449. The psychology of your shadow self

0:04 Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for joining me wherever you are in the world. It is very great to have you here today. I have another bonus episode for you if you are new to this corner of the podcast. In our bonus episodes, we basically fact check and mythbust psychology concepts that you may have heard kind of swirling around the internet a little bit, and we basically provide you with the real research, the real history, and the real science behind what they mean.

0:55 We've done personality tests, We've done Stockholm syndrome, narcissism, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, so many things. But today we are turning our sites and our attention to shadow work. Shadow Work is a practice that is focused on what we call the shadow self or just the shadow, and how this part of us influences our behavior unconsciously. If you have ever done any kind of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, you're probably very familiar with this concept or idea, but it's become exceedingly popular in recent years as people have kind of been searching for deeper ways of meeting and knowing themselves.

1:39 This approach is definitely an interesting one because it kind of promises a good deal of epiphanies, and it really promises the possibility of suddenly uncovering some really deep truths about why you are the way you are and you know who you are, and you know, for a lot of us, that's comforting that there's this thing out there that can suddenly reveal why we self sabotage, why we act in the way that we do. But I think you also should be prepared to find out some stuff you might not want to know about who you are.

2:12 So let's break down just what shadow work really entails, from the most basic principles to some of the more advanced practices. So I think the first thing you should know is what the shadow actually is. I gave a brief explanation, but the shadow essentially represents the aspects of yourself that you don't like and that you don't want to be associated with, and therefore find it very difficult to acknowledge and recognize. The first thing you should know about shadow work is who created it. That's a great place to start. The idea came from Karl Jung, who we have been mentioning a lot recently, So if you're a frequent listener, I'm sorry, but also I don't know how much to revisit for the basics. But simply, Kyl

3:00 Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist. He was a psychoanalyst, and he developed analytical psychology, which is the school of psychological thought, which is very much focused on the unconscious mind and the realization of our true self through a lifelong process that he called individuation. Now, Jung's approach was very deep, it was very inward focused. It was very much concerned with symbols and dreams, and he had a lot of similarities to Freud. I say similarities. He actually originally trained under Sigmund Freud, the grandfather of modern psychology, and you'll know that if you listen to our Freud episode. And at the time he was kind of considered his successor, you know, the baton was going to be passed from Jung.

3:46 H sorry, from Freud to Jung, but they eventually parted ways professionally and personally. They had these series of major disagreements. They had beef, as we'd say in the modern day, Well, beef is probably an understatement. The way they expressed this, like these disagreements was that they would write these like research papers and these articles and academic magazines and journals, back and forth and back and forth obviously about the other one, about the other person. And the reason for this disagreement was that Freud was also focused on the unconscious mind, but he was very much focused on sexual and aggressive impulses, and he saw the unconscious largely as this place where there was repressed material from early childhood

4:34 that we had to dig at. And y'll kind of agreed in some ways. He said the unconscious mind was important. There were definitely things there that we couldn't access. But he thought that the idea that a lot of those impulses were sexual or aggressive was too narrow, you know. He really wanted to expand this idea, and he wanted to talk about symbols and religion and myths and dreams and what he called the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious was this idea that beyond our own individual unconscious. There is a deeper level, a deeper layer of shared psychological patterns that all humans inherit and these patterns show up across cultures, across time, across history, and he labeled them

5:20 as the archetypes. So the archetypes, this is the first critical thing you need to understand if you want to get into shadow work. Are these instinctual patterns that are common amongst every single culture, every single human across history. He basically believed that we all have this built in psychological software or psychological patterns that shape the human mind and shape the human experience. For example, every single human has the self, which brings all of our personality together.

5:54 Every single human has a shadow, which we're talking about today. They have a persona, which is what they kind of use to cover up the parts of themselves that they don't like. And then there's something called the anima and the animus, which we're going to reserve for a whole separate episode. Now, those are the four components of like the conscious mind, well basically not the unconscious mind, but our architecture as humans is feeling humans. And then there are these additional aspects which are called the archetypes. And this is how each of these different parts is channeled.

6:31 So the archetypes are the templates or patterns that shape how we experience certain roles or themes in our lives. So the common ones that you might hear people talk about include the caregiver, the hero, the jester, the lover, the ruler, the rebel. This is actually where personality tests like my brigs come from. If you've ever done a personality test and it's given you a you know, four letter acronym that is meant to describe everything about who you are, know that this came from Yung and his work with archetypes and the shadow. So you've encountered the theory before. But each of these archetypes, and they gave you a couple you know, the hero, the jester, etc.

