Honestly, if you havent read Carl Jung, pick up the cliff notes. The shadow is a helluva drug. People need to be seen as the hero in their own story, so we find people often in public work, social services, priesthoods, volunteer camps, positions of power— as the worst people of all. It’s a psychopath/sociopath thing that comes from the mind because you can’t see the darkness within yourself. And that darkness grows and grows and consumes you, because if you’re a bifurcated person and see yourself as “good” instead of “evil,” your inner guilt is eating your subconscious mind (unless you are a true psycho/sociopath) so you try harder and harder and profess your goodness to others constantly. I refuse to live a lie. Everyone within them has a devil and an angel, so to speak, and Jung says that by acknowledging your shadow self and confronting it, and feeding it tiny morsels to keep it at bay (like getting drunk with the boys twice a month or betting a small amount, some miniscule vice) the shadow becomes manageable. You can “integrate” it. His work on hero worship and the human fables/legends across the world and their similarities is mindblowing.