Reclaiming Our Shadow
- Dec 1, 2021
- 4 min read
Written by: Dolores Andrew, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
It was the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung that coined the term “shadow.” It’s often described as the person you would rather not be and for this reason the shadow gets bad press with some interpreting it as our dark side. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
What does the shadow look like?
The shadow has been described in many ways throughout the years, including as all the things we pretend we are not and all the things that embarrass us!
I remember during a coaching session with a client a couple of years ago vulnerability came up really strong. She winced when I mentioned the word vulnerable as though it was something that she couldn’t even bear to speak about, let alone consider that she might be feeling it. That is an example of how we feel about our shadow parts, we can be too scared or too fearful to go there, so we disown them.
Another definition of the shadow comes to us from the poet and author Robert Bly. He calls the shadow “the long bag we drag behind us” and goes on to say that we spend the first 20 years of our life filling it and the rest trying to empty it!
How the Shadow Forms
We are born an open book full of wonder, awe and excitement. From the time we begin to individuate at about the age of one and a half to two, we are told by our parents, our caregivers, our teachers and those in our environment how to behave. We are judged by others, we may be told we are not smart enough, not good enough, not tall enough or not funny enough. We are told not to be too loud or draw attention to ourselves or make speak up even when speaking up caused us panic.
We hear “YOU did something wrong” but we internalise it as “There is something wrong with me”.
We begin to realise that in order to get the love we want and to fit in that we need to close down the parts of ourselves that don’t bring us good experiences.
We learn that it's best to behave a certain way to please others and because we don’t have the wisdom or the emotional intelligence to understand any better, we dissociate from parts of ourselves.
So where do these disassociated parts that live in our shadow go?
When our ego, the “I AM” expression of ourselves has been wounded, it dons a mask to prove that we are not as defective as we have been told we are. We adopt a persona to feel more socially acceptable, and this is who we present to the world. We take our authentic self and reinvent it in the hope it will bring us the love, the sense of self and belonging that we hunger for.
And this is where our journey of separation and not being authentic starts.
But the denied parts don’t go away, instead, they go into our unconscious, that part of ourselves we are not consciously aware of.
Most of the actions we take on a daily basis are done from this unconscious place, fuelled by our believes. We may call them habits. For example, we choosen unhealthy food because we always do, or we say yes because we always say yes, but deep down inside we want to say no.
Reclaiming Our Power from the Shadow
The shadow contains great power because it represents aspects of ourselves that, whilst they may be hidden are very much a part of us.
The healing comes when we have the courage to look at those parts and to reintegrate them back into our life. One of the ways we can do this is to see how they affect us are through unconscious projections.
This is when we unconsciously see in others what is in fact within ourselves. We firmly believe that the other person is a particular way. This happens because other people mirror back to us our hidden emotions and feelings.
It may feel hard to believe that we could have a trait that annoys us in someone else. An example of this could be jealousy. A particular person might annoy us because we believe they are jealous of us, we may go so far as to say that they follow us around and copy us. We may dismiss out of hand that we also have some traits of jealously within us. But, the reason we are so plugged into them is that our hidden jealousy is being triggered.
It is only when we embrace the aspect in ourselves that other people no longer annoy us.
Good and bad, positive and negative are just two expressions of the one pole, with each being opposite the other. Without knowing what it is to be positive we wouldn’t know what negative feels like. Without knowing the energy of pain, we wouldn’t know how to fully embrace our joy. Without knowing jealousy, we may not find our passion.
We will no longer feel like a fraud when we accept ourselves fully for who we are. We are being authentic to all parts of who we are and, when we come from this place we attract people who accept us just the way we are.
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Dolores Andrew, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine Dolores Andrew is an All-Star Accredited Lifestyle Leader in Holistic Life Coaching. Her personal coaching sessions and Corporate Training programmes are tailored to her client’s unique requirements. Dolores’ supports people to break through their personal barriers and reach their full potential, whatever that means to them. She supports them to reassess their values, effectively navigate their emotions and live their lives aligned with their authentic selves.
