Sermon: Seeing Your Shadow

Seeing Your Shadow

Ana Levy-Lyons

February 1, 2015

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

On a Saturday back in 2002, Dr. Bennet Omalu pulled into the parking lot at a Pittsburg coroner’s office to do a routine autopsy. He was annoyed to be stuck working the weekend shift and he had been out clubbing the night before. As he arrived, he found the parking lot packed with news trucks and reporters and cameras. He had to fight his way through to get inside the building. “What’s going on?” he asked inside. “That’s Mike Webster on the table,” they said. “Who’s that?” he asked.

Let me pause here to say that Bennet Omalu was probably the only person in all of Pittsburg at that time who did not know who Mike Webster was. Mike Webster was the legendary center for the Pittsburg Steelers, considered by some to be the best center in NFL history. Five years prior he had been inducted into the Hall of Fame. And he had just died of a heart attack at age 50. Everybody knew that. To not know that was like not knowing that today is Super Bowl Sunday.

But Omalu is a Nigerian immigrant who was, frankly, uninterested in football. In fact the game seemed really bizarre to him. Growing up in Nigeria, in his own words, “I thought these were people dressed like extraterrestrials, you know, like they were going to Mars or something, headgears and shoulder pads. And I wondered why as a child why did they have to dress that way.” He figured they must get hit in the head a lot if they have to wear those ridiculous helmets.

Omalu considers himself a very spiritual person and when he works, when he’s doing an autopsy, he feels like he can communicate with the spirit of the dead. He talks to the corpse and asks how it died, and he feels guided. So there he was in 2002 with the body of Mike Webster, saying, “Mike, you need to help me. I know there’s something wrong, but you need to help me tell the world what happened to you.” He commented later that the body seemed worn and drained.

Webster had ostensibly died of a heart attack but he had also suffered from some kind of extreme dementia toward the end of his life. He had lost all his money, couldn’t keep a job, was living in his truck, addicted to prescription drugs, depressed, paranoid, had accumulated an arsenal of weapons and was constantly threatening NFL officials. He had gone to see doctors about memory loss and excruciating headaches and when asked if he had ever been in a car accident, he answered, “Only about 25,000 times.”

As part of the autopsy, Omalu opened up Webster’s skull. His brain looked normal. He had died of a heart attack, after all, and everything seemed kosher. The technicians asked Omalu if they could sew him back up and go home. But Omalu did something a little unconventional for the circumstances. Following his instinct, he ordered that the brain be “fixed,” which is a kind of chemical process that allows the brain to be solidified and sliced and examined on the inside. Everyone thought he was crazy.

But when Omalu got the images back from the lab, he couldn’t even believe this was Webster’s brain. It was profoundly damaged in a way that was not consistent with Alzheimer’s or any other known condition. There were changes that, according to Omalu, shouldn’t be in a 50-year-old’s brain – that shouldn’t be in any brain at all. And he realized that he had stumbled upon something huge.

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung introduced to psychology the concept of “the shadow.” The shadow is the negative or destructive part of our being that is hidden from view. It’s the suppressed, sometimes sinister unconscious. It’s not a question of whether or not someone has a shadow – according to Jung, we all have it. It’s a question of how we engage it, how hard we look to try to see it, to come to terms with it, and ideally assimilate it into our consciousness. The more we can bring it into the light, the more we can work with it for good. The more hidden it is, he says, the more “dense” it is and the more power it has over us. Jung writes, “A man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps … living below his own level.”

We can probably all think of parts of ourselves that are the self-destructive parts – the parts we are ashamed of, the parts we want to bury and hide from the world. Sometimes our shadows are so deeply painful, we can’t even admit them to ourselves. Those shadows are the most dangerous of all – the weaknesses that make us give up without even trying, the insecurities that make us push our loved ones away, the fears that make us live small, the blinding rage that makes us lash out. We act out without even knowing what we’re doing. When our shadow is hidden, we don’t know what we don’t know. And even when we do know it, sometimes we just can’t accept it and make the changes we need to make. We retreat, like Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog, who tomorrow may see his shadow and get so scared that he ducks back down into his hole and stays there for weeks on end.