7:14 They each seek something different and they have a different role in society and for us personally. Their role is either to provide structure, to connect to others, to leave a mark, or to provide wisdom within that, each archetype then seeks something and embodies this role as a way to obtain the thing it seeks. So, for example, the ruler archetype creates order in society and what is what they really deep down want as a ruler is control.

7:45 They really need control to feel psychologically safe. The outlaw is another archetype, and they really need liberation, so they seek liberation through everything that they do that every man seeks belonging, the artist seeks innovation. We typically lean towards one, and we see these archetypes in nearly every society, and they play out again and again and again. However, we can shift between them. We lean towards one, but we shift between them. So if you have what y'all would call like a healthy mature personality, you could be and you could embody the ruler when you were leaning a project, but you could also embody the caregiver when you were comforting a friend. You could embody the explorer when you

8:26 were traveling. Now, each of these archetypes has kind of a light expression, which is like the general way that they present, but there is also a shadow expression that develops when the role becomes overidentified with and when we become obsessed with what our archetype seeks, and it's then the role of the persona to kind of cover up how it goes about seeking them, and these kind of darker parts of ourselves. So the caregiver, for example, in its lighter form, is about compacis and support and generosity and looking after others, but when it becomes ego driven, it can turn into overgiving people, pleasing, codependency, needing to be needed in order to feel worthy. The shadow side then takes a step further and can involve resentment, using

9:21 care as a way to gain approval or power, needing control through caring for others. And that shadow side is the stuff that we don't want to acknowledge when we speak about ourselves as a caring person. We don't want to acknowledge, and we rarely will acknowledge how that behavior and that desires can sometimes become ugly. I'll give you another example. The hero archetype is another one that you might hear about a lot. In its outward facing form, it's about courage, it's about growth and facing challenges. But when this becomes ego driven, it can turn into needing to prove ourselves, constantly pushing everything as a battle that we have to win, and the shadow side of that shows up as arrogance, hyper competitiveness, maybe hurting others, or

10:08 an inability to ask for help. The final one I should talk about maniev One more example. I feel like examples are the best way to make this known. Is the jester. Now, the jester brings humor and lightness and connection, but when it becomes a rigidly fixed identity, it can turn into deflecting everything with jokes, avoiding vulnerability, needing to be liked at all times. And then the shadow side of this might include deep insecurity, using humor aggressively deep deep loneliness that we don't want to look at. These behaviors are where we try and cover up this deeper side of us. Are the persona. The persona acts as a psychological protective mask that kind of covers up this raw, unfiltered, often maybe socially unacceptable part of us which lives in

11:04 the shadow. Our persona is what reflects what we think and we or we know we ought to be doing. It reflects our societal expectations and norms and who we kind of wish we could be that we know we are not. So those are the components of the shadow, and really, at the end of the day, the shadow is like is the kind of stuff you keep in the basement, And it's important to know that doesn't necessarily mean all these things are horrible and evil and awful.

11:35 It's I don't know, It's just the parts of yourself that you don't want to see, including parts that could actually be quite great. We all have this, we all you meet, your mum, your dad, your sister, your brother, your cousin. We have a shadow, and it's we've shoved away parts of ourselves that we don't think will be accepted and that we aren't willing to accept. There's also something that we should mention, which is the collective shadow.

12:00 This is like the dark side of society. This is the stuff that opposes our shared values that we don't want to acknowledge exists, but does. It is revenge, It is violence, It is the need for power. It is deep suffering and atrocities. We wish society wasn't like this. We have some deep hope that maybe society will one day not be like this, But we also know that this is just part of human behavior. Where there is light, there is also darkness. Where there is good in humanity, there is also bad. And that is the shadow that is the evil of society that we don't want to look at either. So that's the critical kind of core stuff you should know. Returning to the personal shadow, how does it develop and how can it or how can

12:45 they present? So it's important to think about your childhood self here and think or just think about a child in general. Children we have this wide range of emotions and needs and impulses and behaviors, and when we're young, we experience these in like their rarest most purest form. You know, when you're angry, you're angry. When you're jealous, you're jealous. When you're tired, you're tired. We want control, we want attention, we want love. As we grow up, we learn that this isn't entirely acceptable and that it won't necessarily make people like us, so we suppress organic reactions in favor of belonging and acceptance. Now, over time, we split ourselves into the part of us that keeps us safe and accepted by the group and attached to society,

13:36 and the other part of us that is ugly and would rather remain unseen. And there's what we see is our or what we know is our true self. It's probably not, but we feel like this awful, evil part of us that nobody should ever see is our true self, so we should keep it out of sight and out of mind. The thing is is that just because we try to disown these parts of ourselves does not mean they cease to exist. That is a tail as old as time. There's parts of yourself that you don't like.

