Who’s Calling the Shots? You or Your Shadow?

By Anya Dangora

Many people have a sense of right and wrong. It is generally informed by societal/cultural standards. This moral sense can also be developed based on which emotions and behaviors were positively reinforced in childhood.

This sense of right/wrong or good/bad tends to underlie your values and how you see yourself in a fairly binary way. Overtime, this can lead to internal conflict, shame, and efforts to get rid of and hide what you consider “bad.”

For example, you may believe that taking care of others is an ethically good thing to do. Your parents may have taught you this from a young age by, say, encouraging you to care for younger siblings. In turn, you learned to accept, appreciate, and feel pride in the part of you that enjoys taking care of others.

This is great until the part of you that wants (and in reality needs) to be taken care of arises and you don’t have the capacity to also care for someone else. Choosing to take care of yourself in this context may be perceived as bad. Consequently, you see yourself as bad. The resulting shame can lead you to start to hide this part of yourself away from others.

Worse, it may be considered so bad to you that this part (i.e., the part that acknowledges your needs in this case) gets pushed to the point it becomes unconscious, completely outside of your awareness. These unconscious, hidden parts of yourself form what is called your “shadow.”

The socially undesirable parts sometimes receive the most attention. These parts can be cast into your shadow through traumatic experiences and/or interpersonal experiences that signal that these parts of you are undesirable.

Understanding your shadow is important because it contains clues to some of your long-held difficulties and questions. Based on the above example, you might find that you are feeling increasingly resentful because you’re burned out, never seem to get your needs met, and feel constantly guilty, yet don’t have any clue why this has become a pattern. You may find yourself repeating the same patterns over and over again in relationships.

Getting to know your shadow can help you to eventually understand and accept yourself. It can also help you make different choices in your day-to-day, leading to a greater sense of control/self-trust, and increasing your chances of building a fulfilling life.

The Shadow

The unconscious, according to Sigmund Freud, was the part of the mind that contains the urges, desires, and memories that are hidden from one’s awareness. Carl Jung, a student of Freud’s, believed that the concept of the unconscious was defeatist and limiting. He expanded the concept to include both good and bad qualities, reactions, memories, and, even, creativity. In Jungian theory, this is considered the collective unconscious, wherein many layers exist, including that of collective humanity.

To Jung, the shadow was the entirety of Freud’s unconscious, yet only the first layer of the collective unconscious. Essentially, it is the parts of yourself that have been repressed, devalued, and hidden away. It is the opposite of the personality that you show the world and is accepted as “you.”

Today, therapists use shadow work to explore these parts to bring them into conscious awareness. In so doing, you both gain an increased understanding of the entirety of you and also a greater acceptance of all parts of you, good and bad.

The Shadow’s Purpose

The shadow is adaptive; everyone comes into this world with certain ancestral information, spiritual and/or genetic. You are constantly inundated with new information as life goes on. All of this information cannot possibly exist at the forefront of your mind at all times. It is beneficial, then, to have certain information tucked away.

You can run into issues, however, when your shadow starts calling the shots. It’s sort of like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain that you didn’t know existed, but who is actually in charge of almost everything.

Say, for example, you grew up with a parent whose anger was frightening when you were a child. The part of you that feels anger, a normal and natural reaction, may be too intolerable for you to acknowledge as existing in yourself lest you be perceived as being like your parent. You may unconsciously disown anger in an effort to not be as scary or bad as your parent. However, you will still inevitably feel anger since it is a basic part of existence. You just won’t be able to recognize it.

Instead, your suppressed anger will come out in other ways. For instance, you might have a habit of “playfully” antagonizing another, while maintaining that you are not, in fact, angry. This may then generate an angry response in another. When the anger is acted out by another person entirely, the safe image of yourself as a person who is not angry is preserved.

Of course, this clearly can get you into trouble in relationships. Your partner, family, and/or friends may not be eager to interact with someone who constantly denies their feelings or shirks ownership of their behaviors. It’s also not fair to constantly put your feelings onto another.

Getting to know and accept the angry parts of yourself, separate from your parent, can help you learn how to better manage it. This will also likely lead to better relationships.

Taking Ownership

Just like switching lanes on a highway, we need another person, the passenger, to help us see our blind spots. The same is true for the mind.

Therapy can help you see the parts of yourself that your mind is hiding from your awareness. You may come to find that the things you can’t stand in your coworker or sibling also exist in you. You are then tasked with the tricky feat of developing acceptance and compassion for yourself as a multifaceted individual with flaws like everyone else.

When someone casts a light on another individual self in their entirety, a shadow inevitably forms behind them. If this shadow receives non-judgmental, accepting regard, it can be explored and integrated.

In therapy, the patterns you experience in your outside relationships show up in the therapeutic relationship. An experienced therapist can help hold these undesirable parts with you, signaling that it is okay for them to exist. These can then be offered back to you in a way that you can then take ownership.

Once the parts of the shadow are more within your awareness, you can learn to work with them and communicate in different ways. Some of these ways can increase your chances of getting your needs met. You will feel more control over your parts, therefore increasing your agency in relationships and your life in general. In other words, once you recognize that you are the proverbial man behind the curtain, the Wizard himself, your possibilities increase exponentially.

Shadow work is difficult. It’s also interesting and exciting once it takes hold. You may be surprised at what you find and what you can accept and/or change as a result.