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“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
― Gospel of Thomas
Introduction
This is Part 1 of my text-based interview with Emerald from the DiamondNet YouTube channel. I found her obscure and IMO underrated channel going down the rabbit-hole of YouTube. She talks a lot about the nuts and bolts of spirituality without the fluff, an in particular interest for me are here videos on the Shadow.
I am in the process of doing and integrating my own shadow work through dream analysis with the help of a Jungian psychoanalyst…so you’ll be seeing a few posts about the Shadow in the upcoming weeks!
What we cover in the conversation:
What the Shadow is and what it isn’t
Emerald’s story about doing shadow work and how it was transformational
How our shadow, if not acknowledged, sabotages our life
The impact of the shadow on our relationships
Ways to start noticing and integrating your own shadow
What is the shadow? Explain it to a 5-year old.
The Shadow is a term that refers to the tendency that we as human beings have towards creating blind-spots in our perception.
We unconsciously create these blind-spots in order to avoid being aware of aspects of ourselves that we’re either unable or unwilling to be aware of at a given time.
To put it in simpler terms, think of the Shadow like a dark closet in the human psyche, where we lock away parts of ourselves to forget about.
Then, when we experience traumas or unmet needs, or we make decisions about our identity and worldview, we end up putting on the blinders to certain aspects of ourselves. And we attempt to cut away and discard the parts of ourselves that feel threatening to our self-concept or that feel shameful or unsafe in some other way.
And these fragments of the personality that we cut away relegated to the dark closet that is the Shadow.
And when we repress these parts and put them in the Shadow, they become autonomous from the conscious personality.
This means that each Shadow Aspect has its own agendas and needs that might be quite different from our conscious agendas and needs. And these autonomous Shadow Aspects operate outside of our conscious control.
This makes us operate like a vehicle with many steering wheels.
So, consciously, we might be trying to turn left. But we have 10 Shadow Aspects in the trunk of the car (each with their own hidden steering wheel). And some might be trying to turn right or go straight or move in a totally different direction.
This is why the Shadow is seen as negative… because it often leads to unhelpful or destructive behaviors that we consciously don’t want to engage in.
For example, we can get into patterns of self-sabotage and procrastination that set us up for failure in our personal and professional lives.
Or we can engage in unhealthy coping mechanisms like addictions or avoidant behavior to cope with the unprocessed pain of our Shadow Aspects.
We can also end up in familiar patterns of dysfunctional or unfulfilling relationships due to the unconscious patterns that our Shadow Aspects are playing through.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but we can end up in all of these patterns despite our conscious attempts to do the opposite.
What got you interested in shadow work?
Between the ages of 20 and 25, I was going through a Dark Night of the Soul in the aftermath of a combination of traumatic experiences and awakening experiences that undermined my entire worldview and identity.
In order to maintain the identity and worldview that I was holding, I had to put many aspects of my personality into the Shadow.
And so, when I was facing tons of difficult situations where I wasn’t able to live up to the positive identities that I was holding onto, and I also had a couple of experiences of ego transcendence, my paradigm and my identity was totally shattered. And there was a total loss of meaning.
For a couple of years after that traumatic and numinous time, I became a shell of myself because I didn’t know how to reconcile what I experienced in my awakenings. But I knew that I couldn’t go back to my previous way of thinking.
And one day, at age 22 or 23, I was listening to Tool and pacing around. Then suddenly, the phrase “Masculine and Feminine Principle” jumped to my mind. I thought it sounded interesting because in my awakening experiences, I experienced an energy that I could only describe as Feminine.
I had previously thought of Masculinity and Femininity as a social construct. And in that experience, there was this awareness of a Feminine energy in the plants and in me, that I was always pushing away. There were many parts of myself that I had repressed that came up to the surface in those awakening experiences.
But a couple years later, the phrase “Masculine and Feminine Principle” jumped into my mind. So, I decided to type it into Google, and I found this blog called Matrignosis. The blog belongs to Jean Raffa, who is my favorite Jungian author.
I really resonated with her blog, so I ordered and read all of her books. It felt like I was reading books that a 70-year-old version of myself from the future had written. And I could finally start to make sense of things and see a way forward.
So, I spent the following year immersing myself in the works of various Jungian authors.
This is what began my Shadow Work journey, and it’s gone to all sorts of interesting places in the years since then.
What do most people get wrong about the shadow?
