Shadow Work: Knowing Yourself
In Jungian psychology, the shadow represents the hidden and repressed aspects of the personality that can lead to self-sabotage when not allowed expression. Shadow work is the process of better integrating this part of yourself into your life.
Have you ever gone through a period where, despite concerted effort, you weren’t able to grow, develop or change? During this time you may have done everything you could think of to make progress, but still felt like it just made matters worse. If this wasn’t just a temporary setback but months or years of the same self-limiting patterns, then you were witnessing your shadow in play.
When the shadow seeks expression, an otherwise intelligent and motivated individual may experience repeated failures that are immobilizing. There is an introspective process you can go through that helps you bring the hidden aspects of yourself into the light, better understand their impulses and integrate them into your conscious life.
Symptom
Your conscious efforts are not translating into desired results and you don't know why or what to do about it.
Problem
Your shadow may be causing you to self-sabotage, leading to inertia and perhaps learned helplessness.
Solution
Shadow work will help you overcome this cycle of failure and start making progress.
Consciousness
According to Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity (e=mc2) the universe is made up of either pure energy or energy in mass form. Physicists have started to apply this theory to analyze conscious thought and they are beginning to see it as a form of matter. If this is the case, then consciousness is merely a type of stuff made up of energy. With that, the same laws of nature that govern matter must govern consciousness. So it is possible to find and use a natural law to understand your conscious and unconscious mind.
Inertia
When you self-sabotage, it feels as if the conscious energy you are exerting to improve is not working. But that is impossible, because the very definition of energy is work being done, so if you are exerting energy something must be happening to it. The energy you are exerting is working, it's doing something. The better question is: what? Understanding what is happening to the conscious energy you are exerting is key to decoding your unconscious self.
If you push a boulder and it doesn't move, what happens to the energy exerted? Newton's laws of motion can explain. Whether at rest or in motion, inertia is the tendency of an object to resist a change in its current state. The object will remain constant until it is acted on by external forces, however the net sum of all these forces must be greater than zero or it will remain as is.
In other words, the massive boulder does not move when you push it (at least not a detectable distance) because there are other forces (such as gravity, the weight of the boulder and the ground) counteracting your force. This causes friction which ultimately results in the boulder not moving and all the energy you exert being transformed into heat. Ever wonder why you warm up after trying to move something heavy? This is why.
Coming back to your conscious efforts being blocked: this indicates that there is friction in play — some other force(s) equal but opposite in the magnitude of the energy you are exerting. You are not aware of it, but your efforts are being repelled causing a build up of excess energy (heat) that's not being transformed into its intended state. You may experience this "heat" as fear, frustration, anger, anxiety, disappointment or hopelessness.
If this continues you could develop learned helplessness which causes you to adopt a hard-to-break negative mindset that failure in your life is inevitable. And that, of course, only perpetuates the cycle of negativity.
Momentum
In order to create momentum, you must find the friction and then override its effects. Though this is no small feat. Unless there are obvious external actors interfering with your ability to make progress, you will have to turn inward. There could be hidden conflicts within your own psyche that are sabotaging your success.
You may think of the conscious mind as something you are in complete control of, and that you act freely and autonomously as a result. But this is not entirely true. Your ego, or conscious mind, is the boulder. And it sometimes acts in accord with what we know about inertia — by maintaining the status quo.
The ego represents the thoughts, memories and emotions that you are aware of, and when it absorbs and represses the expression of energy this keeps you stuck. That means your conscious efforts can actually prevent you from making progress. The ego is not doing this on purpose. It is not the enemy, as some tend to misinterpret. Like the boulder, it is constantly trying to manage very powerful but opposing forces.
According to Jung, there are two aspects of your unconscious. The personal unconscious represents your own forgotten or suppressed desires, beliefs and memories (information present but not recallable). The collective unconscious are archetypes or primordial memories, beliefs and behaviors we share as a species.
These hidden aspects are called the shadow because they are deep within the psyche and are constantly at battle to seek expression. Often they contradict your persona, or the outward mask you wear. Sensing that these messy elements of your inner self are incongruent with your public image, the ego blocks them when they attempt to emerge.
