This is tied to my long fic, Understand Me, where Leone has a sort of… life-stopping breakdown, and autistic masking gets the better of him. In his time away from Passione jobs, he starts experiencing violent nightmares of his dad, who is seen in flashbacks sometime in the fic and is a significant contributor to all the shame he feels about himself. So, he starts seeing a psychoanalyst who can help him approach the contents of his dreams in small, safe increments.
I’m using the Jungian concept of shadow here. Per the Society of Analytical Psychology, ”Jung had a deep interest in the shadow – its form and content – and in the process of assimilating “the thing a person has no wish to be” [CW16, para 470]. (…) Complementary to Jung’s idea of the persona, which is “what oneself as well as others thinks one is” [CW9 para 221], the “shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality (…).” Leone’s shadow, in this case, is cowardly (to his judgement!); ashamed of himself, his sexuality, and his disability; he compensates for this by amping up that intimidating facade that made him come across more masculine and kept what he considers the more embarrassing sides of his autism locked away. I think his shadow would also make him critical of traits of himself that he sees in others, like Giorno for instance, because projection is how the shadow is encountered by others.
