Shadow work has gained so much popularity in the last few years, and for good reason. But nobody tells you exactly when and how to do shadow work, and also when to stop.
If you’ve been wanting to get started with shadow work or if you’ve been doing it for a while but wondering if you’re getting it right, then this is for you. I will share everything you need to know about shadow work from my clinical and coaching experience as well as my personal experience.
Shadow work has been the missing piece of my personal development journey, and maybe it has been the missing piece for you too. So it’s time to plug that one last piece in and grow in a way that you never expected you could. There’s an important caveat that I share toward the end, one that you will only understand once I’ve mentioned the rest of it.
Why Shadow Work Was the Missing Piece for Me
I want to first underscore just how much relief I felt when I first encountered shadow work. I had been on this quest for most of my life. At age twenty-one, I was working at a law firm during the day and attending Bhagavad Gita, which is Indian scripture, classes at night.
In my mid-twenties, I moved to a new city to work as a consultant, and in that place, I pursued a one-year postgraduate diploma in yogic science. In my early 30s, I was working in big tech in Silicon Valley and using all my free time and my weekends to learn and become an Ayurvedic counselor. And finally, in the last few years, I’ve been pursuing clinical psychology all while juggling a career and motherhood.
I say all that to say I know what it’s like to be a seeker ’cause all of my life I have been one, and how frustrating it is when despite knowing everything you keep struggling inwardly.
I didn’t have any apparent struggles. On the surface, my life looked good. I had an Ivy League education. I was having a great career in the US. I had a good family. But that sense of peace that spirituality promised eluded me, and it eluded me because of the missing piece, and that missing piece was shadow work. When I found shadow work, I felt this incredible relief that this impossible spiritual standard that I had been holding myself to was not the real me. It was just a construct of me that had to be dismantled so I could get in touch with the real me. Apparently, in trying to be more spiritual, I had just become more attached to a spiritual identity.
And I hope that you experience the same relief from finding shadow work and implementing it in your life as I did. Because you too deserve to live in that sense of peace, in that sense of joy. Not one that is artificial or just for show, but one that you feel deeply within.
What Is Shadow Work?
The first thing to know about shadow work is that it came from a Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung. He coined these two terms, persona and shadow, to explain the split between the conscious face that we show to the world and the unconscious impulses that lie within us.
Persona is essentially a mask that we put on to show and be a certain way in the world. It’s the image of us that we like to project, not just to others, but sometimes even to ourselves. This is how we want others to see us, and over time, it also becomes how we want to see ourselves. So now if you have to uphold a particular way of being, you have to suppress something else. And what you suppress, not consciously but unconsciously, becomes your shadow.
By choosing to elect and intensify certain qualities in your persona, ones that your family may reward you for, ones that society may reward you for, you put the opposite of that in the shadow.
Now Jung created a copious body of work. His work has so much depth and is understandably part of depth psychology that people have taken slivers of his work and constructed whole paradigms and systems and, and frankly fads around it. There’s internal family systems where the shadow is broken into different parts, to different and very specific parts. There’s Myers-Briggs personality tests that go off of Jung’s personality types.
But like I said, all these represent a part of a huge body of work that Jung created, and if you want to get into shadow work, you must understand the broader context in which this work lies. You don’t have to know everything about it, but just know that shadow work is the entryway to start getting to know your unconscious, which then creates the portal to meet your collective unconscious.
This is why shadow work and Jungian psychology more broadly was the missing piece for me. Because I was trying to get to the collective, the oneness, the unity in all of us without integrating my own personal unconscious.
Shadow Doesn’t Equal Bad Stuff
The next thing to know about shadow work is that shadow does not equal bad stuff. Yes, the shadow is hidden from us. We are not conscious of it. Yes, it is in the dark, but it does not represent our darkness. It simply represents all the qualities that we did not get to express.
Let’s take an example here. If you had to be polite and nice in your family to get what you wanted, then you begin to nurture and encourage and intensify those qualities. And whatever doesn’t make the cut goes in your shadow. So any form of rudeness or talking back that you may have might be in your shadow. It is lying there unconscious to you, but it doesn’t stop being a part of you. It’s still a part of you.
And like I said, shadow is not all bad. Yes, being rude might not be very desirable, but what also lives in your shadow is your assertiveness, is your ability to say what you want and compromise being nice for a minute. That is your golden shadow. So the shadow is not all dark.
