This blog post first appeared in K. Day's intuitive life coaching blog, The Alchemist + The Butterfly and is being republished with her permission.
Instagram: kathleen.day.official
The importance of diving deep into the dark matter of our subconscious and the up-leveling that comes after.
Man has always had a sordid relationship with the macabre, the darkness, the obscure. But what we fail to acknowledge is that the real stuff of nightmares lurk beneath our own skin, deep behind the integument of our mind. Good and bad are subjective to our integral moral beliefs. Regardless of what we believe, our shadow self does exist, and until we dance with it, we'll never attain the Latin principle of "know thyself."
"The 'shadow' is a concept first coined by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung that describes those aspects of the personality that we choose to reject and repress. For one reason or another, we all have parts of ourselves that we don't like—or that we think society won't like—so we push those parts down into our unconscious psyches. It is this collection of repressed aspects of our identity that Jung referred to as our shadow self."
— Jack E. Othon
Essentially, those wounded or primal parts of ourselves hold us hostage when left unresolved, or we're forced to feel guilty or ashamed of them either as a result of outside criticism or our own internalized perception of morality.
Much of our shadow self is comprised of the echoes of traumas long past, core-enforced behaviors from our upbringing which conflicted with our human nature, social persecution, and humiliation. We're commonly told not to "focus on the negative," instead favoring a regimen of self-prescribed affirmations and vision board making. This is the psychological equivalent of bandaid-over-bullet-hole. And there are sound reasons it doesn't work unless you've done the shadow work.
"The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge."
— Carl Jung, Aion (1951)
There is a reason that dark matter, which makes up our shadow self, occurs. I refer back to the concise explanation by Jack E. Othon:
"The only way to escape from this perpetual recurring pain is to mask it. Enter the ego. We tell ourselves stories about who we are, who we are not, and what we would never do to protect ourselves from suffering the consequences cof being an outcast.
Ultimately, we believe these stories, and once we develop a firm belief about something, we unconsciously discard any information that contradicts that belief. In the world of psychology, this is known as confirmation bias: humans tend to interpret and ignore information in ways that confirm what they already believe."
Compartmentalizing is part of our survival. We couldn't very well operate on a daily basis or experience a healthy sense of 'normalcy' if we walked around at a proverbial 10 in emotional pain all the time. So, we create a clear divide between what are favorable self-perceptions vs. what is uncomfortable or unfavorable. Therefore, the shadow self begins to develop during the phase of our childhood directly after we've achieved self-awareness. To effectively sort it out, we must examine it from a place of neutrality and compassion.
It's within our nature to first attempt to cut away, smother, or get rid of those parts of ourselves we consider undesirable or unlovable. The problem is we're not computers with an invisible recycling bin. Placing our darkness to the side doesn't make it go away. It just makes it louder, like an ignored child acting out.
Inevitably, this inherent need to avoid things that make us uncomfortable is what compromises our ability to confront and resolve them.
"Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow self and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light... but by making the darkness conscious."
— Carl Jung, "The Philosophical Tree," Alchemical Studies (1945)
Shadow work is the task of bringing to light the darkest parts of our unconscious with the aim of making the unacceptable, acceptable. We do this by forgiving ourselves for our shortcomings, embracing our flaws, and inviting a newfound balance within ourselves which champions the light while honoring the dark, which seeks only to be heard, acknowledged, and understood.
Suppression = stagnation, confusion, irritability, unfounded judgment, depression, and ultimately contributes to self-sabotage. We avoid this by doing the shadow work.
"Shadow work uncovers every part of you that has been disowned, repressed, and rejected. It is one of the most authentic paths to enlightenment."
— The Mind's Journal
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