You know that person who has it all together, who is successful by all external standards, and who is masterful at navigating their job or their family life, or both? That person who is always perfect? That person is in trouble. How do I know? I’ve been that person, and if you’re reading this, maybe you have been, too.
Today, I want to uncover the downside of being this person, and I want to show you exactly how to save yourself from this fate. You’ve been paying the price for a strong persona, and I just don’t want you to pay it anymore.
What Is the Persona?
The persona is the mask we wear for the world and for ourselves. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist whose ideas I keep returning to in my work, said that the persona is what we think we are and what the world thinks we are, but ultimately we are not.
The persona comes about through a process of identity development that starts all the way in childhood and goes all the way up to midlife. In that time period, so many influences come to us: our parents teach us how to be in the world, our broader family, our friends, community, society, culture, what we see in media — all of them send us messages about what’s a good way to be in the world and what’s a not so good way to be in the world. And so we develop this way of being that we believe will be the best and most adaptive version to help us succeed in whatever environment we grew up in.
For me, when I was growing up, I felt very capable from a young age — almost extraordinarily capable. I thought I could get whatever I set my eyes on, and I felt this sense of knowing from within that I could achieve anything I wanted. While I think initially that was just me connecting to my own spiritual power, a power that is present in all of us, it got morphed and nourished as my family and broader society came into the picture.
I wasn’t born into a particularly wealthy family. My parents had humble jobs and we made just enough to get by. My grandparents were refugees displaced during the India-Pakistan partition, and they settled in northern India with nothing to their name. Because of this, my family had no generational wealth. I mostly wore hand-me-down clothes growing up, and we were asked to keep our needs small in order to survive whatever crisis the family might next have to endure. And yet, amid all this, I still had that spark of knowing: I am meant for more. Looking back, I feel that was the voice of my higher self.
But that connection didn’t stay pure for too long. As I started to do really well in school, my family would tell me that I was the smart one, the intelligent one, the one who would redeem the family economically. They applauded every achievement, and I started to think of myself as this high-achieving person who had to win accolade after accolade and keep garnering that attention. The world around me started to confirm these beliefs. I got into the best undergraduate college for business in Delhi, and then years later, I attended an Ivy League university for business school in the US. That which started as my parents’ encouragement of my natural proclivities toward academic success turned into something I simply had to be, and became a never-ending cycle of achievement.
I feel I’m in the grip of this persona even today. The grip has lessened, but it hasn’t gone away. I recently wrapped up a fifteen-year corporate career and I’m finally fully devoted to psychology and personal development, doing the thing that has mattered to me most. And you’d think that would bring a wave of relief, and it absolutely did, but it also exposed my attachment to this high-achieving persona. When I was recently at a social event and somebody asked me what I did for work, I found myself fumbling and not knowing what to say. I found myself referring to things I used to do in an attempt to maintain the persona, saying phrases like, “Now I just go to school. Now I’m just a mother. Now I just work on my creative projects.” All these ways of diminishing my own passions and successes, only because they didn’t fit the persona I had come to think of as me. I actually felt pretty sad after that event, because I’ve been doing personal work for a long time, and it showed me I still have a long way to go.
The Shadow That Grows Alongside It
The downside of a strong persona, where the world sees you as one way for so many years, is that you have an equally strong shadow.
While the persona is the mask we wear for the world because it brings us safety, security, belongingness, and others’ approval, the shadow is everything we push behind us in order to sustain that mask. Those parts of us become unconscious — to ourselves and to others. We don’t know it, but we are constantly hiding and suppressing different ways of being in order to present ourselves in this one particular way. You can think of the persona and the shadow as a polarity that exists within our psychology, one that helps us move forward and adapt to life. But when one side gets really strong, the two cannot work in harmony. The other side tends to gain enormous energy while it is still suppressed beneath the surface. Think of it as a volcano burning and accumulating pressure, getting ready to explode.
I’ve noticed four distinct states that I have experienced as my shadow came to the surface while I was so busy building the ultimate high-achieving woman persona.
