“Shadow” has become a buzzword meaning “everything bad about you.” This is not so. Although your entry point to real shadow work may be looking at your “character flaws,” or areas where you need to grow, the nitty-gritty work of shadow is unearthing and discovering what is nonconscious.
The fugitive self, our hidden gold, the things that won’t let us rest, our traditions and lineages—cobwebbed and musty—are in some cases booby-trapped to prevent extraction and exploitation.
It’s my experience that the shadow doesn’t stop coming up and rearing its ugly head. It’s here to stay, because it was formed by your early examples of what adulthood looked like. What you don’t have to do is take direction from it. The goal is to see clearly what it’s doing to your relationships and progress beyond the usual internal and relational dramas.
“Shadow” is a term for the discarded aspects of our personalities within that inform our lives. It offers the potential to reveal what we previously thought was unsuitable, so unsuitable that we imprisoned it and forgot it.
You can opt to leave the curtains drawn and find ways to medicate what still hurts. You can refuse to forgive yourself and perpetuate the cycles of toxic shame. You can deny and protect, in order to save your self-image or shield others who have hurt you. You can conserve energy by not seeking to fix what isn’t visibly broken.
Most of us are addicted to the belief that we are inadequate—it keeps us striving to be better, and isn’t that a good thing? Believing we are inadequate is exhausting and hard on our nervous systems.
A nonconscious shadow holds us hostage, victimizes us, or causes us to seek control through domination. We each contain all of the weapons of violence imaginable, right inside of us. This can be a frightening thought, yet it promises to re-empower us to grow beyond harming ourselves and others.
The key to working with your shadow is to accept that you have one, and get to know it. See it for what it is and nurture it as your child while you build adult techniques for self-protection.
I overcome its concerns by taking breaks, examining my fears, and reassuring it. Sometimes change is very slow and incremental, sometimes it shifts with the pang of new awareness.
Deciding to face, once and for all, the contents of shadow can be a bit like taking on a part-time job. Tending to ourselves requires space, time, and a gentle bedside manner.
YOUR SHADOW GOT ITS start when someone else’s ideas of how you should be were imposed on you. When you were asked or forced to conform to structures that harmed you, and you didn’t have the power to protest, adaptations became beliefs about who you really were. When you began to individuate, you may have been considered selfish. What you felt ashamed about, you pushed down. This may have benefited the people who didn’t like your behavior, but it didn’t help you. Negative beliefs about who you were began to alter your growth and development.
The shadow includes contents known and unknown about your inner being. Some shadows may have been formed by all that was not allowed to be in early childhood, or that was deemed wrong or unsuitable by caregivers, parents, or peers. You expertly created a version of yourself that you thought would get you the love and care you needed most.
YOUR SHADOW SPECIALIZES IN protecting your most fragile parts. It works as it was designed to work: to keep you from being seen as you do not wish to be seen and to avoid further injury, embarrassment, and pain. Anger or toughness may have been assets in your family. For example, if you were only shown tenderness when you were afraid or hurt, you may have learned to appear in distress to receive care. Some caregivers only know how to nurture fear and pain and not celebrate children’s joys, explorations, and triumphs.
It specializes in preparing itself in the secret lair of your subconscious, waiting for an opportunity to use its awesome skills to keep your young ego alive. My shadow was formed by being pushed and pulled with conditional love by teenaged parents, creating an anxious and insecure parental attachment. When my shadow is in charge, I cycle on a tireless loop between rebelling angrily and aiming to please. I push love away while anxiously wanting to be enfolded and protected. I ignore pain by counting my blessings, a form of spiritual bypassing. Your shadow may act like an angry beast, sly and tricky, invisible or demanding attention. It may lash out against too many limits and rules, or it may be flaky. It may use magical thinking to bypass responsibility. It might find you in jail to reinforce the message that you’re not safe to be around others.
Unrelenting Voices
The sounds of your shadow will vary. Each aspect—inner critic, judge, taskmaster, dictator, boss, lieutenant, perpetual student, saboteur, victim, rebel—has a favorite voice to use on you. These members of your inner board of trustees are relatively powerless innocents who had little control over their early environments. They found a role inside of your mind to keep you safe.
