The Life Review (Connie Zweig, PhD)

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Connie Zweig is one of the most incredible thinkers and therapists working with Shadow, which is the Jungian concept. She wrote many, many years ago, the anthology of thinkers on shadow called Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature. Then she wrote a book called Romancing the Shadow: A Guide to Soul Work for a Vital, Authentic Life, which is how to do shadow work in your immediate relationships. She wrote a really beautiful book called Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path: The Dance of Darkness and Light in Our Search for Awakening, which is essentially about this idea that you never fully transcend shadow. And sometimes where we observe shadow is where there's sometimes the most light. And it is I think for anyone who has experienced any religious trauma or is a member of the Catholic church—she writes about a lot of these communities where the leaders or gurus are not doing their own shadow work and what that can then create the ripple effects of that on the culture.

Nobody is immune. Nobody gets to skip those steps. Her latest book is called The The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, which is what we're going to talk about today. And it's about ageism, yes, but it's also about life review and the ways in which we adopt identities and a lot of shadow identities without really being conscious of what we're up to and what happens as we have to start to put them down. It's a midlife book and a book for older people theoretically. But it's also a book that I think I would've loved to have read 10 or even 20 years ago. It's really about eldership and what that means and how that's not necessarily assigned to becoming a senior. That is a stage that we can get to sooner or later or not at all. But achieving elderhood is definitely one of the goals of my life. So let's turn to our conversation now.

MORE FROM CONNIE ZWEIG, PHD:

Connie’s first episode on Pulling the Thread: “Embracing the Shadow”

The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul

Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path: The Dance of Darkness and Light in Our Search for Awakening

Romancing the Shadow: A Guide to Soul Work for a Vital, Authentic Life

Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature

A Moth to the Flame: The Life of the Sufi Poet Rumi

Connie Zweig’s Website

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

It's nice to see you again. Thank you for coming back. People loved our first conversation. We covered shadow, we covered meeting the shadow on the spiritual path, meeting the shadow. I've read everything you've written. I love you.

CONNIE:

That's so sweet.

ELISE:

However, we did not get to the inner work of age and you said you would come back and I'm holding you to that right now.

CONNIE:

And here we are.

ELISE:

And here we are going through. I've actually been spending a lot of time with you in all of your books because I'm getting organized to write my next book and I have a whole over wrought process for organizing notes and codifying everything. And so I was extra excited when I saw that this was on the calendar today because I have been with you Connie, as always. Let's talk about aging. Let's talk about Thatm. And I loved the inner work of age in part because it felt like such a beautiful shift or addition to, there are a lot of wonderful books about this transition use quote, Ram dos and from Role to Soul or Richard Rohr talking about the first half of life building the container and the second half finding the meaning or James Hollis. But it's a slightly different, well, it's feminine take on it in some ways or to I think some of the great thinking about this moment that comes for all of us.

CONNIE:

Well, what I think is distinct about the inner work of age is from the point of view of the unconscious shadow, and that's another polarity, conscious and unconscious. So there's a lot of stuff about conscious aging out there. There's a lot of material and it's called positive aging and successful aging and all the longevity stuff. But it doesn't include what's going on in the unconscious shadow, whether that is resistance or denial or self-rejection or secret shame, secret fears and anxiety. Most of the other writers and scholars are not trained in depth psychology. So naturally they just don't think that way.

So when I turned 60, I think it was 67, and I was thinking of retiring from clinical practice and I started looking for books about aging and retirement, I couldn't find anything for me. There was no book about dreams and the deep psyche and denial and all the things that are going on in the shadow around this transition around retirement, around illness and mortality. If we only live at the level of awareness, ego awareness, we're missing out on a lot of what's going on underneath underground. So that's kind of what I wanted to excavate for this

ELISE:

Book

CONNIE:

In those themes.

ELISE:

That's beautiful. And it's interesting you mentioned the word longevity. And one of the things that I find just so curious and compelling is the longevity movement, which is mostly led by men, which again has a lot of shadow and light. So the light side is we don't want to spend the waning years of our life with eight chronic diseases, but the shadow side to me feels very present. And it is this fear of death, this unwillingness to accept dependence. And to that end feels like it carries a significant shadow, particularly for men, this enduring power over and trying to engineer certainty over the material world in a very different way. And you say somewhere in the book, which I love, that we are adding more years to life, but not more life to years. And that's the other thing. It's like just live. Don't you want to just live rather than spending your time focusing on how to live?

