“Never meet your heroes.” Everyone’s heard it. I don’t think it’s about them at all. It’s about what you gave them.
Jungians call it the golden shadow. So what is the golden shadow? It’s the good in you that you’ve buried, and then see shining in other people. Here’s my twist, though: I don’t think there’s any gold in the shadow. A shadow, by definition, is just where there’s a lack of light.
Let’s take it through three levels: admiration, envy, and the one place you can’t lie to yourself… your dreams. (With thanks to a punk band and a very questionable haircut.)
Never meet your heroes
Jung said the shadow is the part of you that you’ve pushed out of sight. Most people think that’s just the dark stuff: the anger, the jealousy.
You don’t only bury the bad stuff, though. You bury the good stuff too. The parts of you that got told to tone it down. Too loud. Too much. Showing off. Who do you think you are?
The people who came after Jung gave that buried good stuff a name: the golden shadow.
Level one: admiration
I love looking at where words come from. It’s like watching the collective unconscious grow.
Admire comes from the Latin admirari, which means to look at something with wonder, the way a child looks at things. The word mirror comes from the same root.
So when you admire someone, you’re looking in a mirror. You’re just not seeing that wonder in yourself yet.
My hero, and a very flat mohawk
For me, that admiration came from Rancid and NOFX, my two favourite punk bands ever. They put out a split album where they played each other’s songs, and I listened to that CD every single day on the way to school. I bloody loved it.
It wasn’t just the music. It was the punk idea behind it: you can build something yourself, from scratch. You don’t need the mainstream. You can be yourself and make it happen. I wanted to be in a band and do exactly that.
A few years ago Rancid came to play London, the first time I’d seen them since 2007. In the build-up I completely immersed myself. Spotify told me I was in the top 0.01% of their listeners. I started playing bass again and learnt every bassline from the first album to the last, in order. I even shaved my hair into a mohawk. (My wife said I was turning back into a teenager. I didn’t even put it up! It was a flat one.) It felt good to be living in that again.
Here’s the point. Tim Armstrong, Rancid’s frontman, didn’t give me anything. I recognised something in him. He woke up something that was already mine.
Try this: think of someone you really admire and write down the trait. Not their name, just the trait. For me it was being yourself, going through hardship, coming out the other side, building something of your own.
You never admired them. You recognised yourself.
Level two: envy
Admiration is the nice, polite version. There’s a more honest one.
Envy comes from the Latin invidere, to look upon someone with ill will. It’s where “the evil eye” comes from. Admiration is looking with wonder. Envy is looking with ill will. Both are just looking, at the same thing. The only difference is your intention.
Think about the people you grew up with. One of them starts doing really well. They start becoming more themselves, doing the thing they always said they’d do. On the surface you say, “That’s brilliant, I’m so happy for you!”
But maybe a part of you goes quiet. Not because you want them to fail. Because they’re becoming more of themselves, and you haven’t reached that in yourself yet.
Crabs in a bucket
You know the saying: you don’t need a lid on a bucket of crabs. As soon as one starts climbing out, the others pull it back down.
Not because they’re evil. That crab came from the same bucket. When it starts to climb, it shows the rest of them exactly where they’re still sitting.
When you start climbing yourself, you’ll feel it. “Who do you think you are? What are you doing?”
One of my favourite Rancid albums is …And Out Come the Wolves. The punk scene was already calling them sellouts. They hadn’t sold out, and the way I’ve always read that title is that they knew exactly what was coming. The wolves were the crabs. Their own scene, ready to pull them back down.
Let’s be honest, though. We’ve all been the crab doing the pulling at some point too.
Level three: your dreams
On the surface you’re happy for them. Deep down, part of you isn’t. That part shows up when you’re asleep.
In your dreams your everyday mind steps out of the way, and what’s really there comes to the surface. Everything in the dream is you, every person in it, including the ones you admire and the ones you envy. (It’s the same reason you keep dreaming about your ex.)
Someone posted a dream on Reddit. A teenager dreamt they met their hero, Ariana Grande. It was a VIP meet, just the two of them, and she played them unreleased songs she said were too personal to share. In the comments, the dreamer said they’d always wanted to do music, ever since they were a kid, but their family always discouraged it.
Look at what the dream is doing. Ariana is the trait: someone who gets to sing out loud on the biggest stage there is. The VIP meet lets the dreamer get close enough to touch it. The unreleased songs, too personal to share? That’s not Ariana. That’s the dreamer. Every song they never got to sing because someone said it wasn’t for them.
Maybe that’s just the crab bucket again.
Some people say, “I don’t really have heroes.” That’s fine. You still dream about people all the time, and you don’t choose who turns up. Your unconscious does, and it picks the people who carry something you need to see. The person from school. The friend who went off and did their thing. Someone famous you never even think about.
Write down the trait, not the name, and ask: where is that in me, and what haven’t I chosen to integrate yet?
Is there really any gold in the shadow?
I don’t think there is. A shadow is just a lack of light. There’s no treasure hiding in the dark.
Your admiration and your envy are your light. They’re your attention, and right now that attention is pointing outside of you, at someone else. Your envy isn’t the opposite of your gold. It’s the arrow pointing to it.
The gold isn’t something you find in other people. It’s what happens when you turn the light around and shine it on yourself.
Make it real: think, feel, do
Then line up three things: what you think, what you feel, and what you do.
That’s what envy really is. You think you want it. You feel it every time they do well. You just haven’t done it yet. To realise something means to make it real, and you make it real when what you think, feel and do all line up.
So never meet your heroes. Not because they’ll let you down. Because when you meet them, you don’t gain anything. What you wanted from them was always in you. They were never the gold. They were the mirror.
It’s all you. It’s all one. You just have to choose to notice it, and the easiest place to start is your dreams.
Questions people ask about the golden shadow
What is the golden shadow in Jungian psychology?
It’s the positive qualities you’ve disowned, usually because you were told to tone them down, which you then see and admire in other people. The people who came after Jung named it the golden shadow.
What’s the difference between the shadow and the golden shadow?
The shadow is usually used for the “dark” things we hide, like anger or jealousy. The golden shadow is the good things we’ve buried, like confidence, creativity or the urge to be seen.
How do you work with your golden shadow?
Notice who you admire and who you envy, write down the trait rather than the person, and ask where that trait lives in you. Then start lining up what you think, feel and do around it.
Why do I dream about celebrities?
Your unconscious picks people who carry a trait you need to see. A celebrity in a dream is usually a symbol for a quality in you, often one you haven’t let yourself express yet.
See a real dream taken apart
I’ve made a free video where I take a real dream from start to finish and show you how to find what it’s pointing at.