The first is simply exhaustion. It takes a lot of energy to always be doing, to always be chasing after the next thing that will make you feel good, while ignoring your need for rest, for sleep, for downtime where you let go and don’t do something because it is going to add to your list of achievements. When I think of exhaustion, I think about the time I was in college juggling my CPA licensure classes, dance practices on my dance team, and my regular dance training at the studio. There were days I would start at six AM, come back late at night full of glitter and makeup from competing in dance competitions, bone tired — and yet I would get up at six AM and do the same thing all over again. Instead of making a real choice about what I could or couldn’t handle in that particular season of life, I just chose to do it all.
Later on, the exhaustion would give way to anxiety, because now I would be working in places where people had expectations of me, and I would keep thinking that with the life I had set up, I just wouldn’t be able to keep up. I kept up a lot longer than you would think. But for much of that time, I carried the persistent fear that I was an imposter and would be found out — that this perfect persona of having so many interests while also doing well at work would collapse.
The third form of expression, which I didn’t experience as much personally, looks a lot like depression. It is that feeling of hopelessness where you’ve tried and strived so hard to build a life that you thought would give you what you wanted, and instead it is totally unfulfilling and does not bring you joy. You hate living the life you have built, and it creates this sense of sadness, hopelessness, burnout.
The fourth way the shadow might erupt is through addiction, and this is probably the most powerful way the shadow shows itself.
Addiction as the Shadow’s Loudest Voice
Jung regarded all addictions as a low-level cry for wholeness. He came up with the phrase spiritus contra spiritum — spirit against spirit — because the word for alcohol in Latin is the same word used for the highest spiritual experience. What he meant is that addiction is fundamentally the shadow desiring to express itself so you can feel whole and united with the deeper consciousness that all of us are made of. It is not a moral failure. It is a misdirected search for something real.
Jung’s ideas are said to have influenced Bill Wilson, one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. In a letter Wilson wrote to Jung years later, he described how Jung’s honest diagnosis of a patient named Roland H. — that Roland was beyond the help of medicine alone and needed a genuine spiritual conversion — had eventually set in motion the entire chain of transmission that led to AA’s founding. Jung replied that Roland’s craving for alcohol was, in his view, “the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness.” Only spirit, Jung believed, could counter spirit. Only a genuine encounter with something larger than the ego could displace the compulsive reaching for transcendence through the wrong vessel.
I was reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s most recent book, All the Way to the River, recently, and I found a passage that I think explains how oblivious we can be to our own shadow. This book is a tell-all memoir where Gilbert talks about her partner Rayya’s addiction that was simmering beneath the surface of her otherwise very strong and very bold personality. Rayya was the kind of person who would walk into a room and instantly pull it together, light it up. She was strong, confident, and almost always seemed to command control. But beneath the surface, she was struggling with tremendous pain from past trauma that she could never fully confront. And she never really got to let her shadow self come out, which is why her addiction got so bad and ultimately led to her death.
Gilbert writes, on page 141 of the book, after reading Rayya’s private journals: “Reading Rayya’s journals today and comparing her secret pain with the mighty persona she presented in public, I can see that she did not wish to admit powerlessness to anyone, not even to the God of her own understanding.”
And Gilbert is no stranger to this herself. The book also talks about her own struggles with love and sex addiction, where she used people to meet her own needs for wholeness. On one hand, we have known her as the enlightened, wise, spiritually generous author of Eat, Pray, Love. But beneath the surface, and without her full awareness, she was love-bombing and using money and other things to manipulate people into being with her. If you’re having trouble reconciling both of these people’s personas with their shadow behavior, that is precisely the point. The shadow is so unacceptable to us, so shameful, that we’d rather not acknowledge it even to ourselves. And addiction is one of the ways the shadow compensates for this one-sided life we’ve been living.
