Meet Your Shadow
August 20th, 2009 |
Alissa Sige Weisman, MFTi
There is someone I would like to introduce to you. Meet Your Shadow. Your Shadow is all the parts of yourself that you don’t like. It is the darker, repressed, and denied aspects of your being as well as the light. Your Shadow was formed when you banished these parts of yourself from your conscious awareness in order to be accepted and liked.
Like Yin and Yang, your darkness, or your unconscious, negative self-image and your light, your conscious, positive self-image, are complementary opposites that comprise aspects of your whole being. When you only identify with your positive self-image, you live a lopsided existence because you deny your hidden other half. Conversely, when you face and embrace your shadier aspects, you bring your life into balance by giving your whole being permission to exist.
According to Jung, who introduced the Shadow to the field of psychology, the psyche is always striving towards wholeness. Whether you are conscious of it or not, your Shadow is always showing you your forgotten parts to help you remember who you are. As the saying goes, “If you spot it, then you got it.” Think of someone you encountered recently who triggered a strong emotional response in you. What characteristics did you find so repulsive about that person? There’s a good chance that the very qualities you despise in others are the exact opposite of what you believe is true about yourself. You can continue to unconsciously project your disowned negative aspects onto the people around you, believing, “I am NOT like you”. Or you can welcome this person as a messenger who has come to remind you of who you are. Instead, you may ask yourself, “How AM I like you?” The first response likely breeds hatred, suffering and isolation. The second response may offer you an experience of deeper connection and self-awareness. What to do you choose?
Your perceptions of others are colored by how you see yourself, your likes and dislikes and what you think is right and wrong. You judge others for what you cannot face in yourself. Now, think of someone you admire or feel really drawn to. The same principle applies here as well. What characteristics do you love about this person? Again, you can unconsciously project your disowned positive aspects, the light part of your Shadow, onto others. Or you can learn to see the beauty you admire in them as your own. The tremendous power of this work is realizing that you cannot see an aspect in another that you do not possess yourself. You are in fact everything that you experience in this world.
As you can see, confronting your Shadow is like turning shit into gold! Facing and embracing your disowned aspects is essential for living a balanced life, increasing self-awareness and an receiving an experiential understanding of the principle that we are all ONE.
10 Reasons To Face And Embrace Your Shadow:
1. Wake up from the spell of your ignorance, delusions and projections.
2. Release huge amounts of energy that you otherwise expend to keep your shameful
parts hidden.
3. Stop living in fear, pretending that you are someone you are not.
4. Start choosing whoever and whatever you want to be at any moment.
5. Recognize that the people who trigger you are mirroring back aspects of yourself
that you have forgotten.
6. Remove physical aches and pains in your body that are manifestations of blocked
energy or repressed emotional material.
7. Find the gift in each of your Shadow aspects and learn how to use them for good.
8. Admire the greatness you see in others as your own.
9. Manifest your full potential by reclaiming the parts of yourself that you’ve denied,
hidden or given away to others.
10. Finally really get what those spiritual people are talking about when they say
“We are ONE!”
©Copyright 2009 by Alissa Sige Weisman, MFTi. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry. Click here to contact Alissa and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile
9 comments so far
I get the shadow idea, and love the concept. But what’s the “we are one” stuff all about? Sounds a little like spiritual-babble to me….but, I’m open to you expanding on it a little more.
I like the thought in this of embracing both your yin and yang, or your positive and negative self image. It really is good to appreciate all aspects of the self because they all impact your life.
There’s a song by Jewel called Pieces of You and that part about I’m NOT like you/How AM I like you reminds me of this. The recurring line is Do you hate him, cause he’s pieces of you.”
http://www.songlyrics.com/jewel/pieces-of-you-lyrics/
relationships work out when you put both sides of your coin in it. I can say that definitely cos I’ve been learning that in therapy. I lost friends, my family wouldnt speak to me any more, could never keep a romance simply because I was a bundle of contradictions. Say something and do something totally different. I learnt that expressing my view point need not be only when it conforms to others. Its better to be true to oneself even the dark side of oneself.
This is so hard! Sometimes I loath the person that I see looking back at me in the mirror much less the deepre parts of me that I keep hidden inside. I know I would be healthier if I would allow some love for all of these pieces of me but again that is a challenge that I am not sure I am really up to yet.
We hide who we are because we’re scared people won’t like us or how we think. Are you saying let the Shadow side out to run wild and do whatever it wants? You never see the true unmasked face of another person. I don’t think that should change.
When you don’t feel a need to hide the essence of who you are, it’s very freeing. I don’t believe that you can experience the connectedness of mankind nor have deep relationships without embracing the shadow self. It can feel frightening to open up but when you do so, it’s so empowering!
Everyone has good and bad but I thought being a better person was all about working on the good side of you and learning to ignore the bad side. I dont know maybe its an old fashioned idea passed on to me by my parents.
Events and life circumstances as well as learned behaviours and styles of coping can present personal obstacles or barriers that create stress, anxiety, or feeling down. Occasionally it is impossible to put one’s finger on the nature of the problem. The description often provided is that “things just feel off” or “I just don’t feel like myself”. It is possible to gain insight into the nature of such issues, introduce change, and effectively manage such scenarios through counselling.