What is Shadow Work?
Lately, shadow work has been following me around – as shadows do. Several of my clients began mentioning it about a month ago, and at the same time, I began doing some of my own work in that department after a while of not prioritizing it. Nothing else screams “write about it” as a series of coincidences like that.
The term „shadow work“ has come to mean many things over the years. Fundamentally, a term coined by C. G. Jung and operationalized into „work“ by him and his followers, shadow work has become a term that is somewhat overused to the point that it start losing its effect. If you’re a spiritual person, you likely have your own tools to do shadow work, if you’re a pagan, this might be some of the most important psychological work you do, if you’re into the New Age, I bet you’ve used tarot cards for shadow work before, if you are Christian, your morality depends on facing your demons, etc. There are too many ways of doing it to list here. Of course, I don’t think they’re all equally good, but I don’t feel it’s my place to judge. My own approach may be too much for many. When I work with clients, I do my best to balance being supportive and being direct, but when I work with myself, I don’t pull any punches – I feel that it’s my job as a therapist to be able to look at the worst in me so that I can be strong enough to hold space for others to do the same. It’s not just vital for me, it’s also vital for my clients’ sake.
In this text, I’ll outline what shadow is and what shadow work is. Only in broad strokes, I will outline what it means to actually do the work. In subsequent blogs, I will dive deeper and elaborate on some specific aspects of it for those of you brave enough to go down that road.
This last sentence may seem like exaggeration, but as you will see, it’s not.
What is a shadow?
A shadow is a shape created by an object separating beams of light, thus leaving a dark surface behind it. Everything can cast a shadow. A tree casts a shadow. A stone can cast a shadow. A house casts a shadow. Human beings, too, cast shadows.
This term was popularized in psychology by C. G. Jung, although others before him have used it in similar, if not the same, ways. One of those was Nietzsche, the shadow of Christianity incarnate. For Jung, a shadow is the disowned part of our personality. If Ego is the light, the Shadow is the darkness. If Ego is Dr. Jekyll, then our shadow is Mr. Hyde. Because it’s a part of ourselves that we have disowned, because it’s shadowy, dark – it’s also unknown, unseen and potentially deeply terrifying. We simply don’t know what’s there and it’s a kind of inexhaustible darkness within.
Simply put, whatever we place in our shadow, we try very hard not to see. It’s the darkness behind us.
Our shadow develops naturally as a part of our socialization and it dates to our childhoods – no, you can’t blame mom and dad, that’s never the point of therapy as tempting as it may be. But to tell you the truth, you are likely to run into them often enough as you do shadow work. As children, we don’t know that envy isn’t good, that aggression isn’t desirable. As we grow up and learn these funny facts about society, we start pushing those parts of us away, as if they were not a part of who we are too. I am the good, but not the bad. We identify ourselves with our “best selves” and that’s the only thing we recognize as us.
If you want to be a compassionate person, then cruelty might be in your shadow. And whereas we are quick to dismiss it, we owe a great deal of gratitude to cruelty, because without our potential to be cruel, we wouldn’t have the potential to be compassionate either. They come in pairs.
To take a brief constructivist detour here… In personal construct theory, we look at our experience and sense of self as being organized with constructs. Each construct has two poles. Good vs bad. Dark vs light, etc. Constructs are deeply personal, so the two platitudes I used here might not be meaningful to you. The point is that without the good you can’t have the bad. For good to mean anything at all, you have to have the bad too. And if good vs bad is your construct, then both of those exist within you. Perhaps you prefer one over the other, but both of them are yours and both of them are you.
When I was working under supervision, my supervisor once told me: “You have to learn to love your opposite poles in order to be whole. More importantly, you have to love them to change them.” At the time I wasn’t sure what he was on about but my own journey with psychotherapy taught me that lesson the hard way. As if there could be a different way in psychotherapy!
In effect, taken together, these “opposite poles”, the undesirable sides of our constructs are what makes up a large part of our shadow. I say a large part because this is not a complete constructivist explanation of the shadow. I merely wanted to illustrate how the “Ideal Vladimir” and “Shadow Vladimir” need each other to exist. Without one of them, the other one would be impossible. Disowning the Shadow Vladimir means disowning half of who I am.
We can talk about two types of shadows. A personal shadow, which comes about from our lived experience and the collective shadow which becomes a part of us simply because we live in certain times and in certain societies. Most of my clients and readers are from the United States, and in that case, it’s easy to see the collective shadow in religious, sexual or racial issues and the violent reactions they invoke – just some of the many examples. And just because something is a collective shadow, it doesn’t mean that we don’t have to deal with it on a more personal level!
Shadow is also more than just a matter of our individual or collective psychology. Some Jungians think of the shadow as a biological entity almost. If you think about how our ancestors survived, it wasn’t because they weren’t capable of murder and destruction. I quite like the history of the classical world and sometimes I’m shocked by the unbearable cruelty of those people. Think about crucifixions, and that’s not even the worse thing they did. Marcus Crassus, a noted politician from the era of the Roman Republic, a once close associate of Julius Caesar was captured and later killed by the Parthians who poured molten gold into his mouth, to mock his greed while he was dying. Choking to death on liquid, scorching gold. We are easily fooled into thinking that we’re different today, but that’s only because we resort to “cleaner” ways of killing people. We have drones to kill our enemies so it’s like a video game. And we have the media to make sure we find out just the numbers, just the sanitized “bad guys are now dead” stories, not the details. So we live thinking we’re better. In reality, Romans were just more accepting of their shadow.