CONNIE:

There was this decline narrative that was about, it only gets worse over the hill. All the language was negative about aging for many decades. And so then the polarity erupted positive aging, we can do whatever we want. We have a longer health span as well as lifespan. Let's be activists like Jane Fonda or let's be a painter. And that polarity began to create its own tension. And so the conscious aging community showed up, which was Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, and Richard Rohr. A bunch of teachers began to emerge that were kind of trying to hold, well, the body does really deteriorate and there's all these possibilities and dreams and aspirations that we can fulfill now that we have an extra decade or two. So it was trying to hold those opposites and what it wasn't doing was acknowledging the unconscious process. So I just wanted to add that dimension to it. That was really what I needed for myself. And then it just turned out that with 70 million baby boomers, lots of other people needed it too.

ELISE:

And so can you talk a bit about what that is? You identify these different, I guess you would call them personas, the driver who won't let us stop doing the dutiful daughter, et cetera, the savior. Is that what you're talking about?

CONNIE:

So you were mentioning gender differences a minute ago, and when I did hundreds of interviews, I didn't find too many gender differences. What I did find was the men tended to be really afraid of losing the provider identity.

If I'm not a provider, who am I? If I'm not successful achieving every day productive, taking care of my family, then who am I? And since most women now have careers, women also have that going on that identity crisis. But at the same time, women seem to feel more fear of losing their appearance, their self-image, because that has been a way that we've been persuasive and powerful and in the workplace. So that was really the only gender difference I found. Now in terms of what is going on in the unconscious, most people are not aware of those fears. Those fears are happening underneath the surface of the personality. You couldn't find too many men who would say, I'm afraid of becoming dependent. I mean they are, but they're not aware of it. Dependency is in the shadow of the whole culture because we go by this sort of, everybody is an autonomous, heroic individual striving to be.

And when we can no longer be autonomous and we need other people to care for us, a lot of shame comes up and anxiety and feelings of failure. So that's in the shadow. So from my point of view, for some people you could say the provider is what you called a persona because they're aware that they're identifying with it. And for other people, they're just living day to day and not thinking about identity. And that provider comes up as a shadow when they start to lose it, when that role starts to disappear, maybe they lose their job because of ageism or they become ill and have to stop working. And so they can't take care of their family anymore, whether it's a man or woman. And so everything changes with that in terms of identity. And because we don't have any rite of passage to become an elder and really shift our identity from the provider or what I call the doer to becoming an elder or at a deeper level, identifying with soul, something that sort of lasts beyond all these roles, you could call it spirit or essence or whatever you want to call it, Buddha nature. Christ nature. And we don't have that built in. We don't have anyone teaching that organized religion is not teaching, that families are not teaching that there's no rite of passage.

So as a result, there's this late life identity crisis and the material from the shadow starts to erupt the fears and the shame and the loss and the anxiety and the lack of control. And that's why from my point of view, the inner work is so essential in this stage of life. And many people have never done inner work, they've never been in therapy, they've never taken time to self-reflect or try to change. But many people have also, maybe they've gone to couples canceling, maybe they've had a kid in therapy, maybe they read some self-help books. And for those people, they know there's more going on. They know they have that hunch and have some feedback, and they know there's more going on and some people are more sophisticated. They have a spiritual practice, and let's say they do meditation or prayer, then they also know there's an inner world, but it hasn't been hooked up to aging, right? No, nobody's built those bridges.

ELISE:

No, nor just listening to you talk. And I want to talk about what it would look like to have those initiatory or those rituals or cycles that we seem to be missing. But what's really interesting too is that if we gender this for a minute, even if it's just the masculine and the feminine, and you think about the crisis of letting go of that provider role, and then you think about what's happening with boys and younger men and the fact that women are often sole providers or primary breadwinners or co providers and the crisis that seems to be creating for younger generations of boys and men who don't necessarily feel like they have a place. And then you think about on the flip side, when you were talking about women relinquishing appearance, and then you think about all the consternation about, I just wrote a piece actually about this, about these young girls going into Sephora and getting heavily invested in skincare routines and sometimes using these active ingredients that are intended for people your age and my age and the mirror that they're holding up to us saying, fix your relationship with aging and to the older men fix your relationship with providing.

