What is shadow work?
Unveiling the hidden aspects of your psyche
Welcome and thank you for stopping by our blog at Sacred Shadow Coaching today! We are so grateful for your presence and your continued support is highly valued. We’ve worked really hard to only affiliate with companies and share products that align with our beliefs. As an affiliate, you support our small business by purchasing anything directly linked from our website. What this means is that at no extra cost to you we earn a small commission from your purchase. We thank you kindly, and hope to see you again soon!TLDR: shadow work is an awareness of the negative, repressed, dark, and unrecognizable aspects of your psyche. What it really involves is a deep dive into your thoughts, reactions, and actions which in turn shift your perception of awareness. It’s a choice to take aligned intentional action toward being better every day, or at least accepting yourself as you are without criticism and judgment.
In this article, we will cover the following:
Defining shadow work from a multifaceted standpoint.
A brief overview of the history of psychology and the origins of shadow work.
Various psychological and holistic exercises incorporating shadow work practices.
Shadow Work Defined
Author’s Note: Upon writing this article, I’d spent many months researching and analyzing shadow work, and in doing so, I discovered many facets teaching me how to put it into practice, and how it is already likely being taught in your therapist’s office and educational institution. There are many different ways shadow work can be done, it is not one size fits all; it’s more of a belief.
Shadow work is best defined by first isolating what exactly the shadow is. According to Psychology Today, the shadow refers to negative aspects such as dark emotions, negative thoughts, and past trauma. So, when referring to your shadow, you recognize the hidden parts of your psyche that you lock into proverbial mental closets. You know, those days when you sink into oblivion cascaded by panic-induced anxiety throwing you off the self-help wagon tumbling you to the ground of feeling worthless and left behind. This freefall lands you right into a hot stinking pile of utter depression and down into a pit of shame. You know the days/moments I’m talking about, right?
AI rendered image of woman falling off a self-help wagon into a chasm of void below.
The shadow is everything you refuse to recognize, yet is being projected back to you through the issues you have with others.
The shadow holds the darkest and most intrusive thoughts you hide deep within your mind.
The shadow carries the weight of every trauma you’ve faced, and the conditioned behaviors that came along to keep you safe.
The shadow is oppression combined with destruction pushing you toward a bitter demise.
The shadow comes back over and over until you’ve become aware of it enough to accept, embrace, and integrate it.
Your shadow has a purpose, and everyone has one.
Your shadow isn’t necessarily made up of all the negative parts of your psyche. It could potentially be a culmination of your repressed desires and learned behaviors for the sake of “safety” This piece of your psyche plays an essential part in the body’s mechanisms for perceiving threats and taking dissociative action. It’s responsible for your reactions that you don’t truly associate with, you know the “I can’t believe I just did that” moments.
So… What really is shadow work?
Well, in simple terms, shadow work is an awareness of the negative, repressed, dark, and unrecognizable aspects of your psyche. As an extension, it’s an integration experience into expressing these parts and embracing all of you, as a whole. Shadow work is at the foundation of true mind, body, spirit amalgamation, and it begins the moment you simply open the door to self-awareness.
This doorway to awareness opens a conduit to rapidly shifting your current mental state through an intricate observation process. You tumble through a sequence of eye-opening truths, allowing you to recognize the many recurring patterns that have plagued you over your lifetime. Shadow work forces shifts to happen around you as you unlearn core beliefs that shape who you are. It is often accompanied by a dark night of the soul significantly shifting your perceptions of reality. You begin to actually hear what others may have been saying to you about your behaviors and limitations. Your vibrational frequency raises (or lowers) and you rapidly (or slowly) move the stagnant energy that has surrounded you. You may even lose people that you once found close. Friends and family that you thought would be there for a lifetime. Ultimately, you change
Shadow work isn’t just about journaling, meditating, or new-age spirituality. What it really involves is a deep dive into your thoughts, reactions, and actions which in turn shift your perception of awareness. It’s a choice to take aligned intentional action toward being better every day, or at least accepting yourself as you are without criticism and judgment. At the core of it lies choice: a choice to change or stay the same. It isn’t pretty, or easy, or really all that fun. In fact, it’s quite hard, muddy, and… dare I say it... DARK.