If this is the normal range, everything that’s bad or below goes in the shadow, but everything that’s too good also goes in the shadow because it’s above the fold. Only the normal acceptable range of qualities get to make it.
Okay, so let’s say you’re with me so far and you agree that there is a split. There’s a version of you that you want to show to the world and a version of you that is hiding in your unconscious that you’d rather not come out. Like a snake that has fallen asleep and you just don’t want to rise it and show its hood.
The Cost of Keeping the Split in Place
So what if this split exists? So what if there’s a persona, the face you want to show to the world, and a shadow, things you want to hide or keep private or never want anyone, including yourself, to know about? Well, it comes at a cost, and this is the next thing I want you to know about shadow work. It takes a lot of energy to keep the shadow in place.
Think about yourself pushing down hard on parts of you that are trying to come out and keeping them in place. You don’t really realize how tiring your hand gets after a point if you keep pushing down this material.
The fundamental premise of shadow work is that we all have it all. We all have all the qualities, and that is why we are alike. That is why we are one. So if you don’t let yourself express a part of you that is meant to be expressed, you are denying that part permission to live, and it takes a lot to constantly suppress your shadow so that nobody, not even you, takes a peek at it.
And herein lies the best thing about shadow work. Once you do shadow work, a lot of this energy that you were using to keep the split alive becomes available to you. If you feel like you’re tired or burnt out, or you just don’t quite have the zest that you need in order to live life, try doing shadow work. As that energy releases, you’ll find yourself so much freer and with so much more capacity to take on life’s goals and your dreams.
Three Entry Points Into Shadow Work
Now let’s get to the crux of it. If you’ve got this far, you really want to do shadow work, and I will show you exactly how. The first thing you need is a starting point. You don’t just wanna start shadow work just sitting like that if you’re doing fine. If you’re doing fine, I would say relish that feeling of feeling okay. Nothing always has to be wrong with you. But when something does come up that needs your attention, you must pay attention to it.
So I think there are typically three starting points into shadow work.
One is a trigger reaction that seems quite disproportionate to what has happened. I’m not talking about normal human reactions here. When something happens and you respond to it with an emotional charge that feels a bit too high for what is happening, you feel too angry, too sad, too jealous, too envious. That’s a starting point for shadow work.
Another starting point is when you don’t quite have this big emotional trigger reaction, but you’re finding yourself feel judgment against something that somebody else or some other people are doing. Let’s say you’re walking down the street and there’s this quiet hum in your mind that’s saying, oh, I wouldn’t dress that way. Oh, I wouldn’t do it this way. Oh, I wouldn’t parent my child this way. That’s not where I would walk. That’s not how I would talk. This low-key judgment against others is also indicative that there’s a split within you, that some things are good and some other things are not.
And then finally, the third entry point to shadow work is what I would call a recurring image from a dream or fantasy. If you find yourself consistently visualizing a way of being in this world that’s different from what your regular life looks like, whether it’s in the form of fantasy or it’s in the form of something you see in your dreams, that too can be a good portal into shadow work.
Once you’ve found your entry point, you now can begin shadow work. But keep this thing in mind. If you’re in the middle of an active trigger where your emotions are high, it will be very difficult to do shadow work. It requires a level of introspection and being able to converse with yourself that’s just not possible when you’re in sympathetic mode.
You can make a quick mental note to yourself, ah, I should do shadow work about this. But in the moment, you should just focus on soothing yourself, calming yourself, loving yourself, getting yourself to a point from where you can do shadow work. And sometimes it takes hours, sometimes it takes days, and sometimes we’re not ready for weeks or months to look at something that happened that sent us into a frenzy of emotions that we just couldn’t control or explain.
How to Actually Do Shadow Work
Now when you actually begin shadow work, whether it’s with trigger or judgment or an image, you want to see what emotion it is evoking in you. Are you feeling guilt, shame, fear? And if you can’t get to that emotion, I want you to notice what exactly is so bothersome about what you’re experiencing.
And continue to ask yourself a series of questions to get to the heart of it. For instance, one of my common triggers is when I feel that somebody is being inconsiderate. So if I were to take that trigger and continue with a line of questioning, I would ask myself, “What is so bad about somebody who’s being inconsiderate? What do you think would happen to somebody who’s being inconsiderate? What is that ultimate end result of their life if they continue to be this way?”