The biggest misconception about the Shadow is that people tend to envision the Shadow as this dark and negative “other self” that exists in the Unconscious. This is often symbolically depicted as a Shadow being.
But the reality is that the Shadow is more like a place than it is like a negative “other self”.
As I’d mentioned before, the Shadow is like a dark closet in the psyche. It’s like the psyche’s blind spot. And the Shadow’s function is to ignore parts of ourselves.
But these parts aren’t inherently negative. That’s another misconception. These parts are neutral. We just might feel ashamed of them or want to repress them because they undermine our cherished identities and worldviews.
Or they might be dealing with unprocessed feelings regarding traumatic experiences and unmet needs. So, these parts are difficult to be present with because the emotions are too intense to process all at once.
So, when integrating the Shadow, we’re not trying to integrate the “bad” part of our personality. We’re integrating the parts of ourselves that have been rejected.
Can you give me a few specific examples of negative ways the shadow plays out in our lives?
The Shadow can lead us down paths that we consciously don’t want to go down.
There’s a famous quote from Jung where he said,
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”
This is true, because our Shadow Aspects are working outside of the scope of our conscious radar to bring us closer to facing with and integrating them.
This often means that they will lead us into the same traumatic patterns that we experienced earlier in our lives to get us to face them. Here are some examples…
Example #1:
Let’s say that there is a woman named Julie. And when Julie was a child, her parents never met her needs for validation. She always wanted her parents to appreciate the efforts that she would make towards impressing them and pleasing them. But they never noticed or acknowledged her attempts.
So as a child, she’d make little art projects to show them in hopes of getting acknowledgement and praise. And they’d just wave her off when she’d show them her project and say “Uh huh.” or a half-hearted “That’s nice dear.”
Or when she’d bring home good grades to show them, she’d get similar responses. The same was true in her teen years whenever she’d put forth efforts to help her parents with little odd jobs and errands. They simply wouldn’t acknowledge her efforts.
Then when she’s 30, she meets a guy named Jim who is just as unlikely to validate her efforts as her parents were.
And she immediately experiences intense feelings of attraction to Jim and gets into a relationship with him.
The reason for the intense attraction is because the Shadow Aspect that was repressed because her parents never met her need for validation, now sees an opportunity to close the loop of the unmet need from the past.
This Shadow Aspect is still stuck in the loop of “I need the validation from my parents.”
So, this aspect is unlikely to be interested in a partner who will actually acknowledge and validate Julie’s efforts.
Instead, it’s going to want a partner who is a carbon copy of her invalidating parents… because her childhood goal was to get validation from people who are not validating.
So, this Shadow Aspect will influence Julie to repeat the pattern of seeking validation from invalidating people in hopes of getting a different outcome.
So, the idea is that ‘If Julie can get Jim to validate her efforts, then it’s the same as getting her parents to validate her efforts.’
This of course, doesn’t work and just leads to more invalidating people in Julie’s life. And it leads to a continued cycle of Julie putting in tons of effort that’s never appreciated or acknowledged.
Example #2:
To give another example, let’s say that there’s a man named Bill who consciously wants to start his own business and become financially free.
Consciously, Bill thinks of himself as a loner who doesn’t really need people in his life. But this isn’t true.
Bill has a repressed Shadow Aspect that has a strong need for social connection. But Bill’s identity and worldview doesn’t allow him to be conscious of this Shadow Aspect and its social needs.
Now currently, Bill is struggling financially. So, he has to live with roommates. And he has to carpool to work. And he has to do his laundry at the laundromat.
So, he really wants to make more money, but perplexingly he finds himself self-sabotaging and not putting effort into his business.
The reason he’s sabotaging himself is because this Shadow Aspect that needs connection KNOWS that as soon as Bill starts making more money, he’s going to buy his own house, have his own vehicle, and have his own washer and dryer.
And this Shadow Aspect would suddenly have no outlet to meet its social needs.
Bill thinks of himself as a loner that doesn’t need anyone. So, he’s DEFINITELY not going to be making any effort to connect with others.
So, this Shadow Aspect subtly influences Bill to self-sabotage his business goals.
The shadow is, by definition, not visible to us. So how can we start to notice our own shadow? Are there techniques?
This is the tricky thing about Shadow Work. The Shadow is unconscious to us by its very definition.
Luckily, every Shadow Aspect has symptoms that spring above the surface of consciousness.
