The Nation’s Shadow: Grief, Reckoning, and the Psyche’s Breaking Point
Introduction:
In 2007, the U.S. was involved in a war in Iraq. I was attending Pacifica Graduate Institute, in the doctoral depth psychology program. I wrote a paper for a collective trauma class, where I felt agitated from the curriculum (as was intended), and from this eruption of oppositional & cognitive dissonance, I had dreams where the recurring avoidance of the national shadow would recycle, repeat, and rekindle a repetitive trauma pattern until one day we would be consumed, and no longer able to contain the burden of oppression.
Last night, I absorbed updates, news feeds, social media posts about the U.S. bombing Iran on the Solstice, ironically the longest day of the year. I returned to my paper and edited out the extended academic material, and updated the basic premise with current events. My main message: we will repeat this pattern until we face, accept, and deal with the pain we’ve repressed as a nation. This may be a new concept to readers; my attempt to explain is held in the words below.
The Nation’s Shadow
Title:
The Nation’s Shadow: Grief, Reckoning, and the Psyche’s Breaking Point
The U.S. bombing of Iran in June 2025 is more than a foreign policy decision. It signals a deeper breaking point, a moment when something in the collective spirit of the country feels suddenly and painfully exposed. For generations, the U.S. has upheld a narrative of itself as uniquely virtuous, destined to lead the world by moral example. This idea, known as American exceptionalism, has often erased or excused the violence committed in its name. To see yet another war begin, to witness the cycle repeat without reckoning, tears at that tender mythology and forces many to confront a reality they were taught to deny. The rupture is psychic because it unsettles not only what we believe about our country, but what we believe about ourselves. This rupture is not new, but it is newly unbearable. We have crossed a threshold, what Carl Jung might call an "unquestionable boundary," a moment when the psyche of a people can no longer repress what it has refused to integrate. This is not simply a political emergency; it is a crisis of soul. I feel this rupture deeply, and I write not as an observer, but as someone who is grieving, questioning, and searching alongside you.
Jung wrote that what we do not make conscious, we are doomed to enact. The shadow, as he named it, contains all that a person, or a nation, cannot bear to admit: the denied truth, the disowned rage, the historic grief we have never truly mourned. A nation that refuses to acknowledge its past is not innocent. It is fractured.
We are at that fracture now. And in this moment, I see clearly how the militarism we once exported is now marching through our own streets. Armored vehicles, surveillance drones, and heavily armed law enforcement no longer appear just in war zones—they now roam American cities under the guise of order. Constitutional protections such as due process have been gutted, particularly in immigrant detention centers and marginalized communities. The tools of oppression we once wielded abroad have returned home, and the legacy of empire is now embedded in the fabric of our domestic reality. What we have done to others, we are now doing to ourselves.
This is exactly what Jung warned us about: what we resist, persists. What we project outward will return inward with force. Our failure to integrate the shadow side of our national psyche has created a karmic feedback loop—we have become both the oppressor and the oppressed.
This moment of reckoning has been centuries in the making. American history is a tapestry woven with both profound ideals and brutal exclusions. But the dominant narrative has long depended on whitewashing suffering and gaslighting the people who remember it. For every heroic tale of revolution, there is a stolen land. For every liberty proclaimed, a body chained. And still, the national story insists on innocence.
Jung warns us: we can ignore the shadow, but not forever. Psyche will erupt. What has been buried will rise. And when it does, it will demand not retribution, but recognition.
Bayo Akomolafe, the Nigerian philosopher and poet, reminds us that, “The times are urgent, let us slow down.” This invitation counters the instinct to act quickly or fix what is broken. Instead, it calls us to pause and fully feel, to recognize that true transformation begins when we slow down enough to witness pain instead of bypassing it.
Howard Zinn, in A People’s History of the United States, turned our gaze to those who lived beneath the official stories: Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, immigrant laborers, and the silenced poor. Zinn’s work invites us to ask, whose voices are missing from the stories we were taught? His reframing challenges us to view history not through the lens of the powerful, but through the lived experiences of those who suffered and resisted oppression.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, stripped the veil from Manifest Destiny, showing it for what it was: state-sanctioned genocide. Her work reveals how the founding myths of the U.S. obscure centuries of dispossession, displacement, and violence against Native communities. She urges us to recognize that truth-telling about Indigenous genocide is essential to collective healing.
