Shadow work

5/20/25

I ran the Brooklyn half marathon, cold plunged for 18 minutes, ran Bay to Breakers and made videos about all of it. I resurrected my YouTube self. I discovered Carl Jung and my ego is bruised.

I’ve been reading about Jung's concept of the shadow. Before we get into it, you must believe that there is a conscious and an unconscious mind. The conscious mind consists of our thoughts. We can hear it. The unconscious mind can’t be heard, it’s deeper and hidden, but it shapes our emotions, habits and beliefs.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Jung

Humans are made up, broadly, of two parts – light and dark.

The light includes everything we aren’t terrified to admit about ourselves - our hardworking nature, dislike of certain foods, attention to detail, attunement to emotions, street smartness, ability to empathize with others etc. The dark includes things that are so suppressed that we don’t consciously know they are a part of us. Maybe our desire for destruction, violence, sex and power; our judgemental, envious side; our vulnerability; our coldness; our warmth; our self-reliance; our competitiveness. The dark is not all bad. It’s just the parts we disowned to survive as children. This is our shadow.

If the shadow isn’t recognized, it comes out in intense moments. A random flash of rage. A cheating scandal. Crying spells after something that wasn’t supposed to make you cry. Times where you lose control.

Before I go on, I wanted to reflect on childhood as a whole. Alain de Botton says childhood is jail. We idealize it later, but my god, we’re small and weak and dependent on other imperfect humans for so long, we have no sense that things could be different. Every little thing that goes wrong feels like death. Louise Glück has a quote I think about often.

“We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” - Gluck I interpret this in two ways. One, we take our beliefs about the world solidified in childhood to the grave. Two, we spend our entire lives projecting what we remember from childhood onto the people we meet as adults. Back to the shadow.

Why did we let go of certain traits as children? In childhood, some things we did were frowned upon. If we were too loud and told to be quiet by our caretakers, then we shunned that loud, attention-craving part of us in a dark room of our psyche and became soft spoken. If we were met with disgust if we cried or showed emotion as a kid, then we disowned our emotional side and became hyper-stoic.

This isn’t ours or our parents’ fault - although they are easy to blame - it’s simply fact. Our parents have shadows of their own that their parents gave them. So before we go into this, we must not blame anyone. Not our parents, our circumstances nor ourselves.

Now, how do we figure out what parts of ourselves we disowned to survive as kids?

The most dead giveaway is who we’re naturally attracted to. Who we feel a ridiculous pull towards, for no conscious reason. I.e. If someone asks us to list traits we like about them, we can’t think of much. The traits this person embodies are traits we’ve disowned within ourselves.

On the flip side, the people who bring up strong negative emotions in us. Hatred, disgust, strong judgment. We have probably disowned something they have within themselves. I.e. If we “don’t like” person X, we must stop and ask what we do not like about them. We probably want that back in ourselves.

Then there are dreams, which Jung believed were arenas of the unconscious. They bring messages. Keep a dream journal and see what type of emotions your dreams are constantly bringing up. I’m doing this too, particularly when I have strong emotional dreams. They usually point to events in unresolved negative events in childhood.

The first and most important step of shadow work is to recognize the ugliest parts of ourselves. What’s on the dark edge of our “light traits?” We could be creative but irrational. Accommodating to others but self-abandoning. Disciplined but rigid. Caring/nurturing but controlling. Independent but afraid of intimacy. Funny but avoiding pain.

The answers will be very painful. And at first the ego will do everything to be in denial. If you’re resisting any I statement, like “I am XYZ,” your level of resistance will indicate how likely it is to be in your shadow. For example, if saying “I am emotionally needy” causes your ego to start fist-fighting you, you are likely emotionally needy. Or a barrage of other statements - I am lazy, controlling, codependent, addicted to validation, power-hungry, selfish, manipulative, resentful, bitter, a victim, afraid of intimacy, unlovable, vain, jealous, weak, or ashamed of my desires. Just see which one you fiercely deny.

These truths suck. I don’t like doing this work. It actively reconceptualizes who I think I am, my ego defends itself vigorously and there’s a tug of war in my brain for a while, but with time, each harsh truth gets digested. And then I can work with it.

The more we recognize, accept and integrate our shadow, the more we will become whole. This is a lifelong process Jung called individuation.

The most beautiful part about this process is that it cannot be done alone. It usually requires another person, the embodiment of your shadow in many cases, to come and fuck your life up. Crisis. SOS. Then in the aftermath, you realize that it wasn’t about them, but about what they represented in your psyche. It is simply a message. Take it or leave it. If you leave it, it’ll happen again, in another form.

Good luck.