That seems to me like, and when you're talking about building bridges, that feels like a core cyclical bridge of younger generations reflecting back our own ambivalence or anxiety and asking us to take care of it.

CONNIE:

I had a 30-year-old guy who read my book, reach Out and tell me that it changed forever his relationship to aging. And that startled me. I wasn't writing for 30 year olds, but then I realized this is going on through the lifespan, the messaging from the media and social media and families and schools. And so the earlier we start to understand what is shaping the shadow, what is shaping our unconscious feelings and beliefs about aging, the sooner we can counteract the negativity. There are many ways to do that. If we have an elder in our world who's modeling healthy aging, a grandparent, an aunt, a mentor, that is a really great antidote. My grandkids can see how active and creative I am at 75. I don't even have to say anything. They just take it in. So I think part of what's happening with, and I don't know that I would say boys are struggling because of single moms.

ELISE:

No, no. I mean this cultural idea, this pressure of you're going to be the provider and that is not, they need to be provider and nurture and a much more expanded idea. That's just this recent burst of scholarship and data around the crisis of boys. No, no, no, no. I'm not saying it's because of single moms.

CONNIE:

Yeah, I think that there's a crisis of masculinity that's happening right now, which is a bigger conversation and it's very polarized, and some of it is really anti-feminist. And so it's a reaction. It's another cultural reaction swing of the pendulum, but that's not my topic. I mean, I'm really trying to help people to uncover what are the inner obstacles stopping you from aging consciously and having a fulfilling life after midlife. I mean, this is like 50, 55 and beyond. That's a lot of time for people who can live into their nineties now. So what does that look like? I mean, for some people it means just playing golf or going on cruises, but for people who are more psychological and want and seeking meaning, seeking intimacy and contribution, want to make contribution, there's a whole other universe to be explored there. And there are now lots of groups for elders around activism there, climate groups for elders, social justice groups for elders that were never there before because the baby boomers are doing all this. So there's a lot of potential treasure in this period of time that's been buried. I mean, there's no generation that's had this longevity, and so there's no generation before us that's had this opportunity to find this treasure. Really,

Here we are,

ELISE:

But it's also very Jungian.

I feel like I often see that lecture about age quoted where young talks about how there would be no biological reason for humans to live so long if there wasn't a massive benefit. And you go to the grandmother hypothesis, which is the idea that it was the grandmothers and sort of in the place to scene and beyond who were providing a massive amount of calories and allo-parenting, the young, which I'm sure could extend to the grandfathers as well. But yeah, that there is this massive and essential overlooked function of wise elders that we have in, I don't know if it's recent decades or centuries, maligned shut away, preferred not to look at or consider. You think about something like climate change. You think about a lot of our social ills, not that wise, elders are solely responsible for helping us solve these problems, but what do you think we've lost in our deprecation of old people and what do we have to gain?

CONNIE:

There's a saying, every elder who dies, it's like losing a library.

I mean, we've lost the wisdom of millions of people, but at the same time, we're waking up to this now. There's a big anti ageism movement happening. It's happening globally, and partly it's because the whole human population is aging and every country is having this issue. And so it shows up as a social justice issue where young people complain that the elders are getting all the resources right, the money's going to Medicare and social Security, and that's not fair. Or it shows up in with Covid where all of the people in nursing homes were really diminished and people said, well, let's just let them die. And so people woke up to the ageism around that. This has been happening now, I think for, I don't know, a couple decades. But you see it's rooted in the unconscious, and so it can't be fixed at the level of the problem.

It's like when I was in college, I used to think we could fix racism with legislation and we can see it hasn't been fixed because it's in the shadow. And the same thing is true with ageism. And so we have to combine this inner work with the outer social justice work. Neither one is sufficient alone from my point of view. And a deeper issue is that a lot of seniors are not elders. So elder is a stage. It's not an age. We don't become an elder when we get our Medicare card at 65. If someone is bitter and regretful and mean, that's not an elder because that person hasn't done the inner work to step into that archetypal frame. That's also been part of it, that the older population hasn't had the tools, the rites of passage to wake up to their inner world. So the younger generations see them in their families or in their communities doesn't look so great.