Clint Smith, in How the Word Is Passed, walks readers through the landscapes of memory, urging us to confront the physical and psychic architecture of racism that still stands. Smith brings the reader into cemeteries, plantations, and prisons to show how historical trauma lives in the land itself. His work helps us understand that memory is not abstract, it is embodied in place, policy, and psyche.
To grieve, in this context, is to become honest. Bayo Akomolafe's idea of fugitivity invites us not to escape but to disobey the inherited logics of domination. It is to step outside of the trance of progress and sit with the pain we inherited and perpetuated. Grief becomes an act of liberation.
This is what Frantz Fanon demanded when he called for decolonization of the mind. Fanon understood that colonization did not only steal land and labor; it fractured identity and corrupted the inner life of the oppressed. His call to decolonize is a call to heal the psychic wounds inflicted by centuries of domination.
What Paulo Freire envisioned when he wrote of critical consciousness. Freire believed that true liberation comes when the oppressed become aware of their condition and reclaim the power to name their reality. His pedagogy teaches that learning to see clearly is itself a revolutionary act.
What bell hooks practiced when she spoke of love as a revolutionary act. hooks expanded the idea of love beyond sentimentality; she saw it as an ethic of care, responsibility, and justice. For her, love was the foundation of resistance and the force that makes deep transformation possible.
What Cornel West embodies when he says, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” West reminds us that justice is not merely a policy goal, it is the visible expression of compassion, empathy, and moral clarity in our collective life. His vision asks us to hold both truth and tenderness as we pursue change.
These voices are not calling us back to innocence. They are calling us forward into responsibility.
What might it look like for America to sit with its grief? Germany has done this with Holocaust memorials that ask not for pride but for mourning. South Africa held public tribunals so people could speak what was once unspeakable. Rwanda rebuilt villages through truth-telling and forgiveness. America has had no such collective ritual. We have had protests, yes. Art, yes. A wall for fallen veterans. Courageous scholars and survivors who have spoken truth despite being told they were the problem.
But we have not yet turned toward the shadow as a nation.
And yet, it is there: in every redlined neighborhood, in every prison cell, in every water crisis, in every stolen child, in every denied history textbook, in every foreign bomb. It is there in the silence that follows each eruption of violence, as if silence were neutrality. It is not.
Jung would say we are now being asked to choose. Will we continue to split and scapegoat? Or will we integrate?
Bayo Akomolafe might say the cracks we fear are where new worlds leak in. This perspective invites us to embrace breakdown not as failure, but as fertile ground for imagining new possibilities. The rupture is not the end, it is the threshold.
I believe this is not a time for premature hope or platitudes. This is a time for reverence. For truth-telling. For bearing the unbearable, together. The healing of a nation will not come through denial, nor even through justice alone, but through a collective willingness to feel what has long been unfelt.
We do not heal by forgetting. We heal by remembering well. And then, only then, can we begin again.
I offer this not as a conclusion, but as a beginning. I am in this process too, learning to hold what hurts and to stay present through it. May we find the courage to remember together.
Otherwise, if we continue to ignore, to repress, to deny this national shadow, the burden becomes unbearable. The psyche, both collective and individual, cannot hold such dissonance without consequence. Frustration festers into collective neurosis. As a nation, we begin to unravel, and as individuals, we are left carrying the weight as symptoms—chronic anxiety, attention disorders, sleep disruption, disconnection, and despair. These are not random afflictions; they are the body and mind’s protest against unreconciled trauma. To pretend that history is behind us is to miss how thoroughly it lives in us. The cost of avoidance is health, dignity, and humanity.
References
Akomolafe, B. (n.d.). The times are urgent, let us slow down. Bayo Akomolafe.
https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/
Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2014). An Indigenous peoples’ history of the United States. Beacon Press.
Fanon, F. (2004). The wretched of the earth (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1961)
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed., M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1968)
hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. William Morrow.
Jung, C. G. (1953). Psychology and alchemy (R.F.C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (R.F.C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.
Smith, C. (2021). How the word is passed: A reckoning with the history of slavery across America. Little, Brown and Company.
West, C. (2004). Democracy matters: Winning the fight against imperialism. Penguin Press.
Zinn, H. (2005). A people’s history of the United States: 1492–present. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.