Though well intentioned, this phenomenon hurts your personal growth. The ego neatly packages and presents only a facet of who you are, which is often the side that fits in nicely with societal norms. Your shadow represents all the other positive and negative elements that you’d rather not expose, but that are core to who you really are.
Shadow Work
In order to break the ego from this cycle and experience momentum, you have to do shadow work. Shadow work allows you to reveal, understand, and nurture the hidden elements of yourself that are seeking expression but being repressed. Even though the term “shadow” is used, understand that this denotes that which is hidden, not necessarily bad. As you do shadow work, be open-minded and compassionate with yourself. There may be aspects of who you are that you don't like or deem as negative, but many that are positive too.
Patterns
Archetypes are the patterns of belief and behaviors that are rooted in the collective consciousness. Understanding which archetypes are most dominant in your psyche is a great way to reveal elements of your mindset that you aren’t fully aware of. Reading books on mythology or taking a personality test are a couple of ways to accomplish this.
Projections
Looking at how you project onto others is an excellent way to reveal your hidden side. Psychological projection is a mechanism that the ego uses to protect you from the impulses that stir up from the unconscious.
When you are quick to judge or call out an unfavorable trait in someone else, it is highly likely that is one of your dominant but suppressed traits. It's just that some part of your psyche can't accept this aspect of you. So your ego tries to protect you by denying that it exists in you, and strengthens its stance by attributing it to and condemning it in another.
Emotions
Observing and listening to how you feel is another way to uncover the parts of yourself in hiding, particularly if you have intense emotional reactions — either positive or negative. Keep in mind that your shadow isn't only hiding your negative aspects. There could be just as many undeveloped positive aspects causing you to self-sabotage.
If you find yourself becoming overly joyful, excited or inspired in certain situations or experiences, without really understanding why, this could be indicative of a positive part of yourself seeking expression. The process of analyzing and improving your emotional intelligence can uncover a lot about these inner drives.
Questions
Self-inquiry is also an effective tool for shadow work. It is the process of asking yourself a series of thoughtful questions to illuminate the cause of certain situations, your reactions and the impact on your life. But in doing so, beware of self-blame.
The goal is not to criticize but to ask, listen and reflect in order to become more self-aware. Also keep in mind that not everything, be it favorable or unfavorable, happens to you because of you. There could be circumstances outside your control and you may not always find answers within.
Beliefs
When looking back at your failures and feelings of frustration around them, you may find yourself asking: is this self-sabotage, is this random or is this fate? This process can lead to existential questions and it’s important to develop a perspective on them. Going through the process of developing a life philosophy can be a highly rewarding process of reconciling the different parts of self. This may involve picking and choosing from disparate schools of thoughts and belief systems to satisfy your hidden needs, desires and impulses.
Use this as an opportunity to explore your beliefs and refine them, as the conflict you experience within your inner self could be calling for a personal paradigm shift. Being able to manifest your life vision and dreams from the metaphysical to the physical realm is key to happiness. But overcoming inertia is the inevitable obstacle you must face and that requires a tremendous amount of net positive force.
If deep down you are confused about what your life vision is or are conflicted about the means by which you should authentically bring it forth, your force cancels out and you will experience major resistance when attempting to transfer energy into matter (i.e. turn thoughts into things). Don’t be afraid to question and replace old beliefs. A fresh perspective on life could be just what you need to reconcile the different aspects of your inner self. This will give you the focused force to expend energy intentionally and efficiently and push away the boulders blocking you from success.
Knowing Yourself
In our drive to thrive we can be quite hard on ourselves. We sometimes hold ourselves to impossible standards, follow rules and pursue goals that aren’t in alignment with our authentic selves. The internal blocks we experience are often in opposition to overload, burnout and the inconsequential things we give more attention to than we should.
But when you use shadow work to understand yourself and gain a clear sense of direction, you may not even need to use force. You can persuade instead of coerce yourself into action and often see outstanding outcomes in your life with minimal effort or energy expended. Just like a body of water can effortlessly sweep a boulder away in an instant, gaining insight into who you really are, using these techniques, will help you navigate life more efficiently and dynamically.
More on Shadow Work
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