And you keep digging, and you keep digging until you get to the very root emotion that is at the heart of your experience. And more often than not, it might be fear of being ostracized, fear of not being loved, fear of not being accepted. But it could also be something else. Whatever emotion you get to, however deeper you can go, your next job is to give this emotion space to express itself.
You can do this somatically. For instance, if you were feeling anger, you can go scream into a pillow or punch something. This can work with emotions that have a very strong physiological arousal component. But what you can do with nearly every emotion is to just let it express itself. What I do and what is recommended in Jungian psychology is to do an active imagination with this emotion. You wanna close your eyes, you wanna invite that emotion in, and that emotion might show up as a symbol, as an image, anything that resembles that feeling for you.
And if your trigger is so big that it is hard to even hold in your awareness a specific emotion that you feel, you might want to tone it down to the point where you can palate it. Because remember, you being able to hold the emotion is very critical for shadow work. And without you being able to do that, you won’t really make much progress. So to the extent you can summon and hold this emotion in your awareness, do so. Let it show you what it’s trying to tell you, what it has been trying to protect you from. Begin an active dialogue with this emotion.
You will notice that just by giving some air time to this part of you in your shadow, you are able to reduce the emotional charge around it by a lot. And maybe it’s not all gone, and shadow work doesn’t happen in one go. It’s an ongoing process where the more you get to know what’s in your unconscious and the more you let it just come above the surface and show you what’s going on, the less energy you are spending holding that unconscious in place.
Reclaiming What You’ve Suppressed
Now that the emotional charge around this trigger has lessened, it’s time to engage your thinking mind a little. Just look at your life and ask yourself what would open up for you if you didn’t let this emotion run the show?
Another way of asking this question is to go back to the thing that triggered you in the first place. If I’m triggered by someone who’s being inconsiderate, it means that I’m always trying to be considerate as part of my persona ’cause the opposite is in my shadow. So in what ways am I putting pressure on myself to always appear considerate? Maybe I’m always over-explaining to people what my point of view is. Maybe I am going above and beyond in certain gatherings and wanting people to notice that. All those are ways in which I’m upholding the persona of a considerate person, and that’s why when someone is inconsiderate, it’s in my shadow and I get triggered because their behavior is a mirror to my shadow.
But for me to truly reclaim this inconsiderate part of me, I have to reduce the emotional charge around it first. Like what is so bad if I am inconsiderate? Okay, maybe people will think I’m a mean or selfish person. Okay, what is so bad if I’m a mean or selfish person? Well, people might not love me or like me, might not want to hang around with me. Okay, what is so bad if people did that? Well, I’ll be alone, and I’ll be lonely. And then what is so bad about being alone and lonely? And you keep playing that, and you realize that these are all just fears of your ego. Your higher self, your true self is not concerned. It is never lonely because it is connected to everyone and everything.
So this fear of potential loneliness, which is what is underlying this trigger, is coming from the ego’s desire to keep you safe and to keep you part of a social group. But if you’ve had a dialogue with this fear already, and it’s already told you everything it’s trying to do, it no longer has that power over you. Carl Jung always says, “If you don’t make the unconscious conscious, it’ll govern your life, and you will call it fate.” So if you hadn’t examined this trigger, you would have thought that this is about the other person. But by examining this trigger, you take that power back, you realize that it was something in your unconscious, your shadow. That it was just your ego’s attempt in keeping your shadow locked in where it was.
So to summarize, in doing shadow work, start with an entry point, usually a trigger or judgment or some evocative image in your dream or fantasy. Identify the key emotion that you are feeling underneath all of that. Begin a line of questioning that reveals what is your true fear underneath that judgment, underneath that emotion. Sit with this emotion. Let this emotion express itself. Dialogue with it, journal with it, talk to it, imagine it. Do whatever it takes to let this emotion know you’ve heard it, you understand where it comes from, and you’re okay.
And once you’ve reduced the emotional charge around this emotion, you are welcome to go back to the original trigger, back to seeing all the ways in which you create that split within yourself in order to not be the thing that triggered you, and come up with creative ways of integrating that shadow in you.
