Reopening Wounds

I fear anger. This fear crippled me during times of conflict, during which my mind will draw a blank . I would be afraid of becoming a monster like how my mother was and I would fear the possibility of doing harm to others out of rage and violence. My mother drilled a lesson into me, one that I lived by almost unconscious of until recently : “ Anyone come to fight with you, you are not suppose to fight back. As long as you fight back, you are in the wrong.” Anger was seen as a crime under the authoritarian parenting of my mother. She was always right and I was always wrong. This was an internal gap I could never resolve, a case of the psyche being divided and split off by early developmental demands and circumstance. Reopening Wounds is an exploration that bridges Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow and Jacob L Moreno’s idea of Psychodrama. The shadow self is the site of repressed emotions, desires and impulses that sits within the unconscious. By attempting to manifest and assume the role of my shadow via the creation of the mask and suit, I hoped to understand it better and to achieve psychic wholeness via the eventual union of the opposites, ego and unconscious, persona and shadow.