Shadow Work 101

“Are you sure your friend would get you as nice a gift?” my sister asked me.

I had gotten my friend a pair of Birks for her birthday because I knew how important adventure was to her.

I found myself getting irritated at my sister’s question. And normally, I would just blame my sister for irritating me.

At the time, though, I had recently discovered the concept of shadow work.

In particular, the idea that something may be pissing you off because there’s an element of truth to it.

So instead of just being irritated at my sister, I asked myself–

would my friend have put as much thought into a gift for me?

I had a sneaking suspicion the answer was no. (And since we had similar birthdays, when I got my gift, it turned out to be true–after my friend had initially forgotten about my birthday!)

That moment of uncovering the layer behind my irritation was one of many critical moments where I realized that the friendship I held so dear was actually one-sided and codependent.

And that my gift wasn’t actually so generous, because unconsciously–I was overgiving in hopes I would receive something in return within an emotionally unavailable dynamic.

Imagine if I had just blamed my sister for irritating me and not done a bit more digging–I would have been robbing myself of important information.

Of course it sucked to realize that the friendship I thought was so great, actually wasn’t.

But it was better in the long run for me to face the reality of the situation.

Shadow work (and trigger work) is uncomfortable, but it ultimately sets you free.

What is shadow work?

Essentially, it is looking at what we would rather not look at. When not looking at something serves as a sort of self-preservation.

In the example above, shadow work involved truly seeing the imbalanced nature of the friendship, when before I was invested in putting it on a pedestal.

Subconsciously, I was protecting myself from seeing the negativity of that relationship, because I was sourcing a sense of fulfillment from it.

Shadow work in this situation also meant examining that the positive quality of generosity could also have a negative side to it.

Inherent in having shadows, is a rigidity in what’s right and wrong and what’s good and bad (“light” and “dark”). A fallacy that what is good is always good, and what is bad is always bad.

It starts with growing up being praised for being X or being shamed for doing Y.

Or absorbing cultural values that exalt one quality and demonize another.

Anything that we judge as “bad” or unworthy of love becomes a part of our shadow.

The other way we can develop a shadow self is growing up seeing a certain behaviour, and deciding to embrace that behaviour, or react against it.

Examples:

🌗 Praised for working hard and your family shunned idleness, so anytime you exhibit laziness, you judge and repress that aspect of yourself. And judge others if they are “lazy”.

🌗 Growing up seeing anger expressed in unhealthy ways, so you decide all anger is bad and having anger makes you a bad person. And judge others it they exhibit anger.

🌗 Praised for being “good” and “nice”, so you overgive to the point of depletion and judge others for being “selfish” or having boundaries. (this one, particularly, is gendered.)

🌗 Shamed for crying because “boys don’t cry”, so you suppress all emotions besides anger and judge men who exhibit emotionality.

🌗 Shamed for being queer, so you hide that aspect of yourself to the world and judge others who are openly gay.

Did you notice how all of these examples involved judging others for possessing the traits we’ve rejected?

We often project what we won’t look at onto others.

So the best way to look for something that, by definition, is hidden, is to look at the people and qualities that we judge the most.

The other way is to look at what you pride yourself in, or what you’ve been praised for.

If you were praised for being smart, can you tolerate within yourself or others anything that seems “dumb”?

If you were praised for your looks, could you accept yourself if you became “ugly”?

Once you’ve identified what your shadow is, one way you can integrate it is to look at the positive qualities of it.

When you do that, you collapse the binaries that create “light” and “dark” aspects of our psyche and unify them into a whole.

In the examples above, the positive qualities of laziness is rest and restoration. The positive quality of anger is boundaries and justice. The positive quality of being “dumb” is having a beginner’s mind. Etc.

You can also reverse it and look at the negative qualities of the “light” side. The negative quality of having good looks is people liking you for superficial reasons, the negative quality of generosity is self-sacrifice, etc.

My favourite way to integrate shadow, however, is to use unconditional love.

I love this phrasing I learned from TBM, which is: “I love myself BECAUSE I’m: lazy/angry/selfish/ugly/dumb/[insert whatever shadow quality here].”

When you bring those repressed parts of yourself back online, damn–you have no idea how much power you gain back.

Ninja tip: “the brighter the light, the darker the shadow”. Two ways to interpret this: those who covet the light the most have the biggest blind spots. The other way I interpret this is, the more you become aware and emotionally intelligent, the sneakier your blind spots become, and the sneakier they are to others. It can be really easy to be fooled by emotionally intelligent language that “sounds right”, but tune into your inner knowing/body to see if it truly resonates.

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Good luck in integrating your shadow. I respect people who do shadow work so damn much. (Actually, in all honesty, it is hard for me to fuck with people who don’t do shadow work!)

I wish I could cover every single aspect of a topic in a post, but usually I can only get at the tip of an iceberg!
As always, if you want to go deeper with your integration, DM me and I’d love to chat about how we can work together! ❤️

To the you that’s always whole,
Tasmia (thuss-me-ah), Smia for short

Photo Credit: Jonah Angeles