And so some of that is a lack of social justice work, and some of it is a lack of inner work. Some you asked about rites of passage. I wrote the inner work of age as a rite of passage. So you walk through waking up to your internalized ageism, and I call that shadow the inner ageist, and you start to recognize the toll that it's having on you. That's the first step to break through denial. And then you work with mortality awareness and denial of death, and you explore spiritual practice, whatever that is for you. And there are many, many spiritual practices in the book to choose from and to test out. You explore retirement, that word is thrown around. What does that really mean for you and what does it mean unconsciously in the shadow? I mean, I am having a hard time letting go of the doer, but I am not the doer that I was in my forties when romancing the shadow was published and I was a workaholic.

I'm doing all this in a different state now, a different developmental state where I'm freer inside, more spacious, less attached to the outcomes. And it's a very different experience. I mean, I don't get exhausted. It is just a very different experience, but you wouldn't know that from looking at me from the outside. I look like I'm in the doer all the time. And then there's a chapter on illness and caregiving, and these are opportunities for inner work. It's just that we haven't had any guidance. I mean, whoever teaches us that, right? Whoever teaches us that illness is an opportunity to go within and explore our psychology. My husband is ill and he has an untreatable disease, and I'm the caregiver. And one of the things I need to do with my own shadow work is not fall into another role like the doer, not fall into the caregiver and identify with that because if I do that, I'll be trapped. So part of learning shadow work and spiritual practice is to recognizing that we can fulfill these roles without their becoming who we are,

Because that is not who I am. That is a narrow box, the caregiver. And so we learn through the practices in this book how to continually expand our awareness and open our identity to deeper levels. There's a chapter on activism for people who want to contribute socially, politically, and what are the shadows that block that? What are you telling yourself when you want to go whatever to a protest or sign a petition and you don't? So there's shadows involved in each of these different areas. What is a spiritual elder? What does that look like? How is that different from an activist elder? And what does life completion mean? What does each person need to take care of to feel that they've completed their inner work life review? There's a big chapter on life review and also on completing emotional unfinished business and then moving to life completion, and that looks differently for different people. I interviewed a number of teachers for the book, Ken Wilbur, father Thomas Keating, a Rabbi, a Zen Roshi, and just getting their personal perspectives on their own aging process and the practices they're using in later life. So I'd see this as a rite of passage. I describe my own retirement and the rite of passage I created around it. So people can do that if they want to.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I'm 44, almost 45, and I am obviously a Connie Super fan, so I'm going to read anything you write. But still to me, I appreciate the ageism structure, but to me it feels like don't wait. Well, and as you say, eldership is available to anyone at any age really. It's a practice or it outlines a circuit. When you think about life as a series, when you mentioned the life review, but you think about it as a series of little deaths, just preparing deaths of certain identities all through life, old jobs, relationship, empty nesting, illness, tragedy, so on and so forth, that so many of us, I don't want to say we don't respond to because they knock us on our butts, but we don't necessarily mind them for practice of being able to hold or internalize or alchemize that experience and let it help us get bigger or more expansive or more prepared for this final event. So it's also one of those books that's don't wait until you're 70 to start these practices of personal inventory and life review. Otherwise, it seems like it'd be a lot more work.

CONNIE:

Well, I've lived 30 years longer than you, so if you did a life review, you'd have a different experience than when I do a life review. You could call it more work, but you could also call it more life lived. And I resisted that practice. I'm not oriented to the past most of the time, but when I finally decided I wanted to do it so I could write about it from my firsthand experience, I got this giant wall size piece of paper, and I took about a month and I really wrote as much as I could remember of events and people and losses and betrayals and breakthroughs and insights, and that's above the horizontal line. And below the horizontal line is the shadow. And so I added that to the life review practice. So if this happened in your conscious life, what would've been happening in the shadow if you express this? What was repressed? If you had that relationship, what didn't happen underneath? And that became, for me, a profound experience of accepting the way my life unfolded rather than imagining it piece by piece and this and that. And what if I just saw this immense pattern that was full of synchronicity and gifts For me, it was especially mentors who kept showing up. Mentors just appeared to me through my life, and not everyone has that experience, and I'm so grateful for that. So I think this is a different practice for everyone, but it's really precious and I would really encourage people to chew on your life and how it made you who you are today.

