Rev. C. Scot Giles, D.Min., LLC

The sex scandals involving members of the religious right (such as Representative Mark Foley and Rev. Ted. Haggard in recent days, and Rev. Jim Baker and Rev. Jimmy Lee Swaggert in years gone by) gives any thinking person pause.

Certainly, I condemn Mr. Foley’s involvement with minor children. Many will also join me in hoping that something will mitigate the embarrassment these people caused to those who believed in them. I think a lot of people will join me in hoping that the people who did these things will find healing for themselves, and then a way to pay their tab, to change, and refocus their lives.

For myself, I’m not the sort of person who does a lot of moralizing or judging. I’ve always taken comfort from the scriptural evidence that God isn’t picky about his help, and I don’t require or expect perfection in anyone. But in my heart I do require honesty of myself and those close to me.

With the exception of Mr. Foley, the folks who have gotten themselves wound up in these scandals are in trouble not so much because of what they did, but because what they did was exactly the sort of behavior they loudly condemned others for. Hypocrisy on such a scale is a sign of a serious spiritual problem.

People who study personality tend to talk about the human “self” as being a system of parts. Typically, they identify three parts. Freud thought we have an “ego,” a “superego” and an “id.” This last part was our primitive, darker, instinctual drive. Transactional Analysis talks about a “natural child” part (sort of like the id), an “adapted child” part and the “little professor.” Each of these parts are further divided into a “parent” an “adult” and a “child” part.

I use a simple model of personality I learned from addiction therapist Jacquelyn Small. I talk about a “Higher Power” (by which I basically mean God), a “Higher Self” (by which I basically mean the Soul) and about personality as having three parts: a positive self, an observing self and a “shadow.”

The “positive self” is the sunshine part of ourselves that we’d like others to notice. The “shadow self” is a concept borrowed from psychoanalyst Carl Jung. It refers to the hidden, darker part of ourselves that we all have somewhere. The bridge between these two parts is our “observing self” and that part tends to be the calmest and wisest part.

The point is we all have a dark, shadowy side. It’s the part that gets angry, or hurt. It’s the part that wants to “get even” or to “get away” with things. Jung believed that in order to be mentally and spiritually healthy, a person had to acknowledge their “shadow” and find a way to deal with it.

If you ignore your “shadow,” Jung taught, it would just fester and get stronger. Then one day you lose control and do something dumb or develop a mental disorder. The technical term for this is “repression,” and it means that the harder you try to deny your dark side, the stronger it gets.

I think that’s what happened in these scandals. The people couldn’t face their own darker side. So they held it down, denied it, projected it onto others, who they denounced. All the while their dark part got stronger. Until one day, probably not realizing why, these people found themselves doing the very thing they said they hated.

I think it’s better to be honest with ourselves. We’re all mixtures of good and bad, and if we realize that we’ll probably turn out okay. It’s possible to work around one’s “shadow” side without giving in to it. In fact Jung, and most of the people who have studied the philosophy of mind, teach that repression never works very well. It’s better to find a way to channel the “shadow” into something you can live with honestly.

I had a pretty violent adolescence and that’s part of my “shadow side.” As an adult I’ve channeled that into the martial arts where it does no harm and some good. I'm a multiple black belt, and that's a very good way for me to express this part of myself.

If someone has a strong erotic urge in his or her shadow side, it’s possible to deal with it by making sure that part of one’s romantic relationship stays in good shape.

If your shadow pushes you to take risks, maybe you can deal with that by taking up an extreme sport or some other socially acceptable form of risk-taking.

I know more than a few people who deal with their shadow by writing about it, or expressing it in artistic form. You don’t have to give in to your shadow. You can channel it instead, and that’s always a better way than denial and repression.

Mostly it comes down to honesty. It’s important for each of us to know who and what we are, and to find a way to be at peace with that without hypocrisy. Ain’t none of us perfect.