Persona and Shadow: What is Destructive For Themselves And For Others

It is from early childhood that one feels compelled to build, piece by piece, the face of oneself that is presented to others—the relational mask, the persona. It is an attempt to affirm and give reality to the ideal image of oneself in order to feel accepted or significant. But the progressive identification with the persona implies a kind of twisting, a forcing of one aspect of oneself, which transforms into a forced, inauthentic identity.

Now, the traits that characterize the persona do not manage to exclude its opposite, what lies beneath the mask and what we do not know or do not want to know about ourselves, those contents of self-awareness that we reject and, by pushing them away from ourselves, project onto others: the shadow. The dark and destructive aspect of our being, which, the less we know it, the more it grows.

Realizing that the persona is only one incomplete aspect of oneself, and that it does not deserve to be inflated and filled with often narcissistic content, implies an awareness of the aspects of the shadow—the flip side of oneself, one's limitations, and shortcomings. And, therefore, of everything one will never be and that each frustration painfully reminds them of. This is why the integration of persona and shadow is achieved through a transformative self-assumption of one’s own shortcomings, destructiveness, and the discouragement of someone who is disillusioned, first and foremost, with themselves.

E2 is one of the Enneatypes that most identifies with a narcissistic expression of themselves and has the most difficulty recognizing their shadow. On the other hand, what appears in this character as spontaneity, brilliance, and originality is the opposite of the fixed mask and the destructiveness of the shadow.

The narcissistic structures of personality are marked by a sense of omnipotence. This also forms part of E2, but in this Enneatype, it is overcome by exhibitionism. According to Kohut, "the unlimited exhibitionism of the grandiose self is its insistence on being admired," while its omnipotence is "its insistence on the exercise of total control."

In the Sexual subtype, exhibitionism is a particularly destructive trait, both for the person themselves and for the emotionally significant others, as it dirties precisely the field that interests them the most: emotional exchange. Their thirst to be liked in order to be loved, the desire to feel intensely desired, tends to be insatiable. With this, the Sexual 2, who loudly declares their love, risks destroying precisely love and the romantic relationship.

Let us read the testimony of a man belonging to this subtype:

"It’s easy to be passionate in fantasies, and one becomes dispassionate with equal ease. It’s obvious to be accepted by others with this tendency to show that you are well and, apparently, to offer yourself. The deceit, which has been a true existential disaster, has served me to survive. Letting others believe that with me they had a jewel in their hands. I have spent an enormous amount of energy, even financially, to maintain the deceit. I’ve moved houses many times, changed women and jobs; I’ve had irreparable losses and damaged my health, in a continuous escape from my shadow. I haven’t been conscious of most of my crises, nor of the fact that they coincided with feeling abandoned. Crises that didn’t last long; I had very low tolerance for frustrations: I reacted with more deceit, in the form of ‘woman-sex’ to seduce, and possibly to subjugate. When I began to realize my limits, I found myself passionate and brutal. From ‘I can do everything’ to ‘I can do nothing’ there’s a very subtle membrane. The wounds in my body and soul manifested all at once. I don’t see myself as a compulsive seducer, in the sense that I’ve always sought a preorgasmic tone in everything; but I do see myself as a victim of myself."

— Anonymous

Too Proud to Recognize Receiving Love

Too proud to recognize that they receive love or feel they receive enough for their needs, the Sexual 2 secretly disqualifies others. This disqualification from a position of superiority comes from their taboo against feeling envy. Instead, it is easy for them to feel envied. One could say that they hand over to others the responsibility of feeling envy and try to direct it toward themselves, with the added advantage of feeling proud of the admiration they receive.

In a romantic relationship, they will tend, more or less subtly, to infantilize or make the relationship irresponsible. Perhaps because they don’t know how to free themselves from

that infantile desire for a blessed intimacy with the mother, which they will tend to reproduce, inverted, in the romantic relationship. Or to block the subterranean feeling of unreliability and danger that they vaguely perceive in relation to themselves: "If I love you, beware of yourself." Or to flaunt a certain power in the relationship.

If they feel that their superiority is slipping away, they will attack the bond they have passionately contributed to creating. And in the end, this person who seemed so warm, generous, and passionate becomes cold with hysterical indifference when they risk feeling defeated by loss or by the simple and human limitation of having to face emotionally threatening situations.

The more strategic they are in creating an intimate relationship, the less they are in areas of life that require other resources.

In summary, in the persona / shadow polarity, this character, who seems boastful, in fact hides timidity. They seem quite self-confident, but secretly tremble with fear about the credibility of the representation they stage, with the anxiety of being defeated by vulnerability and insecurity.

However, it must be considered that not only is their sense of security false, but also their sense of insecurity. Here, they do not simply accept their limits; rather, they devalue themselves in a kind of self-damnation: "I’m worth nothing... I don’t know anything... others are better than me." Then it happens that they no longer know what to think, what to feel, or what they want. While they persist in this feeling of impotence, they may become frankly dependent on others or retreat into the melancholy of feeling alone, hopeless, abandoned.

Following the persona / shadow polarity, they seem original and creative, but this will be the unnatural result of a constant effort to distinguish themselves. They seem independent, yet they depend greatly on the impression they make on others. They seem passionate, but are frozen inside or don’t know what they really feel. They seem spontaneous, but are very constructed. They seem generous and caring, yet hide an aggressive appropriation and unsuspected resentment, feeling deep down tremendous needs for love and reaffirmation that compensate for the difficulty of feeling, as they feel cold, empty, and incapable of giving love, as narrated in the following autobiographical fragment:

"I don’t know what angel has sheltered me under their wings, because the life I’ve led could have easily destroyed me. I seem to have lived a strange mixture of passion and coldness, emotional excess alternated with a kind of crust around my heart that, as it formed, didn’t allow me to reach anyone, not even myself. When I saw my siblings mistreated or felt humiliated, I boiled with rage, but then this anger would be imprisoned in a hard shell and, beyond a certain limit, I felt nothing more. The same when I felt, beyond the pain, the anger of abandonment. I stripped myself of emotions, pretending a superiority I didn’t perceive the

falseness of through a ‘I don’t need.’ When I felt this state of hysterical indifference, for which at the time I couldn’t find a reason, I didn’t feel authentic or believable, and that made my dryness worse. Then, this feeling would dissolve, and I would feel pain and joy again. However, the fear of expressing my need for love and support remained; I feared that if I started, I wouldn’t stop, and I would be swallowed by the vortex of mortal impotence. Now, after the last SAT, I feel more aware of my most authentic needs, and the capacity to ask for help is emerging."

— Alba Chartroux