ELISE:

Do you encounter a lot of people in your practice who feel like, oh, why would I do this? I made no impact, or maybe my life feels short on meaning or I was nobody

CONNIE:

Or I'm a victim. For me, that's all the voice of a shadow character. It's either the voice of a resistance to doing something that'd be helpful for you, or it's the voice of an identity, like I was talking about how we take on these roles and they become identities. Like a victim of trauma is a really big one in the culture now. And those identifications can be conscious or they can be unconscious. And so if they're unconscious, they can create resistance to whatever it is. If you're single to going out and dating, if you're in a marriage to changing your patterns, if you're struggling with an addiction to breaking your patterns, shadow characters show up everywhere in our lives, in what we say, in what we do and what we believe in, what we feel, and we're all made that way. We can't get to the place where we have no shadows. I mean, it's just how we're built. But as we become more and more and more conscious or aware of them, our life really takes on this whole other depth and richness that I really recommend to people. It's quite beautiful.

ELISE:

You mentioned how present the victim identification or victim persona is in the culture, which I think we're all conscious of, and there's, I think, a significant difference between being the victim of something that happens and then taking that role and running with it where you really potentially are curtailing the enjoyment of your own life and or not contending with the shadow. Why is it, do you think, so compelling to people to stay with it? Is it because it powers that resistance? It lets you sort of stay in your story?

CONNIE:

Yeah, it's because it's unconscious.

ELISE:

Yeah.

CONNIE:

I mean, most people don't ask, why am I staying as a victim?

ELISE:

Right?

CONNIE:

Right. They're just it. It's an unconscious identification with a story that feels self-righteousness. I mean, victims have a reason to be angry, have a reason to blame, have a reason to put the cause of their suffering outside of themselves and have no accountability. And if they started to look at it as the story they're telling that they're creating, that they're identifying with, that they're choosing to identify with, then it opens up the possibility of a choice. I thought the E Jean Carroll trial really modeled this. She didn't look or sound like a victim of sexual assault. I mean, she was in her power. And the Me Too movement has kind of shed this light. I think on the victim story, it doesn't mean that people weren't abused or wrongly treated or unable to heal. It just means that victim identity, which, and I first started noticing it with the recovery movement a few decades ago when the languaging wasn't sophisticated yet, and then it changed to survivor. Remember it went from victim to survivor. So these trends happen in the culture, and then we're all unconsciously just ingesting them, and then we participate and perpetuate them. So it's important sometimes to just take a breath and look at where is my attention? What am I putting my attention on, and am I making that grow bigger in my life by doing that, and do I want to continue to choose that or do something different?

ELISE:

Yeah. How do you as a therapist, and I think about this all the time as a writer talking about some of these things, it's very tricky. As you know. It's much easier when it's an arising in yourself where you say, I am not particularly enjoying this story, and I would like to move out of it and let this go and create something different for myself. Very different. When you are contending with it as a shadow or unconscious element, and now it's in some ways being weaponized, it's a mess out there in these shadow lands. How do you skillfully help people realize their attachment to a story? I think about this in the context of feminism and all social justice work, which I'm passionate about, and yet at the same time I need constant breaks because some of the victim is so intense. How do you skillfully confront that? Or is that not the job for any of us to do if we're not you?

CONNIE:

Well, clinicians have training. We get training. For me, I would always teach my clients to meditate before I taught shadow work.

And the reason for that is to have a way to come back to center and experience your own ground. And I didn't tell them how to meditate. They could choose their own practice, but let's say if it's the breath, begin to practice how you come back to your breath when a shadow comes up or how you come back to your belly or your feet. And if you practice meditation every day, you learn how to quiet your mind and you also learn how to observe your mind, and you begin to see that the thoughts just come and go all the time on their own. You're not making yourself think those thoughts. They're just happening and feelings and sensations in the body. And so then when you meet a shadow, let's say a critic, a critical voice comes up, then you have a way to come back to your center to explore the critic and to begin to analyze where does this come from?

