becoming an adult.

When we feel our pain and acknowledge it, the healing can begin. When we can counter the tendency to deny it and suppress it and be with others who feel it, when we can honor it and let others know when we sense it in them, when we can remember grief is something we must share, then we deepen the connections between us and we can then feel the blessing of it.

I am not sure why we came to be so afraid of grief, but I believe it has to do with our forgetting that grief is an expression of love. When we label it as pain, we try to avoid it and that sends it into shadow. The way to bring it out of shadow is to feel our grief together and remember it as love and connection.

Many of our deepest wounds can become gifts when we can allow ourselves drop into pain knowing that we are supported and blessed in the process of going there. Obviously if we are shamed for our tears and view them as a sign of weakness then we are not going to be willing to go to that place.

For me, men’s work has been a long and difficult process of creating a safe place for men’s grief and tears, and ultimately for love and compassion.

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