We all know that painful feeling of being at war with ourselves, and we are constantly on the lookout for ways to make ourselves whole. But some of our most common ways of striving for wholeness are dead ends. There’s codependency (a betrayal of wholeness), envy (a hankering for wholeness), workaholism (a barrier to wholeness), and perfectionism (a faux-wholeness). In this work of spiritual and psychological integration, Wilkie Au and Noreen Cannon weave together insights from Jesus and psychiatrist Carl Jung and show that faith and psychology, far from being worlds apart, bring genuine transformation when they move together.

There is a temptation to divide psychology and spirituality and keep them separate, discrete domains that do not interact. “Finding wholeness is a psychological conversation, and becoming holy is a spiritual conversation,” some seem to imply—or even explicitly and vehemently declare. Some Christians see psychology as a hindrance or even a threat to spiritual development and becoming like Jesus. Other people prefer psychology and are deeply suspicious of formal religion after hearing stories of abuse and manipulation, or even experiencing that in their pasts. “Psychology is better off without spirituality,” they conclude.

In the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Mark’s account of Jesus’ life, we find a story where the spiritual and psychological converge and converse quite intimately. Mark tells a story of Jesus and his disciples encountering a demoniac from the region of Gerasene. He lived in a graveyard and no one came near him. The name he gives provides a window into how internally fractured he was: Legion. There was an army of presences within him until he had a moment of encounter with Jesus. People from the town were terrified to see him “clothed and in his right mind.” Whatever had him divided in his person, Jesus brought inner unity and clarity.

The story suggests that wholeness mattered to Jesus as well as holiness. Wholeness was not a psychologist’s brainchild—it was God’s. The God-given “urging of the heart” we have to be made whole, to become totally ourselves, tells us something important about the heart of God.

God wants to be incarnated in each of us in a unique way. As the love of Jesus brings greater wholeness to a person, that person’s inner catalogue of enemies becomes shorter and shorter. But our enemies are not just external. So often, the things we hate and reject in others are the very things we hate and reject in ourselves. This creates blocks in ourselves, with others and with God. But as we befriend hidden parts of ourselves that we hate and treat as enemies, we will find that the catalogue of self-hatred will also become shorter. We will feel increasingly integrated as we accept more and more of those inner parts.

Even though Mark’s account does not offer us an origin story for “Legion” the Gerasene demoniac, we do see the effects of self-imprisonment and profound fragmentation. This lack of internal cohesion left the man vulnerable to spiritual subjugation. Even if we never end up chained to tombstones and cutting ourselves open in a Near Eastern graveyard, each of us has experienced some form of rejection, abuse, or wound that has left us fragmented.

The example of Jesus and his invitation to each of us is to become whole and holy, repairing the psychological and the spiritual. One side without the other is incomplete.

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In a letter the apostle Paul wrote to an early church in Rome two millennia ago, he confesses that he is mystified by his inner dividedness—he does what he does not want to and also does not do what he wants to. Paul tells his readers he himself does not comprehend his own behavior. We can probably relate. Like Paul, we end up in these strange cycles of self-sabotage. We want inner wholeness, but often find inner civil war waging instead.

One of the cultural hang ups with wholeness is that pop psychology misleadingly holds out promises of a finished-product wholeness, where just reading the right book or finding the right sage will help us arrive at a place where we'll never again have to strive or endure conflict. This sets us up for a neurotic, never-ending game of maintenance that leaves us feeling exhausted, disgusted with ourselves, and far from the perfection our guru of choice promised.

By contrast, Christian spirituality offers a counterintuitive freedom that embraces the fact that we are always on the journey. It allows someone to find a sense of home on the road.

When it comes to faith, we crave simple, black-and-white directives and principles. While faith is simple in its own way, the journey the spiritual life takes us on is deep, rich, and paradoxical. What we discover as we walk the way is that the truest, most beautiful things are paradoxical: ideas that seem contradictory but are somehow both true. One physicist expressed it well: “The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth.”

When we think about the Christian notion of wholeness, we cannot appreciate it without seeing it in all its paradoxical splendor. Wholeness involves feeling at home on the journey. Wholeness ushers in a sense of harmony and gratitude, but also forces us to engage with conflict winsomely. This conflict is the unavoidable shadow of wholeness. Yet another paradox is that those who are whole never rest on their spiritual laurels; they are eagerly and curiously exploring their issues that arise during their process of growth. Those experiencing wholeness are always on the cusp of further self-transcendence.

These paradoxes and tensions might frustrate us if we have come to view the spiritual journey as a series of simple facts and yes-no answers, but embracing paradox initiates us into a process that allows for deeper transformation.

There is no cookie cutter path to transformation. Genuine spirituality emerges from the individual’s starting point and unfolds along a unique, unrepeatable path. We tend to look for universal principles that apply to everyone, and while Jesus shows us the way, no two walks to Jesus are identical. In fact, they are often radically different.

Each of us is tempted to declare with an air of driven certitude that, “These are the ways I want to grow.” But the questions that open us up to true spiritual growth and self-transcendence are, “How does God want me to grow? How does he want me to act, given the set of gifts and limitations I have right now?” Sometimes we wait for a word from God before we move, but it is often the experiences with God and sitting in mystery that He uses to direct us.