When did I first start doing this in my life? What are the consequences of doing this? Do I want to do something different? See, we're talking about identification Again, you break the unconscious identification with the critic or whatever it is, the liar or the cheater, because people often say to me, I am that I'm a liar. I'm going to hell, or I'm a cheater. I'm going to be punished because they're identified. So part of the centering practice is to break the identification with that thought. Just like with the provider, I mean, this is the method of shadow work. And you identify what are the thoughts, what are the feelings, what are the bodily sensations? And then you can see who the shadow character is because every time the critic comes up, it has the same thoughts and feelings and sensations every single time. So you start to see the patterns. And if you have a meditation practice, it's not so overshadowing because most people when they meet a shadow are completely overwhelmed. So they learn to get some space from that thought inside and recognize it's not who they are.

I am a soul on a journey. I'm not a provider. I'm not a caregiver. I'm not a critic, I'm not a foodie. These are passing shadow characters. They're parts of me and they originated for particular reasons in my childhood. And I can begin to understand why and what they need, because every shadow character has a valid need. The critic has a valid need. It's making distance. And if you can't make distance consciously, then you're going to make it unconsciously and you're going to push that person away with criticism and you're going to feel superior with criticism, right? So there's valid needs there, but once you begin to practice this, you learn a lot about how your mind works, what your psychology is about, and who you really are because you are not any of this. You're not these mechanisms. That's not who you really are.

ELISE:

I think that those of us who have a lot of rage or displeasure about things that are happening in the world tend to believe or are convinced that the only change that can come, or we have to create the distance by taking that place of the critic or the judger or whatever it is, so that we can feel self-righteous, and understand who's wrong or bad or who to blame. And that the only way to power these movements is through that shadow mechanism of being against something. And part of this process of getting beyond this stage is, oh, I don't necessarily have to do that to stand for something in the world and to try to create something different. I don't need to make everyone bad and wrong and ashamed in order to devote my energy to something different.

CONNIE:

That is such a beautiful point. I would say when I was a student at Berkeley in the late sixties and seventies, all my activism was fueled from rage. And I can see now how much of it was from my childhood. It's not that the issues were invalid, but it was like psychodynamic material in me. And now I would say my activism is fueled more from grief, and it's a very different experience. It's very different at this stage of life. So we are going to project projections inevitable. It's the way that the mind works. We can't stop it. We unconsciously attribute to other people what we can't tolerate in ourselves. And that's how the psyche gets rid of that material. And that happens over and over. But when you learn to recognize your projections, everything changes. You see that you're not living in reality, you're living in this TV world that you're making up, and you start to see that other people are doing that. You start to see how much projection is in the political world right now, and that people are using that against each other. So these are tools that can lead to a more conscious and more fulfilling life. And my books have kind of gone through the different arenas where the shadow erupts,

And I'm just now starting a new Substack platform. It's called Shadow Work Awareness. So you'll be able to find that soon. And I'm going to be doing that with Keila Shaheen, the author of the Shadow Work Journal, so we'll be live streaming together.

ELISE:

Connie, thank you. This stage of your life is such a gift. I know you've been at this for so long, but I love it. I can't wait for your Substack.

CONNIE:

Thanks for having me back, Elise.

ELISE:

Oh my God, my pleasure. Anytime. I'll include a lot of notes in the end notes of today's episode, a link to my first podcast conversation with Connie, which was one of my favorites. But Connie's wag is a national treasure, and I'm so grateful for her work and her affinity or her ability really to explicate concepts that can be really heady and hard, but that are so deep in us driving so much of our behavior. I could truly devote the podcast just to interviewing Connie forever because she's a fan of wisdom and I love it when she sort of holds up a stop sign for me too. And it's like I do not find that concept helpful or useful. I love being around women like that because it's a good model for what I'm trying to cultivate in myself as well. As she mentioned, she's launching a Substack. I can't wait to see that. And I love that she's mentoring younger generations and shadow work because it's a vital concept that's gotten a lot of air lately, and it's hard. This is some of the hardest work we can do.

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