For instance, if you’re afraid of being seen as inconsiderate and other people’s inconsideration is triggering you, then you can do small things to show and signal to yourself that no, you’d be fine if you took the pressure off yourself to be this way. Maybe you explain yourself a little bit less. Maybe you don’t go thinking about all the possible scenarios and taking care of everyone, and you realize that life actually turned out okay. That is the outer reflection of the inner work you did before. And outer work is just as important because otherwise the insight stays with you, but you make no change.
In order to be in this dialogue with the unconscious, you have to have this two-way communication where the unconscious tells you what it has been repressing and what it has been afraid of, and then you reassure that part of you and get to do something in the real world that proves that yes, in fact, you have it under control.
And you rinse and repeat this process as often and as long as triggers arise, which will be till the end of your lifetime. Trust me, it never truly goes away.
Know When to Stop
Now, a very important part, and I had alluded to this at the beginning. You must know when to stop. We’ve identified the entry points into shadow work, but we must also recognize when we must stop doing shadow work. If you are going through a period of low self-confidence, low self-esteem, this is not the time to even begin shadow work.
Your ability to face your shadow is directly proportional to your ego strength. And by ego strength, I don’t mean selfishness or being too full of yourself. Ego strength comes from resilience. It comes from knowing that the ego is strong enough to handle difficult things that come its way.
In the first half of our life, we are typically building our ego. Our persona is an attempt of the ego to create a nice mask for itself, a little interface with the world. We need a strong ego to then excavate these parts of ourselves that got left behind in the process.
But if you begin this excavation and you realize that it makes you hate yourself, that you’re falling into self-loathing or feeling bad for yourself or just immense self-hatred, then you don’t have an ego that is strong enough to do shadow work, at least not yet. You wanna go back to the drawing board, do what Jung would call first half of life tasks, and then come back to do shadow work, which is typically reserved for second half of life, your 20s, 30s, 40s, and so on.
If you are trying to build your ego, you want to give yourself small goals. You want to achieve them. You want to prove to yourself that you can handle the adversity of life. And then when you feel good enough, you can come and tackle shadow work in whatever way, shape, and size is palatable to you.
And ego strength is not a fixed barometer. There are times in our lives when our ego strength is going up and down. I was working with a client who was progressing steadily toward her entrepreneurial dream and her dream of being a mother, and she unexpectedly got laid off, and her sense of self was really shook in this moment. That would not be a time to do intense shadow work because it is time to rebuild the ego. She needs to do whatever it takes to get out of bed, live a productive day, feel good about what she’s doing. Set small goals, achieve them, and once that ego strength is back, she is ready to do shadow work.
Think of it as a flame. The flame is going to help you metabolize what is coming from inside of you. And if the flame is too low, it just doesn’t have the capacity to cook. It doesn’t have the capacity to take what you’re throwing at it and turn it into something meaningful.
Shadow Work Never Fully Ends
The last thing I’ll say is that shadow work will happen on its own. It’s part of the second half of life. You will encounter the same trigger over and over and over again, and then you will learn to modulate yourself or adjust your expectations or do something different. But this is a painstakingly slow process.
By becoming aware of what you’re actually doing, you can accelerate this process. By design, the shadow is unconscious to us, and it’s very hard for us to unearth it all on our own. I found that my shadow work journey really accelerated when I went from listening to podcasts to actually working with a coach.
And you don’t need a coach. You might find a peer, another friend of yours who is just as interested in shadow work, and you too can be the mirror to each other. Just know that when there’s a friendship at stake, people don’t always have the incentive to be 100% honest with you about what patterns and trends they’re seeing in you. But if you can find someone, coach or otherwise, who is ready to give you the gift of honesty so you can accelerate on your shadow work journey, that is the best thing that you can do when you commit to beginning the process.
Where to Go From Here
I’m going to write a part two of this blog post where I share actual examples of my own shadow work, and you will see how pivotal a role my own coach played for me in those moments.
If you wanna learn more about shadow work, I highly recommend Robert Johnson’s book, Owning Your Own Shadow.
I hope that shadow work does for you everything that it did for me. It made me feel so much more energetic. It made me really come alive and get a new lease on life. And it put in perspective all the spiritual work, all the seeking that I was doing all my life.
Okay, you’ve read it all. Now go meet your shadow.