Our self-transcendence depends on a willingness for “self-descendence,” to see what is beneath the surface. To borrow the language of the 20th century Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, we must become conscious of our shadow in order to become truly ourselves. By the shadow, Jung means “the thing a person has no wish to be." We wish it were not there, but it will never leave us. If we refuse to acknowledge what is always roiling and throbbing beneath the surface, then we will remain at the shadow’s mercy and close ourselves off from growth. In effect, we resign ourselves to remaining reactive, ill-defined blobs.

The biblical narrative shows us that same pattern of individuation, of reunion with what was lost. We see it with God searching for Adam and Eve in the Garden. We see it in Jesus’ parables of the prodigal son, the lost coin, and the lost sheep. Jesus’ teachings and fiercest debates with the Pharisees all reveal that God is far more concerned with the kardia (the heart), than with checking off religious to-do’s. The Greek word kardia has to do with the emotions and motivations of a person’s innermost being. 

Jesus and Jung both highlight a path that leads us beneath externalities. When we confront our hidden motivations and desires as they spring up, it can be a painful process. Disturbances from our internal depths can undermine the image of ourselves we thought or wished was there. The spiritual life is rewarding, but it is not all sunshine. It involves descending into our inner depths, but it is a descent that can bring us to new heights. Life on the spiritual path is full of opportunities for death and resurrection: This paschal (or Easter) pattern is the path to wholeness and holiness.

We reflexively hide the shadow, the part of us we often pretend is not there, behind the persona. The persona is the mask we put on in polite company. The more dazzling the mask, the deeper and darker the shadow.

There are nefarious and devious aspects to the shadow, but it would be overly simplistic to call it “bad.” Carl Jung viewed the shadow as a veritable treasure trove, that we should sell everything in order to discover its riches. Paradoxically, the very things we hate and hide are the sources of our wholeness.

The shadow side is full of things we shoved into the dark corners of ourselves to minimize the risks of embarrassment and rejection. But many people arrive at midlife and realize they are just a sliver of who they could be, and the rest of them is still stuffed in the basement, eagerly awaiting integration.

We take a serious risk when we refuse to explore the shadow. When we refuse, the shadow rules us. It becomes more visceral and animalistic the longer we deprive it of attention and love. The result of ignoring the shadow mimics what happens when someone is locked away, isolated, and starved for connection. The longer a person exists in that condition, the more unpredictable and frightening they become. The things we resist persist and gain ferocity if we do not give them attention.

To be clear, this is very different from navel gazing. Doing the inner work is not selfish, but an opportunity to regain ourselves. When we become more fully ourselves, we actually have a self to give away to others. Pursuing the path of greater self-awareness is more beneficial to us and to others than Christian service driven by a compulsive "need to be needed." When we serve with a need to be needed, we use others to heal our deeper emotional wounds: a need for recognition or admiration, to prove that we are competent, useful, or good. Our giving turns into taking if we do not learn to patiently observe ourselves and gain a deeper awareness of how our deprivations motivate us. As we walk along the path with Jesus, he gently shows us areas of drivenness and deprivation masquerading as acts of service or sagacity. 

Religious people are especially susceptible to the shadow. Setting our sights on high ideals can lead us to toil after virtue. We can become tempted to conjure up an acceptable Christlike persona, but doing so risks blinding us to a deeply un-Christlike shadow beneath our glittery displays. The more we feel we have arrived—that we are officially like Jesus—the less likely we are to be aware of our shadow operating behind the veil of consciousness. The more we feed that mask, the more we project our shadow onto others and see their deficiencies (really, our own) and the ways we think they need to be helped (which are really the areas in which we need help).

To begin discovering your shadow, ask yourself what traits in others stir up your self-righteousness? What draws your fiercest ire and most reactive judgements? What receives your adulation? In life’s forks in the road, big or small, tune in to the inner debates and really listen to what both sides are saying. The shadow is sometimes that voice that feels foreign and like it is trying to trip us up, but bad decisions are more likely when we disregard the shadow than when we hear it out. We can also get glimpses of the shadow in our Freudian slips, the kinds of jokes we make, and our dreams. Feelings of guilt often cloud our experiences with the shadow, because we are going against ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that we are socially conditioned to consider “proper.” Deviating from these norms is full of guilt, oftentimes because it is different rather than immoral. We can see that in someone who routinely stuffs his anger and then feels guilty when he starts trying to express it, or in the workaholic who struggles to enjoy a vacation, or in a caring person who feels guilty for asking for what she needs. Guilt is a healthy sign that you are social, but a paralyzing, neurotic guilt prevents us from tolerating the ambiguities of being a messy, in-process human being. It will probably feel strange or even “wrong,” but this is the work of integration and becoming an individual. 

Ultimately, integration of the shadow begins when we acknowledge there is a great deal more to us and this world than we know, and that even the shadowy unknown parts of us can become familiar friends, renewed for our good and the good of others.