Your shadow has a lot to say. Most of its commentary is negative, because it is full of fear. This is not to get you to exercise positive thinking, but to encourage you to understand what that kid blasting away on the saxophone is going through at home and generate compassion for that little one with the piccolo, nearly undetectable at the back of the room. The loudest voices get the most attention, so you must ask yourself what part of your inner child earned a starring role in your personality and what parts of you were better off silent and invisible? What parts of you are you listening to when you feel the lowest? What part of you comes forward when you feel threatened or insecure?
To understand what your pain really looks like, begin by observing yourself in stressful or confrontational situations. How do you react in the face of conflict, disappointment, and loss? Do you tend toward resentment? Confusion? Defensiveness? Silence? An open display of sorrow? Knowing your default settings under stress tells you about the nature of your shadow and can help you track it. Remember: You were not born with a shadow. It was built by experiencing complex models of interaction that caused you to curb your natural impulses in order to avoid disappointing or displeasing someone close to you. It crystallized in place when it served to protect you with certain behaviors and outward appearances. Shadow works to get your needs met and avoid or control a situation. Being hurt results in trying to prevent it from happening again, although what often happens is we end up reenacting the circumstances. Recognizing this pattern means you’ll someday want to take off the mask to shift what you’re painfully reliving. In conflict, what do your expressions and posture reflect? Where do you hear yourself becoming confused or childlike? Try going to a mirror when you feel triggered to get a sense for what masks you put on without knowing it.
Ears Up For Self-Talk
DEVELOP THE SKILL TO hear yourself in a shadow state. In the same way emotions register on your face, your voice will reveal where your shadow is hanging you up. To tune into what’s agitated within you, consider your outward expressions. What do you say out loud, in texts, or in emails when you feel most rattled? Do you write volumes of angry novels or talk in an uninterruptable blue streak? Do you quietly mutter, trying to unravel your inner chaos? Try to discern how you’d like to speak and be heard.
If you don’t get a response, do you drive to the offender’s home and bang on the door, possessed by an overwhelming desire for acknowledgment of your suffering? Is it possible you were silenced as a child, and rage surfaces when that happens now?
Your internal, small, scared child can opt to burst out of the closet with fists swinging, or take shelter in it to insulate you from the kind of pain that still lives in your memory.
Your ability to hide your shadow is what it is counting on, so it can continue working to keep you feeling invulnerable and safe. The cost in adulthood is intimacy, closeness, trust, and security with others. Call your shadow by name when it rises up and take productive and healing action.
Your children may benefit from hearing that you’re aware of how you’ve mishandled them as a result of past pain, and your plan to go forward (in age-appropriate terms). You may want to talk with your lover about where your shadow shows up in your relationship.
While shadow work can feel heavy and high-commitment, it is rewarding work. Deep-dish soul excavation unearths your instincts and revitalizes your intuition, unburies them from the programming heaped on you, and builds resilient confidence. If you interface with something that you don’t want to remember about yourself, turn it over and view it upside-down. Get a good look under the hood and see what’s helped this engine keep running despite how it’s been run down, neglected, inappropriately fueled, and inadequately lubricated.
Healing happens with accountability. As adults with complicated pasts, we cannot get above our own shadows and begin living on our terms if we deny our self-betrayal in this moment. That denial leads us to blame, shame, and make others responsible as we toil in the poison of stagnant anger.
Stealing, sneaking, and manipulating are tricks that come from not taking the time to assess what the need really is. I still catch myself “borrowing time” or “sneaking in pleasure,” because I still carry an archaic, lingering guilt about having my own needs.
YOUR SHADOW IS HUNGRY for power in the form of control. It doesn’t know how to be responsible with the power it wields over your adult life. It is immature, and it represents the underdeveloped part of you that runs on an undercurrent of subtle angst—waiting for the next shoe to drop. It is hungry for the opportunity to jump in and protect you. It is nourished by whatever will perpetuate the cycle in which it was formed. It sounds rather parasitical, but it’s actually the neglected child inside each of us, acting out its big, anxious feelings in the only way it knows. When you view your shadow as your child, the adult you are now can comfort and protect it from making irreversible choices.