What is easy is the comfort to stay the same, even knowing deep down that your system is long overdue for an upgrade in coding. Some people spend their lives within their shadows without ever realizing or recognizing it. Those who choose not to face their shadows often pass the responsibility of healing onto their progeny, or it may need to be addressed in a future lifetime.
Since we’ve been speaking on the polarity scale of positive vs negative, it’s important to note that shadow work potentially involves positive traits that may have been discouraged or suppressed during childhood. A few ways these traits could be interpreted are as repressed joy, laughter, or even a refusal to speak due to feeling unheard or undervalued by a parental figure. Another interpretation could be a child that learned that love and safety came in the way of keeping things neat, thus leading to a codependent pattern of doing more for others than themselves. A person could choose to go to school repeatedly gripped by their shadow of intellect forcing them to seek more without taking action on what they’ve learned because they ‘don’t know enough.’ A father could be a workaholic instead of choosing presence due to feeling a lack of control over his finances because his parents refused to learn how to become financially stable themselves. A teenager could be an overcompensator by being a straight A student to avoid verbal abuse of her parents, leading to feeling her worth is attached to the emotional integrity of others. A wife could repeatedly feign divorce from her avoidant husband due to the shadow of abandonment recurring from being left at the fire station as a child after losing her parents to a car accident.
All of these shadow’s can be seen from various facets, like a diamond. We’ve only uncovered a few versions here, yet each one has a story. Every trauma you’ve faced, to the way you were raised, all of it makes up the very special version of a human that makes up you. Shadow work is like the map a detective uses to find a suspect.
It acts as a breadcrumb trail of evidence to put all the missing pieces back together again providing you with a key to integration. In a way, shadow work is a guide to travel into the chasm of unconsciousness to see the depths of your sacred truth.
Shadow work, at its foundation, lies the awareness of the shadow. Yet, to dive into shadow work, you must also ask who constructed the belief that human personality is based in duality. Who shaped these foundational concepts in psychology? Allow us to put any skepticism aside and move forward with a brief overview of the history on the origins of shadow work.
A brief history of Psychology & Shadow Work
Author’s note: I want to write more here on the specificity of shadow work, however, another blog on this topic is set to release soon, therefore I feel it more important to refrain from adding too much information. Here I cover a brief overview of the history of psychology to build a foundation to expand on. I want to allow you to explore that for a more in depth history of Jungian psychology.
Shadow work was first coined by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in the late 1800’s. Jung’s out of the box perspective became the cornerstone for what we know of today as analytical psychology. He’s known for his studies on the theories of collective unconscious, synchronicity, and archetypes. He believed that the individual personality derived from duality, the conscious and the unconscious. He also believed that through the act of uncovering your shadows, you could unlock your true potential. At the time, psychology and spirituality were blending and collaborations between psychics and mediums were at an all time high. Jung’s theories were quite foreign. This cohesion between religion and science may have led to Jung’s perspective of Shadow Work as we know it. (more on this will be written in our next blog The History and Origins of Jungian Shadow Work)
The history of shadow work is intricate and one that involves beliefs that helped shape our mental health field today. These theories and beliefs came long before Carl Jung, going as far back as Plato and Aristotle. Carl Jung is just one of the many individuals that contributed to the foundation of what we know of as psychology. He expanded upon Freud’s studies of personality: the id, ego, and superego, by introducing the ideal of individual duality and collective consciousness. Many masterful minds came before, and after him, such as Abraham Maslow, you know, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or Aaron Beck, responsible for the creation of CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy). What about Erik Erikson, and his theory of psychosocial development, shaping a human life into 8 key stages, or John Bowlby, and his beliefs on attachment theory uncovering the importance of early relationships between children and their caregivers. Let’s not forget B. F. Skinner being a major figure in behaviorism, proving that behavior is shaped by punishment and reward.
Men weren’t the only ones to prune the field of psychology though it may seem so. We must not forget the women who came in to change our beliefs on development, memory, and race including those like that of; Mamie Phipps Clark whose groundbreaking research on racial identity and self-esteem in black children led to the supreme court’s decision to deem segregation in public schools unconstitutional. That of Elizabeth Loftus’s research shaping our current judicial system’s interrogation methods, particularly on the reliability of eyewitness testimonies and how memories can be influenced and manipulated.
