Often parents see their son’s shadow and become afraid of it, or lazy in the face of it. They just hope it will go away. They hope someone else will discipline it and give it structure. If parents—especially male parents, including the transitional mentoring parent—don’t take on the job of giving the boy structure and discipline, helping him understand his shadow in full, and helping him integrate its shadowy energies into his future growth, the boy will take that shadow into the society, his future marriage, his own future family, his workplace, and exercise it inappropriately. People will see that giant rise up in him as he sexually attacks or harasses them, loses his temper at ballgames, beats up his children. People will see the giant rise up and they will be afraid. When parents, mentors, and educators don’t help boys confront their shadows in their adolescent years, those shadows become even larger giants as the boy grows into adulthood, and in the end, the law has to deal with them.
Among the Shavante of Brazil, the shadows in boys are honored and trained in a number of ceremonies. In one, for instance, boys are taught to work together to bring their anger, in the form of a huge log, into the camp. Through ceremonies like these, elders teach the boys the right boundaries for anger. Fear is another part of the human shadow that adolescent initiations deal with throughout Native America. Boys are mentored on three, five, ten, or fourteen-day Vision Quests in a dangerous and frightening wilderness so that they learn how to move through fear and find the self that perseveres. The essential idea in this questing is that if a boy’s fear is not trained, he will not use it to further himself and his community—rather, he will, from is how position of fear, try to make others afraid.
Anyone who works with adolescent boys must teach them—through disciplines like martial arts and sports, through intimate and communicative family environments, through respectable authority—how to deal with their own angers and fears. A great deal of male self-discipline grows from flourishing in the face of the shadow sides of these emotions.
Many elders who teach boys, myself included, have turned to things like the Ropes Course as a way of helping boys work with their emotions, especially their fears. Ropes Courses exist throughout North America. They involve high platforms, poles run between trees. Boys have to push beyond their fears to talk across a thin pole (they are always harnessed for safety) thirty feet above the ground.
The world of sports is a world where many boys face large parts of their shadow. When a boy is playing team sports, he faces shadowy moments of fearful competitiveness, a need to humiliate another, the humiliations of others which he must combat or integrate. Through the sports experience, we see boys confronting shadowy egos, excessive pride, unchecked impulses, fears of failure, fears of success—“I can’t do it! I’ll always fail at the important things!”—how they navigate and are mentored to navigate these fears says a lot about who they become.
At home, boys must feel free to talk to parents about the shadowy feelings they are having—feelings about drugs, girls, violence, racism, sexism. Parents must use every opportunity to teach boys about their own shadowy prejudices and give boys wise ways to do better.
In the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack takes the Giant’s belt off the big waist and carries it into his new home. This is a representation of the necessity of a boy not only facing the shadow but also integrating it. Some mythologists call this “eating the shadow.” Eating the shadow is a way of saying, “Yes, that’s my shadow, that’s my world of flaw, failures, imperfections, angers, fears, hurts, and now that I’m conscious of it and know how to walk around in it, I am able to be a man fully and truly.” If we don’t integrate the shadow, but rather try to quash it, make it disappear, we face its uprising at sudden and dangerous times. We end up hurting other people and other organizational systems in our lives, at home, at work, at play—and thus hurting ourselves—because we have not let go of an infantile desire for perfection, and embraced a mature knowledge of the human shadow.
In Jack and the Beanstalk, the confrontation with the shadow—symbolized as a Giant who is Jack’s own “giant world” of fears, shames, confusions—follows the sacred theft of the goose and the magic harp. In so many myths and stories, the confrontation with the shadow follows a similar pattern: it occurs after a boy’s discovery of his gold and connection to spiritual growth. The mythic logic to this is good common sense. Facing the shadow is a very difficult task. A boy is better equipped for this if he has at least made good strides in feeling confident in himself and in his connection to the mysterious and greater world. Sometimes we don’t have the confidence to face our shadow until we are well initiated into our spirituality and therefore feel grounded in life itself—feel like we are a unique self who absolutely belongs to the world.
