Managing The Weather

My Shadow and Me, Part II

Nobody ever said it out loud. It was simply the cultural agreement: Keep the moody, unsteady, angry people happy.

An outsized sense of responsibility lives inside me. It whispers:You should understand this person’s pain. You should help. It’s your job to make sure they leave feeling okay.

Put simply, the script goes like this: If they’re hurting, you’re responsible.

Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash

This has been a summer of shadow work, both with spiritual directees and even more so personally. It feels like a capstone course in deconstruction. Every time I think I’ve graduated from one of those old agreements of fundamentalist Christianity, another emerges from beneath the floorboards asking to be named, grieved, and integrated.

One of those agreements surfaced recently through an unexpected encounter with an old friend from an earlier season of life. The conversation itself wasn’t all that remarkable, but what it awakened inside me was.

I discovered a part of myself from waaay back that still believes I’m responsible for managing another person’s emotional world.

While my shadow doesn’t believe I’m God, something in there does believe I’m responsible for preventing other people from feeling what they’re feeling—which is its own form of perverse omnipotence.

It’s not the loud, narcissistic version that bloviates from the Oval Office proclaiming, “Only I can fix this country.” It’s like a quieter cousin whispering, “Only I can keep this relationship from falling apart.” Both assume a power no human being actually possesses.

Children raised within religious environments around emotionally unpredictable adults become amateur climatologists. They learn to read faces the way sailors read the sky. From across the room, you notice her sigh or his tightened jaw. You hear the cabinet door close just a little harder than normal. Long before they can explain what they’re doing, children in these environments are scanning the emotional weather, adjusting themselves in hopes of preventing the coming storm.

Looking back, I realize it wasn’t God who possessed all the gravity on planet Ryan. It was the emotionally volatile people who claimed to speak for God.

Their moods became commandments. Their approval became sacramental. And their disappointment in me was a divine judgment.

You can’t expect a child to discern the difference between the finicky emotional weather of immature, unhealed adults and the voice of God.

A child who believes it’s their responsibility to manage the emotions of their caregivers and authorities begins filling their shadow bag with fears of alienation, rejection, and abandonment. Those fears don’t disappear. They grow up into patterns of codependency, enmeshment, and relationships that continue long after their expiration date.

If this is hitting some type of nerve for you, I can’t recommend Xavier Dagba’s Scars of Gold strongly enough. He suggests that beneath our fear of alienation lies something even deeper: an addiction to belonging.

“The highest invitation of this fear is, therefore, to liberate ourselves from our addiction to belonging. It is to make peace with the possibility that choosing to stand in our authenticity may cause us to walk alone for a while.”¹

But wait—we were made to belong, right?

Absolutely we were.

Belonging is one of our deepest human needs.

The tragedy is that many of us raised in high-control fundamentalism weren’t taught real kin-dom level belonging; we were taught its white nationalist counterfeit. We were taught that belonging was scarce and highly conditional. Something to earn. One wrong belief, one moral failure, one sign of uncertainty, and you could find yourself on the other side of the belonging fence… for eternity!

Those are the conditions that create an addiction to belonging.

Let me say it loudly, THOSE CRUSTY RELIGIOUS GATEKEEPERS OF LAW & ORDER DO NOT RUN THE SHOW ANYMORE! Neither do the old stories you’ve internalized about belonging. One of the practices helping me bring these old fears out of the shadows is becoming much more curious and conversational with my body instead of overriding it.

When I unexpectedly crossed paths with that old friend, we made eye contact and he started walking my direction. Immediately, I felt a gang of caffeinated Oompa Loompas bouncing up and down in a rave inside my stomach.

Not long ago, I would have ignored those sensations. I would have powered through the uncomfortable conversation, pretended everything was fine, and probably shamed myself for feeling anxious in the first place.

Instead, I leaned in and got real curious.

Over the next day, I listened carefully. I asked my body and my inner committee of distinct psychological parts what they were trying to tell me.

Eventually, I could feel their response:

You’re feeling disproportionately responsible for managing something you were never meant to hold.

Damn. Ok.

That landed in my soul with the type of serious force in which you instantly know it’s true.

Fundamentalism taught me to distrust my body and over-trust my sense of responsibility. Every anxious sensation was something to override rather than something inviting curiosity and integration. In that world, Jungian psychology would have been dismissed as equally dangerous as Dungeons & Dragons. And my body would have been dismissed as deceptive as MTV.

And yet, decades later, both shadow work and bodily awareness are helping me lay down burdens God never asked me to carry.

So, friend, here’s a blessing I’m learning to receive for myself and if you resonated with my above confessions, you are so welcome to make it your own!

May Spirit gently loosen your grip on responsibilities that were never yours.

May your nervous system begin to learn what your heart has long believed—that another person’s pain is not a referendum on your worth.

May you find the courage to walk alone—to disappoint people when faithfulness invites that.

May belonging cease to be something you chase and become something you receive as a gift.

And when your body whispers that an old burden has returned, may you have the patience to listen, the wisdom to discern, and the graced freedom to lay it down.

Deep peace to your body.

Christ’s peace to your soul.

The sweetest of stillness to the younger parts of you that have been standing watch for far too long.

1. Dagba, Xavier, Scars of Gold: A Framework for Self-Liberation, Integration, and Healing Through Shadow Work. Hay House 2025. p. 29