Carl Jung & The Psychology of Self-Sabotage (feat. Emerald)

Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking. Also, it frequently happens that unconscious motives overrule our conscious decisions, especially in matters of vital importance.

— Carl Jung

Many people tend to undermine their own agendas. To their frustration and bewilderment, they find themselves making irrational decisions, experiencing mental blocks, and even physical ailments that cripple their plans. It’s like a mysterious force takes over control, steering them away from the goals they’ve determined to accomplish.

And thus, plagued by continuous self-sabotage, these people never seem to get where they want to be. But why do we self-sabotage? How come that we wreck our own plans without any good reason? Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung discovered plausible answers to these questions as he became aware of a part of the psyche that he called the Shadow.

We can see the Shadow as a psychological container within the realm of the unconscious. In this dark place, where the light of our conscious awareness does not reach, we store our undesirable traits. There could be various reasons why we sweep certain unwanted aspects of ourselves under the carpet. Our parents may not like them, or they may not fit the societal ideal.

Or life taught us that they lead us to suffer. And so, we repress these traits by banishing them into the bowels of the psyche, as if they aren’t part of us. But they are. And according to Jung, the repression of unwanted aspects of ourselves will not solve the problem. In fact, it can have disastrous consequences, as these aspects take on a life of their own, operating in obscurity.

And this is where the self-sabotage begins—the repressed parts of the personality revolt against our conscious minds from the deepness of the Shadow. And so, we are at war with ourselves, without even knowing who we are fighting. Luckily, there are ways to stop this self-sabotage.

Instead of repressing what’s in the Shadow, Jung urged us to integrate it into our personality. And we can only do this by making the unconscious conscious and discovering what’s hiding underneath. Let us explore the psychology of self-sabotage (and how to overcome it) based on the works of Carl Jung.

This video is a product of a collaboration with Emerald from The Diamond Net. There is a common misconception about the Shadow that leads to a lot of confusion and misunderstandings about the role of the Shadow and how to integrate what’s been repressed. It is often thought that the Shadow is simply the dark and negative side of the personality.

Because of the issues it can cause, it’s often thought of as the part of ourselves that holds all our negative impulses. And because of this, the Shadow as a psychological concept is often depicted symbolically as a shadowy figure, suggesting an ominous “other self” that exists outside of our awareness.

But the Shadow actually refers to something fundamentally different. The Shadow is actually more like a dark place than it is like a dark and shadowy figure. So, we could think of the Shadow as being like a dark closet in the human psyche where the light of consciousness doesn’t shine.

And this dark closet is where we lock away all the repressed parts of the personality that we are unwilling and/or unable to face with or reintegrate at the moment, which can happen for a variety of reasons, such as trauma or unmet needs, to name a couple.

So, when we talk about doing Shadow Work and integrating the Shadow, we’re not actually integrating the Shadow itself. We’re actually integrating the contents of the Shadow. And when I say ‘the contents of the Shadow,’ what I’m referring to are all the repressed parts of the personality.

These are the parts of the self that inhabit the ‘dark place’ that is the Shadow. So, in the same way that you could put objects in a dark closet and it becomes shrouded in Shadow, you could also take those same objects out of that dark closet and into the sunlight, and they’d no longer...