Your shadow self, or shadow, is the side of yourself you have no awareness of. It holds all the qualities you disowned during your formative years.
Although you learned to repress these qualities to push them outside of your awareness, they are still living underneath the surface.
They unconsciously guide your actions and are the unseen cause for many of the troubles in your life.
Shadow work is the intentional practice of becoming aware of your unconscious shadow and integrating these neglected qualities into your being—becoming whole.
This is a process of building self-awareness, self-acceptance, and universal Love.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Why Is Shadow Work Necessary?
Light and dark, black and white, good and bad, male and female, and so on, make up everything in the world. And these polarities coexist in every person because no one is completely “good” or “bad,” but rather a combination of infinite nuances.
As a result, each individual carries both light and shadow within himself. Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, identified this shadow as one of the essential archetypes of the personal unconscious.
The shadow represents the dark side of the personality, where the most primitive instincts of human evolution are hidden and the conscious and social mind rejects aspects of the personality.
When personality traits are confronted with the values imposed by family, culture, and society, this dark side manifests as fears, frustrations, and insecurities. They are the aspects of one’s personality that each reject because they contradict established and accepted norms.
How Is The Shadow Self Created?
It all begins in childhood. Parents or caregivers are the ones who instill what is right, wrong, allowed, prohibited, acceptable, and unacceptable in the first place, and what each family understands by these concepts is what the child learns throughout their development.
Thus, if an adult chastises a child for being honest, the child may not feel safe in the future when expressing his true feelings, because it has been internalized that honesty is a bad thing, and it will be avoided from that point forward.
To continue with the same example, if one of your shadows is the one that obstructs your candor, seeing other people speak clearly may irritate you. When someone openly speaks in front of you, you may experience uncontrollable feelings of rage and resentment, as you have been programmed to believe that being open is dangerous.
How to Become Aware of Your Shadow
While working with a therapist is recommended, you can start exploring your shadow on your own by examining your thoughts, feelings, and assumptions.
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to understand ourselves,” as Jung put it. So consider what irritates you in others first, and this will help you become more aware of the small things that trigger your shadow and why they do so.
Keep in mind that working with your own shadow, discovering and recognizing those dark aspects of your personality is not easy, so you must always be compassionate with yourself when it comes to those repressed parts of yourself.
And if you feel that seeing that dark side of yourself causes you pain, suffering, or fear, and you are not ready to handle it on your own, you must seek the guidance, accompaniment, and support of a professional.
Does Everyone Have A Shadow Self?
By creating a proper persona that is socially acceptable, you can be a part of society and can engage in healthy relationships.
Although you are not whole, you can at least identify with the side that can make a living and live freely in this world. Then, later on in life, you can discover your shadow. Then you can then integrate it into your proper persona so that you can become whole again.
This is how shadow-making and shadow work typically happens in a person’s life.
However, what if someone doesn’t build up a proper persona?
Instead, they identify with their shadow qualities, such as a thirst for power and destruction. Unable to form healthy relationships, violent and murderous.
People who had incredibly horrible upbringings or were born with a different type of brain end up like this.
People who never built up a proper persona can only identify with the rash and reckless part of themselves. With that in mind, there is no other side for them to integrate and become whole.
So yes, everyone does have a shadow self. And yes, shadows are necessary.
Because without incidentally creating a split personality between shadow and what is socially appropriate, we wouldn’t have functioning societies.
Instead, we’d still be living in the stone age—killing, raping, and pillaging acting like animals.
Is Your Shadow Evil?
Your shadow isn’t necessarily evil or immoral—it’s just different.
Keep in mind that your shadow is the other part of yourself. Although it may have qualities that you don’t find most agreeable, it contains a lot of your creativity, interests, intuition, and energy that you can access.
If only you knew how to integrate it.
Learn how to integrate your shadow and become whole with our Shadow Work guide here.
How Shadows Are Necessary For The Well-Being Of The World
Yes.
First-world countries are made up of people who are “more civilized”, and in turn, also have their own shadow sides.
But it’s thanks to having built some moral backbone and sense of obligation, they have spiritual depth.
You need spiritual depth to get in contact with your shadow and become whole.
However, there are still many countries out there that lacking in spirituality.
The concept of freedom and safety comes from spiritual development.
Something you’ll notice about third-world countries is that many of them have a massive slave trade.
These countries overall have a low spiritual development, which is why slavery is so abundant.
This is because civilizations that haven’t developed enough spirituality don’t understand the importance of freedom.
However, world affairs are outside of the scope of this blog.
I will just say that the geographical locations make a massive difference in spiritual development because some places are much harder to live in than others; making spirituality more “affordable”.
The last thing I’ll say about it is that spiritual development happens in its own time.
People, civilizations, and nations all grow in different ways and on different days.
It’s only a matter of time.
NEXT READ: Everything About Shadow Work (Comprehensive In-Depth Guide)
Here are some resources I recommend:
A Light Among Shadows is a guide to self-love and being that helps you overcome negative self-talk, instill genuine self-acceptance, and overcome self-hate and resentment by making sense of people’s level of consciousness and your spirituality.
Shadow Work for Beginners Series helps you beat negative patterns and beliefs, integrate your shadow, heal your inner child, reclaim your projections, build emotional maturity, and take back your life by becoming whole.
Shadow Work for Relationship Series helps you heal your attachment style, navigate relationship issues, and build a healthy, mature relationship.
Advanced Shadow Work is an ongoing publication with continued in-depth insight and practical advice you won’t find anywhere else on the internet for practicing shadow work, self-awareness, inner healing, spiritual development, and more!
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