Shadow Work | Owning Your Dark Side (feat. Emerald)

We have not understood yet that the discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our civilization. Carl Jung.

Human civilization consists of countless traditions, codes of conduct, and systems of ethics. Depending on what social group we belong, and what environment we grew up in, there’s always an ideology in regards to what’s preferable and what’s not. Therefore, we develop a set of behaviors in order to fit the situations we find ourselves in.

We create a fake persona that reflects how the world wants to see us. We consciously hide a part of our undesirable characteristics behind the masks we wear. However, as Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung observed, there’s an unwanted part of ourselves that we are not conscious of. Jung called this the Shadow. The Shadow is a result of the imbalance between who we want to be and who we truly are. The more we repress, the denser the Shadow becomes.

And because we are unaware of what’s lurking in the dark, we’re at risk that it lashes out unexpectedly with all the consequences that this entails. According to Jung, part of self-realization is the integration of the Shadow into our personality. When we make the unconscious conscious and stop rejecting the unwanted parts of ourselves, we break the chains that hold us back from moving towards a state of wholeness.

The process of integrating our ‘dark side’ is called Shadow Work. The true efficacy of Shadow Work, as a process, is that it allows us to become more authentic, conscious, and whole by allowing disowned and unconscious aspects of our personality to integrate back into our conscious awareness.

In order to understand why the process of Shadow Work lends itself well to these ends, we must first understand that Shadow Work is a subtractive process and not an additive process. This means that it’s not about directly and actively adding unconscious aspects of our personality back into our conscious awareness. In reality, it’s about subtracting the barriers to consciousness that are the root cause of why those aspects are repressed away in the first place.

You can think of these barriers to consciousness a lot like a dam, and the conscious and unconscious aspects of our Self a lot like water. Thus, in this metaphor, all the water that builds up in the reservoir of the dam is a representation of the parts of our psyche that end up unconscious to us and in the Shadow.

These obstructed aspects of the Self are thus unable to flow from the unconscious mind to the conscious mind because there is a metaphorical dam in the way. So, in terms of our dam metaphor, it’s not very effective to start actively bailing water from the reservoir of the dam to the other side. It’s much more effective to simply remove the dam.

And if you do that, the water will naturally and effortlessly find its level and flow downstream. And that’s the goal of Shadow Work. With Shadow Work, you’re trying to remove barriers, in the form of emotions and thoughts, that keep parts of ourselves from flowing naturally into the light of consciousness.

So, the key to Shadow Work is to find the mental and emotional barriers and dissolve them or let them go. Before integration can take place, it’s essential to acknowledge the existence of our Shadow. The question is: how does the unconscious manifest?

According to Jung, we cannot communicate with the unconscious in the same way that we do with the conscious realm of our psyche. While the language of the conscious mind is predominantly literal, the unconscious speaks in symbolic language. This language is built on metaphors and archetypes. Symbolic language is prevalent in mythology.

A myth is a story that preserves its meaning throughout different cultures and time periods because it uses universal aspects of existence: things like trees, animals, natural phenomena, the nurturing mother, the old wise man, or birth and death. The Shadow, therefore, communicates on a primordial level. In addition to that, it uses images of conscious memory material, that are saved in the back-room of our psyche.

When the Shadow reaches out to us, it’s a sign that a repressed part of ourselves wants to be integrated despite the blockages that withhold it from doing so. This ‘reaching out’ can happen in dreams, as well as in our imagination during waking hours. Thus, dream analysis is one of the tools that Jung applied, to identify the symbolic images that dreams produce.

And the practice of active imagination is a form of meditation, in which one engages in a dialogue with these images. These methods aren’t without risks, as Jung speaks of terrifying encounters during his experimentation with his own unconscious. A more straightforward way in which the Shadow communicates is by psychological projection.

This happens when we observe in others what we repress in ourselves. A consequence of this is an emotional reaction from the Shadow, which could manifest through harsh judgments and even anger. Ironically, many people aren’t aware that the behaviors of others that irritate them, most likely hide in themselves as well!

These could be all kinds of things, like the public display of emotions, ‘feminine traits’ in men, ‘masculine traits’ in women, repressed sexuality, or the desire for a creative outlet. There are many reasons why we’d feel the need to get rid of these traits. But by repression, we cast them into the Shadow.

This may hide them, but that doesn’t mean that they’re gone. And what’s devoid of light starts to fester until it becomes a demon that pulls the strings behind the curtain, without us even realizing it.

I quote: It is absolutely essential always to have our consciousness well enough in hand to pay sufficient attention to our reality, to the Here and Now. Otherwise, we are in danger of being overrun by an unconscious which knows nothing of this human world of ours. End quote.

So, awareness is the first step in mediating between Shadow and consciousness. When we confront what lingers in the dark, we can identify and tear down the barriers that prevent it from integration. As we are engaged in the process of Shadow Work, we must first understand that the state of entropy for our psyche is wholeness and total integration.

This means that there is already a constant psychological force pulling us back into a state of conscious integration as our natural setpoint. And it is only the resistance against wholeness and integration that creates a barrier to reaching this state of entropy. This is also why meditation is so effective as a consciousness-work practice, but that’s a topic for a different day.

So, to do Shadow Work, we must first find the parts of ourselves that we are resisting against so that we can understand the nature of our resistance and eventually unravel that resistance and let down our guard. To find the source or sources of resistance, and thus the barriers to becoming aware of the repressed aspects of the psyche, we have only two places that these obstructions can reside: the thoughts and the emotions.

The thought-based barriers to consciousness are things like our self-concept (aka ego), our beliefs, our worldview, our ideals, and our judgments about ourselves and others. So, to let go of these barriers, we must first call all of these things into question and see if they are actually based in truth.

And perhaps most importantly, we have to dig into our motives for attaching ourselves to these thought-based barriers to consciousness in the first place. Finding our motives is a great doorway into understanding why something is in the Shadow. Now, in my opinion, the easiest thought-based barrier, to begin with, is to examine our judgments and aversions toward other people.

So, if we ever find ourselves propping up our own identity by internally or externally judging someone else, this is something to pay attention to and to try to find our deeper motives for this judgment arising. The other place to look for barriers to integration is in the realm of emotions. When we experience emotions that are too big for us to process at a given time, it creates trauma.

And the trauma response causes the mind-body complex to work together to keep us unconscious of those emotions to keep us from being overwhelmed by them. So, if we still have old emotional wounds that have not been processed or healed, the trauma response of the mind and body will continue to keep certain memories and parts of the Self repressed away from the light of consciousness.

These barriers to consciousness can be dissolved through focusing toward processing old traumas and engaging in an emotional exploration of repressed aspects of the Self. Shadow Work is the umbrella term given to different methods to achieve Shadow integration.

Owning our dark side isn’t a matter of adding but a matter of subtracting. So, instead of actively bringing back unconscious aspects into our personalities, we aim for removing the blockages that resist the motions of entropy, so we embark on the natural flow towards wholeness.

Needless to say, this starts with the acknowledgment that, below the surface of our conscious awareness, there’s indeed a dark side. This video is a product of a collaboration between Emerald from The Diamond Net and Einzelgänger.

If you’re interested in more content about the Shadow, Jungian psychology, and many other related topics, I’d highly recommend you check out Emerald’s channel The Diamond net. In the end screen, you’ll find a link to her playlist with videos about the Shadow. Thank you for watching.