Going Over to the Dark Side (Shadow Work)

Everyone has a dark side, what does yours look like? What happens when people have a dark side they have no control over? In this podcast we discuss Carl Jung's idea of the shadow; how can you explore your dark side and integrate it into your personality, to help you solve some of life's toughest challenges.

Audio-Essay by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Curmi is a consultant General Adult Psychiatrist who completed his training in the South London and Maudsley NHS foundation trust. In addition to general adult psychiatry he has a special interest in psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation.

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Transcript

Welcome back to the Thinking Minds podcast. My name is Alex. I'm a consultant psychiatrist. Today we're going to be talking about why you need to explore your dark side, what it involves, how it can benefit you and make you a more well-rounded individual. 12s There are many times in life where we're simply not sure what to do. This may be because we're facing a problem we've never faced before, possibly a problem we've never even conceived of before. Or we're at a new stage of life, or events happen to us which make us question the way we've lived our life up until this point. We're often put against problems which we don't yet have the language to describe, or the mental toolkit to overcome. These periods of profound uncertainty call on us to discover new parts of ourselves and in a resources which were not yet aware of. One way this can be phrased is the discovery of your dark side. Thanks to Star Wars. When talking about your dark side, people primarily get the idea of discovering the evil forces within oneself and channeling them to get a selfish or ego driven goal. And this, of course, can happen, but it's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is beginning to explore the parts of your psychology which you have repressed and kept outside of your awareness for one reason or another, and to begin to integrate these parts of your psyche into your personality. This, of course, is best captured by Carl Jung's concept of the shadow. Looking into your shadow or your dark side is no easy task and will take time. But the more one becomes aware of and utilizes their dark side, the more dynamic they become, the more they are able to handle the wide variety of different problems which life tends to send our way. And the more difficult challenges can be faced with grit and resolve. People who integrate their dark side can expect to be less fearful, because facing the darkness within oneself is analogous to facing the darkness in the external world. People who integrate their dark side can generally expect to have less interpersonal problems, because they tend to have strong boundaries, while also being able to be kind rather than leaning too much in one direction or the other. People with an integrated dark side, however, are at war with themselves and have a lot of internal conflict. They might find themselves acting in contradiction to their values, behaving unpredictably or impulsively, and engaging in self-destructive or self-sabotaging behavior. Having an unexplored dark side is like carrying around a loaded gun that could go off at any time. Of course, this is not a binary situation where you either have a totally integrated or an integrated shadow, but in all likelihood people are on a spectrum of integration. But the more integrated and unconscious your shadow side is, the more able it is to run a person's behavior. There are many ways this can manifest itself in everyday life. Here are a few examples. Lying to avoid having to express your needs or set boundaries. Lashing out and using aggression to suppress others because you feel threatened or fearful. Positioning yourself as helpless in a situation and demanding people take your problems away and solve them for you. Taking control of another person's situation and trying to solve their problems because it boosts your ego and makes you feel needed. You may notice similarities between these examples and the drama triangle discussion from a few weeks ago. A lot of these examples are reminiscent of what it means to be a persecutor, a victim, or a rescuer. In all of these cases, what you have is a dysfunctional coping strategy that is being used because a person is unable to tolerate a part of themselves. 1s A person lies because expressing their needs feels unbearable. Someone lashes out because they're not willing to examine their fears. Someone takes control of another person's situation to compensate for a lack of self-esteem. 1s Young also described how people with an unconscious and integrated shadow may project their shadow onto others, in effect blaming other people of having qualities they refuse to acknowledge in themselves. For example, a person can be very moralistic, always pointing out other people's prejudices and their hatreds because they're not able to tolerate any of their own hateful or prejudicial thoughts. You can see the results of an unexplored dark side very clearly in celebrity culture, where people, often with the most innocuous or moralistic facades, turn out to have the darkest shadows. People like Bill Cosby fit this description. 