How to see the shadow?
Because we’ve disowned this part of ourselves, we naturally have difficulty seeing it. But we somehow do see it. First, we experience it and then express dismay that we behaved so unlike ourselves! Second, we see it in other people. It’s safe to see and despise the shadow when you can recognize it in others.
We find appropriate targets and then project our shadow onto them. The way Donald Trump is treated by his opponents is a good example of this. Donald Trump is a recipient of numerous projections, but only because he is a soft target for them, he embodies so much of it that he makes it all too easy. It’s hard to project so much dirt and garbage onto someone who isn’t willing to embrace it or doesn’t have the potential for it. Marie-Louise von Franz described this dance of sending and receiving projections as a mysterious alliance. An alliance sometimes filled with hatred but of existential importance for both the sender and the receiver. Both sides are fed by exchange of projections until the ultimately explode.
Here's how Molly Tubby sees some visible manifestations of our shadow:
Strong feelings about others, those people we look at and think “such a disgusting human being.” That may very well be true, but your disgust is a sign of the recognition of your own shadow. Ask yourself: how am I like this person?
Listen to the negative feedback you get, especially the feedback that talks about patterns you’re not aware of, feedback that outlines the effects of your behavior that you can’t see or predict. If the same or similar feedback comes from more than one person, it’s an even more important sign.
Slips of tongue or impulsive acts are examples of shadow at work par excellence.
What makes you feel humiliated, what makes you feel like you’re losing your dignity?
Every time when you get upset over someone else’s faults: are you angry that someone else is too messy? Or too loose with other people’s time? Selfish? There’s a part of your shadow.
Meeting the shadow is a frightening experience and this is why we tend to erupt but then move on quite quickly, since we insist on not looking at it for a second more than we have to. When you look long enough you risk identifying with it, and if that were acceptable, your shadow wouldn’t be your shadow. Many pop psychology approaches to shadow work incorporate journaling prompts and exercises. Whereas I am a big fan of journaling, I think how you approach it is quite important and we will talk about that in other parts of this shadow series. Otherwise, you risk scratching the surface and making a pretty polished façade of what is hard and ugly emotional labor.
In my own shadow work, my therapist has been irreplaceable. Her penetrating vision prevents me from obfuscating and hiding behind my own intellectual nonsense. She lays it bare and then I have no choice but to stare at my own psychological rock bottom. It’s never a pretty sight or an easy experience, but over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate the process when I see the ever-greater ease with which I move through life.
A good therapist is a ruthless but compassionate mirror at the same time. That way, we can see the ugly but feel it’s bearable.
What is the goal of shadow work?
Getting to know and own our shadow makes us whole. There is something remarkably liberating about accepting that we watch serial killer TV shows for a reason, an ugly, awful reason – but it’s freeing, nonetheless.
It’s freeing because once you see your own envy and hatred, you have it under control. When you can see it coming to life, emerging from its darkness, you can hold space for it and direct it where you need it to be. And don’t be fooled – our darkness has its use and has its function. When we don’t integrate it, we can’t make good use of it. Instead, it jumps out of us and causes harm, to us and to other people, and we end up feeling guilty, anxious, and confused.
When we talk about radical acceptance, it includes radical acceptance of our shadow too. Warts and all. Consequently, we heal, and we grow. For the lack of a better work, we become good people. Good people don’t live without darkness, good people live with their darkness, they know it and respect it. It’s how they don’t harm. Our kindness is more genuine, our compassion truly heartfelt. We can use our shadow to enrich and guide our creativity, to be its source and its inspiration.
Our shadow is not ugly and disgusting, it’s what we see as ugly and disgusting, and this difference is not just silly wordplay, it’s crucial. The shadow can be many things – many good things – once its released from this preemptive prison as mere darkness.
Part 2
In the next blog on shadow work, we’ll outline the mechanics and the themes of the collective shadow. Now that you have a broad idea of what the shadow is, we can address some of its aspects in more detail and perhaps I can point you to useful direction for exploration through meditation, active imagination and journaling.
Where to begin now? A simple and unpleasant exercise
Until the second part comes out next week, here are some journaling topics and topics for reflection:
Think of a person or behavior that disgusts you. Do a short meditation on the topic. Ground yourself, focus on your breath for a few minutes, and then visualize that person, their particularly disgusting behaviors. Feel your reaction fully. Write down any thoughts and body sensations, any memories or images that come to your mind. Write them down in as many details as you can.
Don’t try to analyze what arises or what you write down. Just write or type in real time – ignore grammar, rules of writing and don’t judge yourself for the content that comes up. Just write. When you naturally reach an end, close the notebook and continue with your day.
When you repeat the exercise, do the same thing again, although you may want to think of a different person if you feel like you’ve exhausted the content with the previous one.
Repeat the exercise three days in a row, then wait for a couple of days and only then review what you wrote. Pay attention to the topics that keep coming up, phrases that you use over and over again, perhaps repeating images or memories. There’s a part of your shadow. Befriend it.
This exercise is difficult and if it becomes too difficult, stop. The goal is not to torture yourself.
If you have a therapist, share your observations with them and really dive in.
