What Is Your Shadow Self?

 

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

— Carl Jung

When thinking about the shadow self, I always think back to an argument I was having with my eldest daughter a few years ago, when she was a teenager. I remember she snapped something quite bizarre at me, that actually made no sense at all in relation to what we were debating, and I started laughing. She then said ‘I have no idea why I said that’.  It stuck in my mind, as I had also done this many times before. It also reminded me of a time when I myself was a teenager. I had asked my own mum for something and she had snapped a spiteful response, and with a lump in my throat, I had left the room, eyes stinging, not knowing what to do. She had eventually followed me out of the room and apologised, stating she ‘didn’t know why she had said that’.  And that is our shadow self.

The “shadow” is a theory introduced by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung that describes the aspects of the personality that we reject and repress. As children, we learn to push  down the parts of us we don’t like, or that we think others/society won’t like, into our unconscious psyches. It is this collection of repressed aspects of our identity that Jung referred to as our shadow self, the ‘blind spot’ in Johari’s Window.

Rather than confront something that we don’t like, our mind pretends it does not exist. Aggressive impulses, taboo mental images, shameful experiences, immoral urges, fears, irrational wishes, unacceptable sexual desires,  are a few examples of shadow aspects. As well as a tendency to harshly judge others, especially if that judgment comes on an impulse; pointing out one’s own insecurities as flaws in another or playing the “victim” of every situation.

Seeing the shadow within ourselves is difficult, so it’s rarely done—but we’re really good at seeing undesirable shadow traits in others.

Seeing in others what we won’t admit about ourselves is what Jung calls “projection.” Although our conscious minds are avoiding our own flaws, they still want to deal with them on a deeper level, so we magnify those flaws in others. First we reject, then we project.

“Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.”

— Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion (1938)

Shadow work, then, is the process of making the unconscious conscious. In doing so, we gain awareness of our unconscious impulses and can then choose whether and how to act on them. We begin this process when we take a step back from our normal patterns of behaviour and observe what is happening within us. Meditation is a great way to develop this ability to step back from ourselves, with the goal being to gain the ability to do this as we go about our daily lives.

Questioning and observing ourselves reacting to psychological triggers, or events that prompt an instant and uncontrolled reaction from us, asking ourselves, “Why am I reacting this way?”  teaches us to backtrack through our emotions to our memories, which hold the origins of our emotional programming. Taking a bull’s pause, and journalling daily are great ways of becoming curious and learning about ourselves.

One aspect of integrating the shadow self is healing our psychological wounds from early childhood and beyond. As we embark on this work, we begin to understand that much of our shadow is the result of being hurt and trying to protect ourselves from re-experiencing that hurt. We can accept what happened to us, acknowledge that we did not deserve the hurt and that these things were not our fault, and reclaim those lost pieces to recover. Working with a trained therapist can help cultivate a deep understanding of yourself.

“If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against… Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.”

— Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion (1938)