1s So what does your dark side include? Unfortunately, there's no one size fits all approach to this because importantly, everyone's dark side is different. Everyone has unique predispositions and life experiences, and everyone has different aspects of their psychology which have been repressed. And these can include desires, aversions, attitudes, emotions, talents, personality traits. And why might they have been repressed? Again, a number of factors could be at play and these can include one. A lack of acceptance within the family. For example, a mother whose creativity was stifled in her own life may suppress her daughter's creativity because she is unconsciously envious of her two. A lack of acceptance within society. A gay man may have had to suppress his sexuality for his whole life because it wasn't considered acceptable. Three A lack of self acceptance. You may have suppressed certain aspects of yourself because it doesn't fit with the story you have crafted about yourself. For example, a man who realized early on that being kind was an easy role to fall into may have repressed all of his aggressive impulses. So how should you start exploring and integrating your shadow? Like many things in personal growth, it's best carried out with a mixture of internal and external work the internal being, introspection, contemplation, reflection and the external being. Experimentation, trying out new behaviors, new ways of being and seeing how the world responds. You then repeat that process over and over again. 1s Starting with the internal work. Here are ten examples of questions you can ask yourself. If you want to do a practical exercise, you can actually take note of these questions and answer them as fully as possible. These are also questions you could go through with a friend or with a counselor or therapist. One what parts of yourself do you suppress? Two what are you avoiding? Three. What do you dislike about yourself? Four. What do you dislike about other people? Five. How might these judgments reflect aspects of yourself that you don't like? Six. What thing could you do that you know would make your life better, but that you're very frightened of? 1s Seven. What scares you about yourself? Eight. What messages did you receive in childhood about specific qualities or behaviors that were deemed totally unacceptable? Nine. What qualities do you admire about other people? And ten. How easy or difficult do you find it to embody these qualities in your own life? If you take time to answer these questions and other questions, like them honestly and in some depth, the answers will contain a decent blueprint a sketch of what your shadow side looks like, and what parts of yourself you may be underutilized in your own life, parts of yourself that you are denying. What these include will be very different for each person, as we've said. But they could include your aggressive impulses, your drives and ambitions, your desires, common emotions like sadness or anger, and even traits normally regarded as positive qualities like your empathy. Some people suppress their ambition because they're afraid of failure. Some people suppress their desires because they're afraid of rejection. Others may suppress their empathy because they are afraid people will betray them. 2s Once you have a blueprint of what your shadow looks like internally, you can try out experiments in the external world. You would normally go about this by starting with small experiments that you repeat often, seeing how the world responds and then adjusting and then building up those new habits over time. To illustrate this, let's look at an example. At 40 years old, John found himself caught in a cycle of loneliness and addiction to pornography. Despite being a successful computer engineer with a lot of friends, he was never able to enter a romantic relationship with a woman. While on the surface he often dismissed the need for a close relationship. Deep down, he began to realize that his suppressed desire for meaningful connections with women had profoundly impacted his life. With the help of a therapist, John tried shadow work as a means of dealing with this problem through self-reflection. He began to realize that every aspect of engaging with a woman romantically was very frightening to him. Whether this was talking to a woman he didn't know, complimenting a woman, or asking someone out on a date. 1s When going through his early life, John saw that he was deeply affected by his parents divorce when he was about five years old, which gave him an early impression that relationships were dangerous and risky. At the age of 12, he had a series of bad experiences at school where he was bullied and shamed for expressing romantic interest in other girls his age. With the guidance of his therapist, John gradually worked through these emotional barriers from childhood and started experimenting with new behaviors. He tried online dating, made a concerted effort to talk to new women, and social situations, started with just introducing himself, then learning the art of flirting and asking people out. This was hard and awkward at first. It involved a lot of rejection, but eventually John became more comfortable engaging with women in a romantic way. As he integrated his shadow, he was more able to authentically express what he felt and his desires. This newfound authenticity allowed him to connect with Sarah, whom John met at a friend's wedding. Sarah appreciated his vulnerability and shared values, and this connection allowed John to have the first fulfilling romantic relationship in his life. 2s There's a lot of debate within psychotherapy and self-development as to whether you should give more emphasis to the internal or the external work, but this is really a moot point. It's very difficult to have a life most people want externally without having a balanced mind, and most