How to Live With The Shadow

Shadow work isn’t easy. But the reward is a life fully realized.

Photo by Jose Francisco Morales on Unsplash

You’re beautiful.

You’re amazing.

You’re worth it, whatever it may be.

A cursory glance at the messages our adverts bombard us with might lead some visitor from another planet to conclude that we humans love ourselves a little too much.

We reflect on ourselves endlessly, our films and music and art concerned with what is to be human to the exclusion of anything else. We really seem to rate ourselves highly.

But we are not always beautiful. We are not always amazing. We are not from another planet; we’re from this one. We know that our projections of ourselves reveal more than a first glance suggests.

We hate the teeming heart of the wasp’s nest or the sinister silence of the ocean depths not because of what they are but because of what they remind us of. Everything waspish and crawling and darkly threatening in ourselves. Every symbol refers ultimately to you. And everything, in the right light, is a symbol.

Carl Jung wrote extensively on the shadow.

The dark part of human nature, the secret twin of your daylight self. A repository of everything you don’t want to admit and aren’t ready to face. The less we embody our shadows in our conscious life, Jung argued, the blacker and denser they become. And like a hand puppeteer behind a hanging sheet, we project our shadows onto the world around us.

Our flaws and faults glow darkly back at us in everyone we see. The coward sees only cowardice, the vain only vanity, the cruel only cruelty. That which we fear ourselves to be becomes what we see.

The shadow is unavoidable. We all have one. And it will stay with you for life. Yet to become a fully realized person, the shadow must be dealt with.

There is only one way to do this. First, you need to understand the shadow. Then, you need to merge with it. Finally, you will assimilate it. And though it will never go away, you can learn to live with it.

Understanding the shadow

The shadow is more than merely the parts of ourselves we don’t like. It’s everything we remain unaware of. The whole unconscious weight we carry around with ourselves like shackles on a chain gang convict.

In the case of people with low self-esteem, the shadow can even contain positive qualities that a person remains unaware that they have. Some of us are braver, smarter, and more talented than we know, our inner radiance hidden within ever-thickening walls.

But there are other reasons to explore your shadow. As the unconscious parts of ourselves, the shadow contains the source of creativity. The part of you that connects to everyone else. Even in the brightest sun, the shadow comes bubbling up from the cracks like oil, a black river feeding us with life-giving energy from its murky depths.

Every good story requires a descent into the dark. It’s in the underworld, the unconscious, where the treasure of human life is kept. The jewels we bring back from the darkness. Orpheus in Hades. Jesus in Hell. Luke Skywalker on the Death Star. Over and over again, our heroes wander into the darkness to show us how to safely do the same ourselves.

To understand your shadow, you need to examine the parts of yourself normally kept hidden.

The parts you normally hide from. No one ever said shadow work is pretty. But before you can deal with the darkness, you need to see into it clearly.

Doing The Work

The goal of shadow work is to bring these powerful unconscious impulses into the light. By doing so, we make the unconscious conscious. Once that’s achieved, we can start to integrate the shadow.

So how do we see into the dark? Three things to remember:

Know Your Worth.
Own Your Emotions
Don’t Compartmentalize.

Know Your Worth

For many of us, the shadow contains the belief that we are not enough. To live is to sometimes fail, and over the course of a lifetime, those failures can start to fester and rot in our shadow selves. Doubts about our worth lead us to feel like imposters, or that we don’t deserve happiness.

The first step to working with your shadow is to understand that you, just as you are, are enough. Just as every tree in the forest has the same right to grow where it stands as any other, you have the same right to happiness and existence as anything else in the universe.

To stand under the sun is what creates your shadow, but you have every right to that golden light.

Own Your Emotions

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Everything grows when you feed it. Your shadow self grows fat on unwanted emotions, the ones you feel you shouldn’t feel. You stuff them down until you choke, repressing and suppressing them with everything you’ve got. And in the depths, your shadow feeds on them.

Inhabiting your unwanted, embarrassing, negative emotions doesn’t mean wallowing in them. Instead, it means giving them room to breathe, to be fully felt. You can’t change the way you feel, but you can change how you feel about those feelings. It just requires acceptance and a measure of detachment.

When you feel a negative or destructive thought rising to the surface, give it space. Allow yourself to feel it without believing in its absolute truth. You will quickly find that negative emotions lose much of their power if you look at them with detachment. It’s just something you feel. No less, and no more than that.

Don’t Compartmentalize

There’s an idea in our culture that we need to be happy. We need to stay positive. To focus only on the good. To reject all negativity. But the shadow thrives on being ignored.

Trying to compartmentalize your negative thoughts only makes them more powerful. By trying to keep your conscious and unconscious self separated, you only ensure that the shadow grows stronger.

Deny your demons at your peril. Instead, allow your negative thoughts and emotions to become as much a part of you as the positive ones. Make space for them. Accept them as part of being human, as necessary to life as air and light.

Integrating The Shadow

It’s important to remember that this is not a conflict between you and your shadow self. The shadow is you, as much as anything is. You can’t win a battle with yourself, any more than you can pick yourself up by your ankles.

The goal of shadow work is to find a way to understand and assimilate your shadow, not to declare victory over it. And the work is never done. The shadow isn’t going anywhere. And you’ll find, as you learn to work with it, that you wouldn’t want it to.

For all the impulsiveness and negativity associated with it, the shadow isn’t necessarily bad. Emotions of rage and sorrow and bitterness exist for a reason. Anger has built great cities and turned mere paint and canvas into a thing of beauty. Loneliness and sadness are powerful catalysts that force us to make necessary changes in our lives. The creative potentialities of the shadow are something that no worthwhile life can do without.

Shadow work requires deep introspection, time, patience, and courage. There are a variety of techniques for learning to work with the shadow.

For some people, psychotherapy is the answer. For others, art can be a way of doing shadow work, forcing the artist as it does to come into close contact with the creative power of the unconscious. Meditation and yoga can also put you in touch with the shadow, and are excellent for providing the necessary detachment to see and experience negative emotions without getting caught up in them. Certain psychedelics can also be extremely valuable in doing shadow work.

Whatever method you choose, shadow work is a necessary and unavoidable part of any fully realized life. To unlock the hidden potentialities of your truest self, you need to venture boldly into that darkness. It’s only in the underworld that the real treasure can be found.