Bennet Omalu discovered the shadow side of football. It’s a side of the game that we all know about now, that we can all see – it has been brought into the light. Players receive multiple concussions over the course of their careers resulting in permanent, debilitating brain damage. We see this now, but this illumination was hard won. The book League of Denial: the NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth, details this story. It’s the story of Omalu’s discovery and of the NFL’s subsequent attempts to cover it up, discredit Omalu, and make the whole thing just go away. The authors trace the history of the denial of this shadow. They knew, like Carl Jung knew, that we humans are scared of our own shadow – it’s too terrifying, too painful, too disconcerting at the deepest level of our being. Because the shadow is part of us.

And so this thing that emerged in the collective unconscious of football, at first nobody could believe it. The information was simply absurd – unthinkable that their beloved game could be destroying its heroes. And then, in the face of the indisputable evidence, the players began hiding their own concussions from the public. As recently as a few years ago, over half of NFL players said they would try to hide a concussion rather than take themselves out of a game. This, even while being able to talk about the fact that they know they are going to be messed up later in life – that they’re going to have trouble walking, that they’re going to have trouble speaking, that they will be, so to speak, a shadow of their former selves. One player who was interviewed about why he would not report a concussion said, “I’m not going to tell on myself.”

This “I’m not going to tell on myself” has echoes of Jung’s description of a man “standing in his own light.” It speaks of a person at war with him or herself – a divided being that can’t turn and face its own shadow. And the shadow overwhelms it. “Shadow” is an interesting metaphor because of course shadows are shaped like the objects that cast them. They’re not spontaneous and separate. They are intimately related to those objects. In human terms, our shadows often correspond to unique gifts and strengths that we have. They are the opposite sides of a coin that makes us who we are. You can’t lose just one side of a coin. And our ego – the part of ourselves that we like, that we see, and that we do claim as “us” – holds on desperately to itself at all costs.

It had been evident long before Bennet Omalu came along that football players were becoming mentally debilitated at a young age. But NFL doctors couldn’t see it. The people who knew and cared the most about football couldn’t see it, they wouldn’t see it, and when it surfaced now and then, they went back down into their holes. And how could it have been otherwise? The raw aggression of 300-pound men repeatedly slamming each other to the ground is not just incidental to the game. It’s not something that can be just neatly and politely removed with the coroner’s scalpel because someone might get a headache. It is central to the game. It is, at least in part, what the game is about. The game is a celebration of male strength and power. So it’s not surprising that its inverse, its shadow, is a condition that creates ultimate weakness, dependency, and internal collapse. And it’s also not surprising that this shadow – the fact that these heroes are rendered so vulnerable by the very thing that made them so powerful – would be virtually impossible to see. To anyone invested in the culture of football, which was most of the country, the implications of letting it sink in were literally unthinkable.

It took someone who did not care about football to be able to see its shadow. It took someone who was born in another country. It took someone who knew nothing about the game, to whom the players looked like extraterrestrials, to whom the whole thing was literally alien. It took someone with no investment in the institution to see it for what it was. The people who became his foes recognized immediately that his “otherness” posed an existential threat to football as we know it. And they were vicious about it. In an interview, Omalu said, “Yes, some of them actually said that I’m attacking the American way of life. ‘How dare you, a foreigner like you from Nigeria? What is Nigeria known for, the eighth most corrupt country in the world? Who are you? Who do you think you are to come to tell us how to live our lives?’”

The fact is that Bennet Omalu is a threat to the American way of life and to the multi-billion dollar industry of football. But he is a blessing for humanity. When he asked, “Who’s Mike Webster?” he showed the value of standing a little apart from the culture and institutions we love. He showed that being an outsider is sometimes the only way to see inside something. (Maybe we can apply this to the other great issues of our day – climate change, for example, or poverty in this country.)

And each of us would be well-served to nurture our own internal Bennet Omalu – some corner of our being that is not invested at all in celebrating our social accomplishments or preserving who we think we are or who we think we should be. We need a corner of our being that is not attached to what our ego wants but rather wants what is best for us deep down. This is the spiritual self, the self who can help us see ourselves from a little distance, as if we were extraterrestrials. This is the self who can lovingly coax us out of our holes, allow us to see our shadow and not be afraid, and herald the coming of the warmth and light of spring.