A Brief Introduction to Shadow Work

Hi everyone,

We’re going to go a bit mystical bullshit ahem weird niche psychotherapy this week, because I’ve been having fun with shadow work recently and wanted something easy to write.

What is the Shadow?

The Shadow is a concept from Jungian psychology and roughly means “the parts of our personalities we hide from ourselves”. If you’re not familiar with Jung, he was basically a mystic cosplaying as a psychologist, and as a result often ends up being really interesting. Sometimes he ends up being really interesting in good ways even.

I’ve never actually got around to reading any Jung (it’s on the TODO list), so my understanding of the Shadow largely comes from Robert Bly’s “Little Book on the Human Shadow”, which is a great book, and Carolyn Elliott’s “Existential Kink”, which is um certainly a book that exists (it has a lot of nonsense in it, but is also fairly enjoyable and surprisingly useful, so it’s a better starting point for the practice than it seems even if it’s largely wrong in the details), and a lot of conversations with people on the subject, so in terms of respecting the original sources all of this may be totally off, but it’s still a frame I find useful.

(I actually really like Existential Kink, but it’s completely ridiculous and in places terrible. If you can read it without taking it seriously then it’s both hilarious and genuinely very useful, and everyone I’ve recommended it to has enjoyed it, but I have been extremely selective in who I’ve recommended it to because of all the caveats).

In Bly’s framing you think of the shadow as “the long bag you drag behind you”. You start out whole and unconstrained, and over time society teaches you the parts of yourself you are not allowed to express, so you “put them in the bag”, hiding them away and never bringing them out.

This is bad because generally these parts of yourself are things that are useful. e.g. many people learned that anger is unwelcome, and put the angry part of themselves in the bag. But without anger it is very hard to defend yourself when you need to (anger is, more or less, the sense of gearing up for a fight). Someone who has learned not to be angry lacks important defences.

It’s also bad because of projection - what we reject in ourselves, we tend to be overly ready to see and reject in others. We’ve been so hyper-sensitised to the idea that the thing is bad that we become acutely aware to its violation, and this tends to create unfair negative reactions towards others who have really done nothing worse than remind us of parts of ourselves we don’t feel able to express.

What’s in the bag?

One of the reasons I like shadow work is that it’s really damn easy. There are a million things you can do in about half an hour of work to make you go “ouch turns out I got some shit to work on there”.

The easiest is basically to look for things you reject in yourself by looking at things you judge in other people. If you have a strong felt sense that other people aren’t allowed to do something, you probably don’t allow yourself to do the same thing.

Here’s an exercise I ran on Sunday at our monthly reading group (we did a chapter from Little Book on the Human Shadow). It consists of three steps:

1. Write down a list of things that are really irritating when other people do them. Particularly pay attention to anything where the irritation feels maybe a bit irrational - you know it’s not really that bad but it feels it.

2. Identify a bunch of common patterns.

3. Try to identify some archetypes of people corresponding to those patterns, where it would be awful if someone saw you as one of those archetypes. You can give them names if you like.

We did this with (1) and (3) as private writing activities, (2) mostly as a discussion, and with further discussion afterwards, but you can definitely do this as a private journaling exercise.

For example I identified the following:

• The Slacker: Didn’t do the work on something despite the thing being important and the work being reasonable and proportionate.

• The Try-Hard: Is clearly trying much too hard to seem a particular way (cool, clever, attractive) when you’re supposed to do that effortlessly.

Both of these very much feel like things I don’t have permission to do.

Examples of the Slacker were bad public speakers (I’ve put a lot of work into good public speaking) and men who dress badly (yeah it’s only men, but that’s not very surprising given that I am a man and this is my shadow). It feels like if I can do the work I should do the work - I’ve got no permission to not give a shit about it being good and people will judge me if I do. This might seem ironic given my impassioned defence of half-arsing but note carefully that throughout the entire thing I was arguing that half-arsing was good because some things aren’t important, not because sometimes important things aren’t your problem and you can just let them fail or go badly.

Examples of the Try Hard are men who overdress (yeah I’ve clearly got something going on with male fashion here, which is interesting - I’ve been doing a lot of this stuff recently and I still didn’t know that was there until I sat down and did the full exercise), people who are just really into conversation as performance (e.g. have clearly practised and retold that anecdote a thousand times). It also comes across a bit with people who are too friendly, and writers who have dialled the snark up to 11 to demonstrate how much cooler they are than the person they are writing about. And… yeah, I definitely don’t feel like I have permission to try hard, which is unfortunate given that you need to be a try hard to make it from the conscious competence to the unconscious competence stage. Certainly I’d like to dress better, and it feels like this part being in my shadow is part of what’s holding me back from that.

(I identified a lot more than this, but I can’t be showing you all my Shadow at once)

An interesting common theme that didn’t quite click with me (I’ve definitely got something there but I’m not sure this is quite right) is something like… people who don’t care enough about what others think. There is a sort of underlying outrage at “What do you mean you’re not constantly hypervigilantly monitoring to make sure everyone is OK?”. This didn’t quite resonate for me, but that might be more that this shadow part needs a different route in for me.

Taking Things Out of the Bag

Knowing these parts are there is often enough to start bringing them out on their own, but if it’s not then helping to draw them out is likely to be a complicated and highly personal journey.

This is where I depart from the source material because I read Bly’s suggestions and they seem like nonsense to me.

My preferred approach here is basically to murder Jiminy Cricket. The thing that causes you to put parts of your self into the bag is that you have acquired norms that constrain you. You have learned that this is not an OK way to be, and if you want to bring parts of you out of the bag then you need to unlearn that. In order to do that, you need to decide when and whether it’s OK to bring these parts of you out into the open.

I’m still figure out the details of this, and my approach is tangled and bumbling, but I think something like the following works:

1. Try to look for scenarios where you don’t actually endorse the feeling that this thing is bad.

2. Try to find safe environments in which to let it out. Talking to friends, partners, a therapist, about the underlying needs. Maybe journal about them.

3. Try to identify what positive things integrating this aspect of yourself into your broader life would allow you to do.

Once you have done that you can hopefully start to unpick some of the emotional responses around this. You might find some of the following things I’ve written useful for this:

• A crash course in having feelings

• How I fix anxiety triggers

• Some Useful Emotion Management Principles

Another thing that can be helpful here is writing. You can write fictional characters designed to represent some part of your shadow. Another thing that some people seem to find useful is to create a Twitter Alt (cf. Being Your Selves: Identity R&D on alt Twitter) to express aspects you otherwise don’t let out.

But to be honest this might be a thing where your real options are “talk to a professional therapist”, “figure it out yourself”, or “ask me again in a year”. I’m still very much figuring out what to do about these discoveries, and suspect it’s highly contextual.