14:07 The jealousy, the anger, the selfishness, like they're still there. It's like energy in a way. It can't be destroyed, it can only be converted. And this part of ourself converts in unexpected ways. One of the main ways these impulses and our true personality can be converted or seep out is through something called projection. This is where we notice, we judge, or we overact to something in someone else because of how it touches something unresolved in us. For example, we might see somebody posting a lot on Instagram and they look really hot, and they're showing off the house they just bought and their accomplishments, and they they've achieved a lot, and our instinctual reaction is to kind of

14:53 roll our eyes and to criticize them and to find something that is wrong with that picture and a reason why they are evil or and don't deserve it. Now Is this an issue with them or with us? Does their behavior actually impact us? No, but their confidence indirectly impacts us because we've internalized societal messages to do with humility and not showing off and their confidence. Their outwardness feels unbearable to witness because it requires us to acknowledge that we would never feel comfortable enough doing that ourselves, and that we are maybe missing out. Another example is becoming very irritated by someone who is very needy or sensitive. Yes, maybe it is annoying and maybe you don't want to

15:39 look further into it, but shadow work would maybe take that sense of annoyance you have about something that doesn't really impact you and interrogate it and expand on it and say, well, you know, you've spent years and years denying your own needs and your own sensitivity that you think is shameful. So when you see it in somebody else, you see the alternative that you didn't have to suffer, that you didn't have to suppress, and you realize the burden that you've carried. And the only way to not feel terrible about the fact that you've carried that burden for so long as to dismiss that behavior and somebody else.

16:15 Sometimes the size of our reaction to somebody else's actions and emotions and life is the greatest indicator that we've suppressed such a feeling in ourselves, and we cannot come to terms with that. Another way our shadow of self presents beyond our reactions to the behaviors of others is through repeated patterns of behavior that continuously lead to outcomes that we are not happy with. And yet despite that the behavior cannot be broken, it cannot be avoided. We keep doing it despite all of our best attempts. Cheating, lying, letting ourselves down as some big examples, but it can also be more subtle. A particularly familiar example of this is constantly choosing emotionally unavailable people or people who are

17:04 sincerely bad for you and not knowing why. And I say choosing because it often actually doesn't even feel like a choice. It just happens. It just always ends the same way, and you just, for the life of you, you look around and you're like, how did I get here? I promised I wasn't going to do this again. I can't figure out why I always find myself in these situations.

17:24 Shadow work would see that pattern and know there is a hidden experience at play. There is a deep belief perhaps that you know, I'm not the kind of person who can ask for more or who deserves more than this, because asking them to love me as I am is already too much. You know, there's a part of us that thinks that asking for anything more than the bare midmendum would be greedy, and people who are greedy are bad people. People who are like me should just take what they can get. Or perhaps you know, if I choose emotionally unavailable people, this type of life love, you know, is the kind of love I can understand. And so if they leave me, it won't hurt as much because I knew they won't ever fully in it. It won't

18:09 be as unexpected as an emotionally available person leaving me, And therefore my ego can be protected and ugly parts of me that might come out during love will never have to come out. So these behaviors can exist in everything, literally everything something like anything, anything that you continue to do that you're like, I don't like that I'm doing this, and yet I can't stop anything that you like secretly, just like without any warning, like hate in other people is a big, big sign that the shadow is at play.

18:45 The shadow is secretive, you know. The persona we can identify. We can kind of see the thing that's trying to cover everything else up. But the thing that's pulling the strings behind it requires a lot more effort to see, and it requires stepping beyond the ego and beyond the conscious mind, and particularly the self conscious mind, so that we can look into the danger zone and so that we can actually know ourselves by coming to terms that the parts of ourselves we would rather not know. Now you may be asking yourself, you know, Gemma, if our shadow and our shadow, our shadow self survives by being imperceivable, how do we perceive what doesn't want to be perceived?

19:27 How can we see the shadow if the shadow doesn't want to be found. Well, we've noted this already, but the shadow, the shadow self, leaves clues, and we're going to talk about them after the shortbreak. Shadow work is freaking hard work because what shadow work asks you to do is to notice irrational reactions, repeated patterns, anger, disappointment, resis that seems to have no origin. It asks you to notice limiting and cruel beliefs, desires, that become jealousy.

20:08 It asks you to identifies ways you keep self sabotaging, and then it says, look at these parts of you that you wish you weren't and go backwards. Work backwards from here, deconstruct the persona until you find what is underneath the mask. It basically puts us on this line of questioning, which says, if I now know this part of me exists, it must exist for a reason, and often that reason is protection. What is my worst fear here?