In Jack’s story, the whole community comes to admire what he has done. The man who sold him the beans comes to admire him. “I knew you would return from your magic journey,” he says. “Now that you have, I’ll be on my way.” The mentor has finished his job—years of initiation have passed. Both move on.
The mentor moves back into a kind of communal background—he returns to being one of the tribe whose admiration Jack’s work needs. Jack, like every youth, needs the communal group to say, “You are brave, you’ve done good.” It’s important to note also the timing of the community’s admiration. The community gives Jack this respect not before he has faced the shadow but afterward. It is as if the community is saying, “We may have always cared for you as a person, but now you have earned our respect.”
One of the terrible things we do with our criminals, most of whom are male, is give them no respect or admiration after they do their time and face their shadows. We disrespect them when they leave prison. We don’t give them jobs, we still treat them like criminals. And because some don’t face shadows while in prison, we condemn all criminals.
We do the same with many boys in many ways. We don’t notice the hard work they’ve done to grow up. We don’t admire it. We don’t help them cart away their carcass. We don’t help them bury their pasts. Boys need their communities to accept the fact that they have a shadow side, to help them manage that shadow side, and then to give them respect for having learned self-discipline. That is the three-stage process of male initiation into the shadow—recognition of the shadow, aided by elders who see it, from the outside, often more clearly than the boy himself; confrontation with the shadow, aided by elders who themselves have been down the hard road of developing self-discipline; admiration by the community of elders for the shadow work done.
Boy meets girl
In just about every tale of a boy’s initiation, there is a maiden trapped in a castle or cave of a giant, an evil sorcerer, a monster, a demon, a sea-witch, a warlock. The boy falls in love with the girl and must, in order to free her, confront the giant, the monster, the demon.
In Jack’s story, he falls in love with the maiden and is immediately confronted with the shadow. It is rare in a boy’s life that his sudden affection for a girl is not also accompanied by a confrontation with his own shadowy desires and impulses and, once he’s rejected, his hurts. Mythic stories know biology very well. They know that, for instance, testosterone is the hormone that drives both sex and aggression. They know that in a boy, as testosterone surges, increasing his desire for sex and intimacy, so does his impulse to be aggressive and irresponsible. The deep confusion boys feel in their impulses to “have” girls is biologically grounded.
It is specifically when a boy begins to look to girls that we can expect him to face many shadows in himself, and this it is essential we mentor him well at this time. A boy who “marries” the maiden before he has been led in confronting his own shadow—i.e., a boy who impregnates a girl before he has confronted much of his own irresponsibility, acting out, impulsiveness, and immature responses to hurt and rejection—does himself, the girl, his offspring, and his society future harm. A boy must kill the giant and take its belt off and put that belt up on the mantel where he can always be reminded of who he is before he takes on the most difficult relationship of his future life with an intimate mate.
Stories like Jack and the Beanstalk have tried to teach us this. The role of the fathers and elder males during the boy’s early adolescence is crucial in keeping the boy from impregnating girls, abusing girls, using girls. If no elder male is around the single mother often must change the way she has brought up and disciplined the boy to include diligent structure, lots of discipline, lots of communication about sex and love. If the elder males are around, they must alk about the nitty-gritty—the impulses, the aggression, the ecstasies—more than once.
As Jack’s story ended, we saw that he built one house for himself and his mate, then another for his mother. His reunion with his mother included, initially, his mother bringing him the ax that cuts down the beanstalk. There’s wonderful symbolism in all this.
The mother has let the boy go on his journey into masculine initiation, yet she is not tossed off or seen as unessential. She is essential again, the ax bringer. The son and mother are reunited, emotionally, in this gesture, for the mother helps the son, at least in some part, face the shadow. Respect for mother appears in this element of story. Respect for mother also appears in Jack’s construction of a house for her. At the same time, separation from her is obvious. Jack no longer lives with his mother.
And so Jack has gone on and been led on a masculine journey of initiation. It began with his mother’s frustration and ended with Jack’s acceptance by the community as a man. A journey like this one would be the ideal for every boy’s adolescence.
Excerpted from The Wonder of Boys, by Michael Gurian. Tarcher-Putnam, 1996. Used with permission.
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