people would find it difficult to find inner peace without having achieved certain basic goals in the external world, such as good relationships, meaningful work, good health, etcetera. You can achieve the best results by oscillating between the external and the internal world. For example, deciding to be more assertive with your work colleagues, seeing how it affects your life, how they respond, how it improves things, observing how it makes you feel, considering what you might do differently next time, and then repeating that process over and over again. The importance of repetition can't be overstated in this. Before we conclude, there are some cautions about exploring your shadow, which I'd like to mention. The first caution is that as people start to become more self-aware, many start to realize that aside from being more conscious of their own dark sides, they are more able to see the dark sides of others. And this can include people they love, friends, family, partners, etcetera. This is a common experience for therapists in training. Attitudes and behaviors that may have gone unnoticed previously may now stand out in sharp relief. All of a sudden, it can become harder to be willfully blind to other people's resentments their passive aggression, their putdowns of themselves, their putdowns of others, their casual use of dishonesty, their lack of boundaries, or their extreme rigidity. It may become increasingly obvious to you when someone is avoiding something, or using anger to protect themselves from fear, or lashing out due to an insult to their pride. 1s So now, not only do you have a higher ideal set for yourself to aspire to in terms of growth and maturity, which, let's face it, is hard enough, but automatically the ideal becomes higher for everyone else as well. Except everyone else is understandably not necessarily interested in exploring their darkside, and may indeed probably not even think about their problems in these terms. Because success and maturity in our culture is largely discussed in terms of the acquisition of status and material success, not psychological or spiritual growth. This is not necessarily because people don't care about or value psychological growth, but because it's hard to measure. It's hard to evaluate. It's not. On the surface, discovering other people's dark sides can be harrowing and disappointing, especially because unlike your own dark side, which you can at least choose to explore and manage and integrate, you have little influence over the dark side of others. All you can do, short of becoming someone psychotherapist, is set boundaries, get your needs met, and try and maintain a calm, compassionate approach and accept other people and their wholeness and their flaws as much as you do for yourself. The second caution I'd like to mention is that acknowledgement and acceptance does not mean approval. This is an idea commonly used in dialectical behavior therapy, and this phrase makes a very important distinction. It means that to accept that a part of yourself exists is not the same thing as giving in to that part of yourself and following its every whim and impulse. However, people are often worried that one will lead to the other, and so they choose to remain blind to large parts of themselves. And as we mentioned earlier, the more you remain blind to a part of yourself, the more that part of you can surreptitiously run the show. For example, a person may come to acknowledge and accept that they have violent thoughts while still honoring the principle that violence is wrong. Acknowledging and accepting their violent thoughts would put that person in a better position to manage their impulses, to find different outlets for their aggression, to ensure that they use verbal boundaries early to explore the fears that may be underlying their violent impulses. 1s So to conclude, shadow work is indeed a scary and difficult process, but its promise is that it can open you up to the very parts of yourself that you need in the current season of your life to solve that difficult problem, to get through that particular situation, to meet that need that you really need met. Not only that, but it can be a path to peace and self acceptance and the acceptance of others. It can make you less hypocritical, less moralistic, but at the same time more capable and more principled. 1s It's one of the cornerstones of psychological maturity. 1s As Carl Jung said about the shadow. Everyone carries the shadow, and the less it is embodied in that individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is at all counts. It forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call his fate. The shadow, when it is realized, is the source of renewal. The new and productive impulses cannot come from established values of the ego. When there is an impasse, a sterile time in our lives, the shadow may lead us to the inner sources of vitality from which authentic life comes. 1s What about you? Do you agree or disagree with what we discussed today? If you have any feedback, you can email us at Thinking Minds podcast at gmail.com. This is the Thinking Mind Podcast, a podcast all about psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry, self-development and related topics. If you like it, there are a few different ways you can support us. You can share it to the friends. Give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Follow or subscribe on any of those platforms or if you want to support us further, you can check out the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description. Thanks for listening.