“The work itself is about cultivating self-awareness to arrive at compassion and self-acceptance. “A ‘shadow’ is a part of an individual and should not be judged as a mistake or flaw,” Sanam Hafeez, a neuropsychologist in NYC, tells Mic. Why would you want to dredge up all the ick and muck that your conscious mind has so skillfully buried? Well, the whole good/bad binary really falls apart when it comes to emotions. For many people, doing shadow work means excavating our psyches to bring the parts of ourselves we’ve been hiding - even from ourselves - into the light. Shadow work, then, is the emotional and intellectual labor you do to get to know your shadow self in all its potentially messy glory. “Therefore, can harbor everything from intense embarrassment to bitter sadness to profound rage the full spectrum of emotions,” Kirsten says. Your shadow self, Kirsten explains, is made up of everything about yourself you’ve repressed - in other words, made unconscious - as a way to fit in, feel loved, or be appreciated. “Shadow work involves delving deeper into the ‘darker side’ of ourselves - aka the shadow self,” Charlotte Kirsten, a psychotherapist in London, tells Mic. “Shadow work” is a term that was first coined by Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, that’s recently become something of a pop psych catchphrase. The truth is we really do contain multitudes, and much of what’s inside us isn’t easy to neatly label. I asked psychologists to help me understand what shadow work is and how it can help us move toward great self knowledge and acceptance, and to provide shadow work prompts we can all use to get started. That’s where shadow work - a tool for dealing with our less palatable human emotions - comes in. The best we can do is get to know ourselves, honestly and with compassion. Basically, a lot of us have ended up asking ourselves not just whether humans are good, but whether we ourselves are good.īinary notions of good and evil, though, are unfortunately limited - not to mention problematic. COVID has made us very aware of how much we are - or aren’t - willing to be inconvenienced for the sake of others. When George Floyd was murdered, we all asked ourselves how we have been personally complicit in the white supremacist worldview that allows such atrocity. The thing is that most of us can’t think about humanity as a concept without including ourselves - nor should we. Add to that the mundane rollercoaster of daily life, and what you have is the perfect conditions for forced reflections on the state of humanity. We have been faced with disease, systemic oppression, climate disaster, and a government that has often seemed to be veering closer and closer to fascism. Multiple quarantines and the inescapable news cycle have left us with precious little respite from the complexity of our emotions. These past few years have felt like an unrelenting confrontation with the darkest facets of human nature.
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