I was just reading this in a book about doing shadow work, embracing all aspects of ourselves etc... this is the late psychotherapist Barbara Hannah doing some combination of paraphrasing and quoting a talk once given by her esteemed mentor Carl Gustav Jung:
Quote:
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Our consciousness is like a ship or bowl floating on the surface of the unconscious. Each piece of the shadow that we realize has a weight, and our consciousness is lowered to that extent when we take it into our boat. Therefore, we might say that the main art of dealing with the shadow consists in the right loading of our boat: if we take on too little, we float right away from reality and become like a fluffy white cloud in the sky. If we take on too much, we may sink our boat.
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Not sure how relevant this may be to you but I'd found the comparison especially relevant regarding my expectations of others ..which I think are perfectly reasonable but not always realistic. 
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“We use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. One of things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean, the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day.”
— Antonio R. Damasio, “The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness” (p.28)
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