20:40 And when and why did I learn to be so afraid of it? And why am I so certain that will happen? And therefore, why do I construct all these things around it to keep that locked away and to prevent it from ever occurring by acting out in ways doing things that I don't necessarily want to do, Like we said, and a lot of our encounters with the shadow do come from projection. Basically, you see something in someone else that you don't like that says something about you.

21:13 But it's so much easier to see the perceived flaws of others than ourselves, and so that strange hatred, that strange jealousy or fear or whatever it is, is pointing towards the shadow. You also believe that your dreams are a very important place to encounter the shadow. To him, he did a lot of work on himself with this.

21:36 But to him and to us, I think we know one of the only times, some of the only times that we are relaxed enough to encounter the things that we are suppressing or hiding is when we are literally asleep and our conscious brain can't come in and say nope, don't think about that one. To him, a dream was never a dream ever. Ever, it was a sign from your deep subconscious that required interrogation. In our dreams, you know, the shadow is often the same gender as the dreaming ego, and things happen that reveal what we secretly want and what we secretly don't like about ourselves. So, as I said, these moments are called encountering the shadow. Once we've encountered the shadow and we've kind of brushed up against these

22:23 parts that we really are like, ooh, I don't know if I like that in myself. Only then can we actually begin to do something about it, and can we begin to assimilate the shadow. Assimilate the shadow, which is to say, incorporate the shadow into our conscious awareness to create better fundamental self awareness, therefore thereby kind of providing a way for us to know ourselves even deeper. Now, in the words of Jung, the interrogation of the shadow, or the realization of the personal, the personal unconscious, and how it endeavors to influence us is like the task of a lifetime. It's ugly work, it's brutal work, it's messy work. It is absolutely essential. In his words, he basically said, the privilege of a lifetime is to become

23:10 we truly are. And only when you acknowledge the worst parts of yourself and the worst parts of humanity, can you say that you have done that? Can you say that you know who you are? The thing is, despite the shadow being seen as this reservoir of darkness and all the things we wish nobody knew, the shadow is also the seat of our creativity, and it's the seat of our ability to relate to the world and to relate to the best but also the worst in others.

23:38 Our shadow also, funnily enough, contains our potential. I don't think I haven't mentioned this yet, but it's such a critical part of this. There is this amazing article that was published by the Society of Analytical Psychology, and it talks about how the shadow contains all sorts of qualities, capacities, and potential, which if not recognized and take an ownership over, will mean that you maintain essentially a state of impoverishment within your personality and you deprive yourself of your destiny, of a source of energy, of a bridge to connection and your dreams. For example, a person might believe that to be assertive is to be selfish or arrogant, so they go through life being pushed around by others and

24:27 deep down seething with resentment that in term makes them feel guilty and that is an ugly part of themselves they don't want to talk about. They don't want to acknowledge that they have the capacity for these things, but therefore by not acknowledging that they aren't able to use that to their advantage, the shadow needs to bring this stuff to the surface. It's also important to say this kind of work can be really emotionally intense and painful.

24:51 It often requires us to go back into childhood, to go back into our belief system and when we were taught that we weren't enough or that we couldn't do that of that part of us was ugly, and a lot of people talk about the pain of doing that as the whole point. The only way to confront these deep parts of yourself is to question the ego and question the persona, and therefore, you know, challenge it, which is not gonna like. You know, some people can engage with these kind of gentle reflective practices and they find them helpful. I've never been that person, and I probably never will be. And I think what the shadow work really does is it says, let's take a frickin' knife to that, let's just rip all this up and just

25:35 like really get down into the dirt and wrestle with who I am so that I can be better for myself and for others. So it sounds quite violent, I think it psychologically is. And that's why I don't think and now that young you didn't think that shadow work was for everyone. And I think there are certain situations where it can get us further detached from our true selves if we become obsessive, obsessive with all these things that we're doing. Because as much as it's important to interrogate our behavior, sometimes things are just random. Sometimes you just do things because that's just how you responded. And sometimes you just don't like people. Sometimes you just make mistakes, sometimes you're unpleasant. It's just not any deeper than that.

26:22 There is a difference between gently as gently as you can, but attempting to meet a hidden part of yourself with no judgment, with the only goal to know yourself deeper, the good and the bad, and pursuing shadow work because you want to completely eradicate every single part of you that is bad or awful or that is in your way.