Jungian psychology became a turning point that many individuals piggybacked off of. These theories further contributed significantly to the field, like that of Joseph Campbell’s “the hero’s journey.” or Marie-Louise von France and his analysis of archetypes in fairy tales. What of Isabel Briggs Myers and Katherine Cook Briggs known for the famous Meyers-Briggs Personality Test? The last one I’ll note is Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel Prize winning physicist who collaborated with Jung to explore the idea of synchronicity and coincidence. All of these profound individuals and more have fully shaped what we know of now as western psychology.
Clearly, this Jungian psychology has a place, and shadow work has created a collective anchor into self-awareness and change. It’s important to also look at how Jung’s theories have been used. So let’s take a multifaceted approach to see how shadow work is currently being practiced today.
Various Shadow Work Practices
When you hear the term shadow work, you probably immediately think about a journal, or meditating on the beach. Maybe you have something else in mind, like therapy. All of which are adequate ways to practice shadow work.
Shadow work is so prevalent that many people are already practicing it in their everyday lives and business. If shadow work is simply self-reflection, then you could say that by offering constructive criticism to your team or parenting consciously, you are putting shadow work into practice. Sure, journaling is a way to begin, but it isn’t the only way.
Journaling - one of the easiest ways to open the door to self reflection is to write down your daily experience as if it were a record log. Over time, you collect data about your patterns of behaviors that become hard to unsee. An amazing way to begin this is with Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. She encourages readers along a 12 week stream of consciousness writing course to boost inner creativity. No, we are not sponsored, we just truly believe in Ms. Cameron’s work, as it has the tendency to open the door to your shadow much easier than other methods, even if it may be a bit unrecognizable at first.
Meditation - another form of shadow work is to meditate. Now, we know what you’re thinking.. Does that mean you have to sit in one spot and do nothing? No. Meditation looks very different on each individual just like the pages of each person’s journal will vary. Meditation could look like methodically doing the dishes or ritualistically making your bed in the morning. The main intention is to be practicing some form of self reflection while you are meditating.
Dream Analysis - when you wake up in the morning, write down your initial thoughts and interpretations of any dreams you had the night before. Analyzing this presents you with key evidence as to what your unconscious is desiring to be uncovered.
Inner Dialogue - begin to communicate with your shadow by partaking in parts work. This open style of dialogue uncovers secret truths, limiting beliefs, and more. The work of Richard Schwartz Internal Family Systems covers this in extensive detail.
Creative Expression - to draw, to write, to make music, or any other form of creative expression acts as a conduit for your shadow to be seen and heard. Many people use social media as an outlet for creative expression.
Self-Reflection - the act of shadow work is the willingness to reflect on your actions, your thoughts, and your behaviors. We do not recommend beginning your shadow work journey without the intention and action to complete the process due to potentially repressed emotions and patterns getting out of control. If left unchecked, these shadows can run amok, much like a nasty malware or computer virus, and cause damage to your system. To you. Think the person who has spent years allowing anxiety to control their every move, or the individual who turned to chronic alcoholism to avoid taking action. Remember, your shadow is usually attempting to protect you in the name “safety,” which oftentimes gets mistaken for complacency.
Therapy/Coaching - It’s our belief here at Sacred Shadow Coaching that shadow work be done in addition to traditional therapy and/or alongside a trusted coach. We will always encourage having a support system in place. This is essential, and is a must. Your support system acts as a weapon to knock back the raging shadows that have gone rogue. This path must not be taken alone, though you may feel lonely much of the time. It’s like the beginning of The Legend of Zelda, where Link gets told not to venture alone; he must take a sword on his journey.
The Legend of Zelda Copyright Nintendo Co., ltd.
We are not in any way attempting to discourage you from walking on the path of your own shadow work journey, we say this to offer you an honest outlook as to what shadow work really is, and what it can do for you. We are not here to lead you to believe this journey is for the faint of heart. We extend our hand of guidance to those of you sitting on the sidelines waiting to take the leap. If and when you are ready, we have 1 on 1 spaces available to help assist you in finding the light you have hidden inside.
