Finding and understanding your shadow can help you to reach your fulfillment in life. This can help you to identify with yourself and to understand yourself more, according to Carl Jung, psychologist.
Jungian Theory
Carl Jung was a psychoanalysis, and he studied the human psyche. He was one that would look at people and would research how they acted and who they were.
Jung would look at the personality and find that people are conscious and unconscious of things in their life. The conscious mind is where the ego is and helps us to know our personality and what we are. Jung felt that people had personas which were their personalities that made them want to please others and want to hide things about who they are.
The problem with personas is that Jung thought that they could cause you to have parts of your life that you never looked at. This can make parts of the personality to be suppressed and to not be developed.
As people try to please others, they hide things that they don’t think are acceptable to others or to society because they are afraid that they are negative.
Jung called this the shadow self and felt that this was part of the being that people were afraid that society wouldn’t approve of and so they pushed it to their unconscious thoughts.
Hiding the Shadow Self
Until you learn to figure out your shadow self, you are not going to figure out who you are. When you hide your shadow self, you are hiding parts of your life that are who you are.
Jung would suggest that when you hide the shadow self that it would lead you to suffering in the future because you are hiding feelings that are there inside of you. These negative emotions would cause you to miss out on who you are. They also can come out later and assert themselves in different ways such as mental problems or addiction.
Hiding your shadow self can cause you to not reach who you really are. This can cause you to have low self-esteem and to not be able to accept your life. It can cause you to have anxiety and to believe that you are not good enough. Many of the things that happen to people that are traumatic in their childhood are things that they have hidden.
When you look at the shadow self, you are looking at what people call someone’s dark side. This is the personality that is negative and that are parts of people that they want to disown. This is a weakness that they have or something negative in their being.
The shadow self is the part of the personality that is supposed to be destructive. When this is ignored, it can later be a problem because people are not facing things that will come back later.
When we don’t take time to look at who we really are, we can become obsessed with who we are, and we can lack believing in our real self.
Integrating the Shadow and Growth
When you can take your shadow and look at it without blocking it, you can learn to accept yourself. You will stop comparing your life to yourself and to others and learn to accept and understand who you are. This can lead you to grow and to have a deeper understanding and can help you to look at yourself and find out how you can be happy. This is helpful to help bring the unconscious to the conscious.
Jungian Shadow Integration
Before you find your shadow self, you need to figure out what you are willing to find out. You can look at your life and the shadow and you can get shadow work of your personality. There are different things that different people do and there is no right way for shadow work. You might want to ask someone you trust or talk to a professional to help you.
Finding Your Shadow
Here are some ways to find your shadow:
Triggers
Look at things that trigger you or cause you to have negative thoughts or feelings. This is part of your shadow self. A real way to know is when you feel uncomfortable with situations, and it causes you to be angry or to feel guilty. These emotions have to be explored.
Find out why you have these feelings and write them down. Journal them and keep up with it so that you can always check this off in a moments notice. Write your thoughts on paper and your feelings so that you can identify your shadow.
Be mindful that you will not get the answers that you want right away but keep looking.
Recurring Themes
When you focus on your emotions, find out if there are certain things that always make you feel uncomfortable. Write down your detailed triggers and find out if these things always come with negative thoughts and feelings.
Identifying your shadow is not always hard and you need to know that this will not get rid of your negative feelings. This is a way that you can look at what kind of shadow work that you need. When you learn to accept these things and this shadow, you can integrate it into your life and learn how to not feel these feelings.
Talk
Exploring your shadow is not easy and if you can talk to someone, it will not be as painful to handle. These things in your life have been likely pushed away because of trauma that you faced.
You can talk to a professional and they can help you to find the help that you need to integrate things into your journey.
Talking to someone can help you to have the therapy that you need to face the painful memories and feelings of your past. There are different approaches for different people, and you need to find the one that works best for you.
Conclusion
Doing shadow work is not easy and should not be done unless you are really ready to face things. This might take you getting a professional to help you address your shadow self and to help you to identify what you need to know in order to get rid of things and not suppress them.
Learn to unearth the things that have been holding you back and the experiences that you have felt along the way. You have to learn to address these things and then learn to accept that this I part of your life.
When you look at your shadow self, you can learn to accept yourself and learn to love the parts of you that you have not yet found out about yet.