26:51 That is impossible. You every single human need these aspects of themselves. It is what balances us. It's who we are, it's what makes us difference. It's part of our human psychology. So there does come a point where over interrogating your beliefs and your ideas about yourself and your bad behavior and your hidden self is harmful. And I think it's harmful when we feel like everything needs to be seen through that explanation, or when we just use it as a further way to shame ourselves. And shame is how you get here in the first place. Shame is how you get to a place where your identity and your personality and your mind has split. So working with a psychotherapist, I was gonna say a psychologist, but a psychotherapist specifically

27:41 is what can really help you to do this safely and in a constructive way. Psychotherapy, psychoanalyical therapy is a whole set, a whole discipline of psychology that just attempts to sit with the unconscious mind and the shadow and it is informed by the work of viewing and Freud. And guess what, it's not for everyone. It's not for everyone.

27:59 But if it is for you, having somebody who's trained in this can support you and just holding your experience, looking at it, allowing you to examine it without needing to get into that state of preoccupation. And it means that you can actually discover, discover who you are, rather than feeling overwhelmed by a painful, painful list of insights that you just don't know how to deal with. And again, I want to say this, like, it's not for everyone.

28:27 Shadow work is not meant to be this endless excavation of your deepest, darkest feelings, the excavation of them and the removal of them. It's not meant to become a hobby of suspecting yourself or being suspicious of the deeper meaning behind your actions. The point is to acknowledge when your current patterns of feeling and behaving aren't working for you anymore, and getting curious about how you can work through these with enough compassion that they don't control your life, but you acknowledge your capacity to have these parts of you.

29:01 Rather than eliminating them. Shadow work is about bringing them into conscious awareness with curiosity so that you can understand yourself better. And integration in this context means actually seeing these ugly sides of humanity and sides of you and not saying that's okay, and not saying I completely approve of that, but saying I get why I got there, and I get why I was ashamed of that, and I get why society doesn't like this. But also, if I don't want this to influence my behavior in poor ways, I have to be able to sit with this and acknowledge that this is just part of who I am.

29:39 And I think that's why a lot of people seek out shadow work, because they are tired of repeating the same pattern of behavior and not understanding why they're doing it, and their only way of counteracting it being shame and fear and suppression. They just want a more holistic understanding of their identity. But be prepared to find things that you don't want to find that have been buried, buried, buried, buried buried. And it's not the treasure kind of buried. Well, maybe it is, depending on how you see it, but it's not gonna be fun to be like, oh, this thing and the reason I am not behaving the way that I want to, and the reason that all these things have happened in my life is because of this

30:20 deep wound or this deep thing that I've suppressed, or be prepared for that. Also, be mindful not to start doing that same level of interrogation for other people and psychoanalyzing everything they do or say, just because you've gotten some basic idea of shadow work and psychoanalytical psychology. How other people's shadow is projected is actually, quite frankly none of your business unless what they do activates your own shadow, in which case that is of your concern. But it is only what you have ownership over that you can be I think you can pass judgment on, or that you can you know, psychoanalyze or explain. So as we wrap up, I want to recommend a few other resources.

31:06 There's only so much we can do in a thirty minute episode. I hope I've covered the basics for you if you want to go further. The book Meeting the Shadow is so good it will I When I read it, I would read like a passage and that I'd have to sit in silence for like five minutes. It took me a while to finish it. I read it a couple of years ago. It's great though. It's like the best guide other than Carl Jung's original works obviously on this topic. And they also have exercises in there as well.

31:37 And then there is a video on the YouTube channel Eternalized, which I used to love Love Love when I was in high school, and the video is called The Shadow, Carl Jung's warning to the world that is just amazing, and he breaks down the personal shadow. He also breaks down the collective shadow a little bit more. But what he really gets into is that this core idea, the journey of a life lifetime is to know oneself, and you have to be able to sit with the ugly parts of oneself in order to do that, and to understand why you don't have the life that you want and how to get there. So I'm gonna leave some little descriptions or leave the link sorry. In the description.

32:15 To those below, I hope you've enjoyed this episode. I hope it's brought you some more knowledge. Thank you to our research on Liby Cobbett for her assistance with this episode. A reminder, you can follow us on Instagram at that Psychology Podcast. Make sure that you are following along or subscribe so that you get notified when new episodes are released and you have something to listen to you on your Monday morning commute or on your Saturday Sunday morning runs.

32:38 What else we need to say, All the usual stuff, All the usual stuff. You can watch us on Netflix. But yeah, you can watch episodes, not like this one, but all of our other episodes on Netflix. This is a special bonus episode, so they're just for my audio only fans. But you can watch other episodes on Netflix.

32:54 And you can just find everything else that we're up to in the description. But until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself, Be kind and gentle to your shadow. We will talk very very soon