I like to think about Shadow Aspects like a root vegetable… like a carrot.
The orange part of the carrot (the root) grows underground. So, if we’re looking around for carrots, we won’t be able to see that.
But we can get used to recognizing the leaves of the carrot, and this will enable us to find the carrot and dig it up.
We want to do the same thing with our Shadow Aspects.
The leaves (symptoms) of a Shadow Aspect includes things like agendas, behaviors, coping mechanisms, and emotions.
So, if we notice ourselves constantly engaging in a particular coping mechanism, we can name a Shadow Aspect for that coping mechanism.
Let’s say that my coping mechanism is to people please. So, I name this Aspect of myself “People Pleaser Emerald”.
Now, being a people pleaser is not in my Shadow. In this case, I am fully aware of the fact that I’m people pleasing. But I don’t yet know the deeper reason why.
At this point, I can begin asking myself questions about how the people pleasing is meant to serve or protect me in some way. This will allow me to understand more about the Shadow dynamics that exist underneath that coping mechanism.
So, let’s say that I ask myself the question, “How is people pleasing meant to serve me?”
Then, I come up with the answer that it helps me avoid conflict.
After that, I might ask myself “Why am I trying to avoid conflict?”
Then I realize that when I experience conflict, it makes me feel like I did something wrong and that I’m in trouble. And this makes me feel shame.
So on the level of the symptoms, I have an issue with people pleasing. But if I explore that symptom deeper, I can recognize that the root problem is actually shame.
And I can then name out this Shadow Aspect as “Shameful Emerald”.
Then, from there I can explore this aspect of me even more deeply.
So, when doing Shadow Work, we want to look for the symptoms and explore those symptoms down to their deeper roots.
Once we bring light to our shadows, what can we do to work with them to re-integrate them in our lives?
One thing that’s important to note here is that making a Shadow Aspect conscious to us and integrating a Shadow Aspect are sometimes two different things.
We can become aware of a Shadow Aspect, but not yet be ready to integrate it.
With that being said, we want to always be expressing our Shadow Aspects in positive ways.
Shadow Aspects are often misunderstood as negative aspects of the personality. This leads a lot of people to the confusion of “How can I integrate or express this aspect when it’s so destructive?”
This one really confused me for a long time.
So, it’s important to recognize that integration of a Shadow Aspect doesn’t’ mean expressing its negative behaviors. It’s about becoming aware of the negative behaviors and understanding the deeper reason why those behaviors are there.
Then we can work with that Shadow Aspect to get it to drop the negative coping mechanisms that it’s engaging in through addressing the root issue.
Once the root issue is resolved, we can then express from these parts of ourselves in a more exalted way.
For example, let’s say that someone has dealt with some trauma regarding feelings of powerlessness. So, an aspect of themselves got relegated to the Shadow that’s feeling chronically powerless.
Then, this person started having frequent episodes of explosive anger to cope with those chronic feelings of powerlessness.
So, if this person is looking to integrate their Shadow, it isn’t about expressing the anger. And it isn’t about expressing the powerlessness.
It’s about working through the anger and the powerlessness at its root, to access the part of themselves that’s bore the brunt of that trauma.
This might look like facing past traumas where they felt powerless over things.
For example, let’s say that they were emotionally abused by one of their parents, and they had no power to stop them.
This would create a situation where that feeling of powerless was so intense that they needed to repress this aspect of themselves in order to cope with the situation.
So, resolving the root of their powerlessness would mean facing with the repressed part of themselves that still feels stuck in the abusive situation and still feels powerless.
And it means feeling those feelings of fear and powerlessness again in order to process that trauma that was not able to be processed in childhood.
Then, once the core wound of powerlessness is resolved at its root, this enables the coping mechanism of explosive anger to drop away.
Then, potentials that their child-self had that didn’t get to blossom before because all the energy was going towards coping with the abuse through powerlessness and anger, can now be redirected towards higher order needs and personal growth.
Then, they can express this Shadow Aspect in its positive exalted form.
Is there anything you'd like to share about your YouTube channel or courses?
Yes! If anyone wants to learn more about Shadow Work, you can check out my FREE 60-Minute Shadow Integration Masterclass called “The 6 Simple Steps to Shadow Integration.”
You can watch the masterclass for free by going to shadowintegration.org/masterclass
Thanks for reading! If you’re doing your own shadow work, or have in the past, feel free to share and comment below.