So what was my addiction? My addiction was to achievement. I was focused on acquiring more and more accolades in order to feel good, in order to feel whole, but that wholeness never arrived. In fact, the more I went after it, the more the gap between how I thought I would feel and how I actually felt kept growing. Marion Woodman, the Jungian analyst who spent years working with women and wrote about this in her book Addiction to Perfection, said that this form of ambition is not healthy ambition. It is a compulsion, a way of managing our intolerable relationship with our own ordinariness. That hits hard even as I write it, because that’s exactly what I was doing. I was so afraid of being ordinary. I would take on so many things that at some point I had to tell my husband, “Next time I come to you and say I found this course, this workshop, this group — you look me in the eye and tell me I can’t. I’m already at capacity.” And I would still hate him for doing that, even though I’m the one who asked for his help, because that’s exactly how addiction works. You think that the next hit will be better, will be the final key to feeling whole. But that wholeness needs to come from within.
Know It, Name It, Claim It
So now that you know the different ways the shadow can erupt — and again, these are examples from my own life, my own personal experience, and maybe you can relate to them too — we come to the bigger question: how do we release the steam of this built-up shadow and start to soften our edges so these things don’t happen to us?
I think it all starts with admitting these shadow qualities to ourselves. I cannot tell you how much of a release I feel every time I journal and I’m able to pinpoint exactly what has been living in my shadow: what got triggered in me, how I’m really feeling, whether I’m exhausted or anxious or nervous or sad or hopeless or just out of control. Being able to name it takes some power away from the shadow. We can breathe and accept that this is a part of us.
And then we can further reduce this charge by taking something that has been in hiding — something so incompatible with our idea of ourselves, so shameful — and sharing it with someone. Gilbert talks about this in her own recovery process, and I find this passage on page 136 of the book to be one of the most quietly radical things I’ve read in a long time. She writes: “One of my best friends in the program and I exchange phone calls a few times a week that always begin this way: ‘Okay, sis, here’s the one thing I don’t want anyone to know today.’ Because that’s how you stay sober. You have got to let somebody know the things you don’t want anybody to know. Otherwise, your shadow self will keep running the show from the darkest corners of your mind, growing ever stronger in the darkness, poised for any opportunity to strike and take you down once more.”
I’ve experienced this. When there’s something you’ve been harboring inside for a long time, and you finally become aware of it, and you share it with a dear friend, somebody who will hold even the worst ideas about you in compassion — that alone can lessen the charge of the shadow.
Gilbert took this a step further by attending recovery groups as a public figure, fully aware that this could damage the public image she had built for years. And she traded that risk for the possibility of actually getting better, actually transcending her addictions to find a new and complete sense of wholeness. And by writing this entire book in which she openly acknowledges her partner’s addiction and her own, she is taking nearly all the power away from the shadow by claiming it as a part of herself.
But we have to be careful that vulnerability doesn’t become yet another performance of the persona. When I did my own shadow work after that social gathering where I didn’t have a flashy company name to throw around, I realized that my sadness that day was essentially a fear of being seen as ordinary. And as I was writing about it to speak out loud, I caught myself thinking, “Oh, should I really say this? That will make me sound like an absolute jerk.” This is precisely the sneaky act of the ego, where it takes our attempt to release the shadow and replaces it with something that actually builds the persona even further. Our ego is like, “Hold on. Don’t reveal that. But if you’re revealing it, let me at least make something out of it.” Really, we have to be okay with people thinking the worst of us if we are going to release ourselves from the grip of the shadow. Because if the source of our power is our higher self, then what do we really have to worry about? I am just as ordinary and just as extraordinary as everyone else. We are all the same.
If I had to crystallize this process of doing shadow work into something you can remember, something I can remember because this work is ongoing for me too, I would say: know it, name it, claim it. First, we have to become aware, because the shadow has been lurking beneath the surface. Then we have to name what is in our shadow, because the shadow can show up as amorphous feelings or triggers and we don’t even know what is living there. And finally, after we’ve named it, we have to own it as a part of ourselves. We can’t discard it like trash. This is our trash. And as with any pile of trash, sometimes there are hidden gems. By discarding this side of us entirely, we lose access to those gems.
So let this be your invitation to take and embrace your shadow, no matter what you find there, and to stop paying the price of this carefully crafted image you have built over the years. It will be the best inner work you’ve ever done.
