A Meeting With The Shadow
It’s about time you had a meeting with your shadow!
A simple way to understand the shadow is: the part of you that’s pushed out of your awareness.
The shadow develops through different experiences that force you to suppress parts of yourself to feel accepted, loved, or protected. Somewhere in your life you learned what parts of yourself were okay to express and what parts you had to hide. The parts you hid remained beneath the surface and eventually began to show up in your patterns.
The hidden parts had to be filtered somewhere—you can push them out of your awareness, but you can’t push them out of you!
So, that’s how you get…the shadow.
If you’ve never engaged in shadow work, or even if you have, you may feel like you’re showing up as a version of yourself that doesn’t feel true to you; that’s probably because some form of trauma or survival shaped it. There can be tension in certain areas of your life that could be signaling that your shadow is more active in that area and could be the one influencing the way you make sense of situations and how you react in them.
For example, someone sees a couple holding hands in a grocery store and immediately feels annoyed; they roll their eyes and think to themselves, “Now why the hell do they even need to be holding hands in a grocery store?” and aggressively push their shopping cart past them. That’s an example of operating from the shadow. In reality, the couple isn’t doing anything to them; they’re just minding their business, but for some reason it brought up this annoyed reaction in them. Now they’re annoyed at the grocery store but… nothing actually happened. This reaction is signaling that there’s something deeper within them that needs to be addressed, and that their shadow is active in that area.
A lot of people are living emotionally difficult and overwhelming lives without realizing they’re not fully living in their truth; they’re living through their hurt, and not the version of them that feels whole. Don’t look at your shadow as something to shame or push away; if something in you feels off, it’s probably because there are parts of yourself you haven’t fully unpacked yet. You have to get to know your shadow so you can begin to feel whole again.
9 Different Ways to Know Your Operating In Your Shadow
1. Repeated Cycles
You keep finding yourself in the same type of distressing relationship problems or social dynamics, even when the people are different.
2. Over-reactive Reactions
Reactions that feel bigger than what the actual moment calls for. It can be something you react to impulsively in the moment, or something that stays on your mind longer than it should and starts to carry heavier meaning.
3. Victimization
You’re constantly viewing yourself in the position of something always happening to you, without recognizing how you may be participating in the pattern or how the wound still has power over the way you’re showing up in situations.
4. Control
Control can show up as needing to manage every outcome and conversation, how people perceive you, and constantly trying to stay ahead of how situations might go; basically, you aren’t comfortable with being seen or have a problem with unpredictability.
5. Numbness
You disconnect in moments that should affect you; you feel numb or indifferent when something actually matters to you, and/or have delayed emotional responses because you don’t feel safe being vulnerable in the actual moment.
6. Guilt
You may feel responsible for things that aren’t yours to carry, or you struggle to make choices for yourself without feeling like you’re doing something wrong. This can also show up as you overexplaining, overgiving, excessively apologizing or apologizing too quickly, or staying in situations you know don’t feel right out of guilt.
7. Envy
The shadow here appears through comparison that ignites irritation within your mood, silent/one-sided competition, downplaying what the other person has, spewing hatred, because you feel like their success is emphasizing something you believe you lack within yourself or your life.
8. Jealousy
This happens when the shadow feels threatened, like someone is taking your spot or taking something you have. It can feel like your place is being challenged. It can show up as possessiveness, obsession, suspicion, watching situations too closely, or feeling unworthy because someone else is being chosen or has the possibility of being chosen.
9. Avoidance
You pull away from conversations that require honesty and vulnerability, or distance yourself when things start to feel uncertain or “too much”. This can look like procrastination, constantly “needing space,” and convincing yourself you don’t care about something when you actually do.
What Is Shadow Work?
Shadow work is the process of understanding the parts of yourself that have been pushed out of awareness, accepting them as part of your story, while recognizing how they still show up through patterns that disrupt your sense of alignment. It also involves actively engaging with what you uncover through externalization practices or mental work, so you can begin changing those patterns, build a stable identity, and live a more fulfilling life.
The purpose of shadow work is to help you build a stronger internal foundation where you develop a deeper relationship with yourself so that you can move through life with more sovereignty. Also, your nervous system will thank you. So when life challenges you, or brings you into a moment that would’ve once taken you over completely, you have more ability and power to move through it with awareness and more honesty. You understand that you’re still human, and you’re still growing, but it makes you able to stay connected with yourself through the human experience.
The process usually moves through five layers: noticing, acknowledgment, externalizing, understanding, and integrating.
(These layers are not linear, and you may move back and forth between them or spend more time in one area before moving into another)
Noticing is the first step—the most important step of them all. Because you don’t know what you don’t know, but when you do know, you can begin to change! This is where you begin paying attention to the reactions, emotions, and internal shifts that disrupt your sense of alignment. You notice the moments where something in you shifts—maybe your tone changes, your body tightens, you start overthinking, your thoughts become defensive, you feel the urge to shut down, snap back, withdraw, judge, etc. At this stage, you’re simply catching the pattern as it’s happening or recognizing it after it happened. Also, this doesn’t need to be after an immediate situation; you can notice at any point.
Acknowledgement. This is where you begin to actually look at yourself honestly. You pull from memory, or from any previous instances where you first noticed the reaction, and honestly acknowledge it; for example: “You know what? Maybe I AM defensive of xyz.” This stage is about being able to acknowledge that you do react this way or feel a certain way when you're in certain situations, basically just naming the pattern and emotion. You’re not trying to shame yourself, you’re not trying to excuse yourself, you're also not attempting to clean it up, or understand it right away. In this stage, you’re simply doing the part you may have been avoiding the whole time, which is acknowledging that it’s there. People can stay in this stage for a while, which is fine until it's not. This can turn into self-awareness without integration (I go into this later in the essay), which can turn into a defense mechanism called intellectualization—where you focus on analyzing, explaining, or understanding an experience instead of emotionally processing how it affected you.
Externalizing and understanding go hand in hand. Externalizing is how you take what’s happening internally and bring it out of your mind so it becomes easier to process. This can happen through journaling, voice notes, creative expression, or therapy. (Meditation and stillness aren’t externalization practices themselves, but they can help you uncover what’s happening internally. What you find during that process can then be expressed through externalization practices.) But the point is to give the internal experience a form. When something stays in your mind, it can feel abstract, but when you write it down, record yourself speaking, or express it creatively, once it’s outside of your head, you can examine it. From there, you start asking where the reaction comes from, what triggers it, and why it keeps repeating. The goal is to locate the root of the behavior instead of only naming it. The point is to go deeper than “I get defensive” or “I overreact.” And also deeper than stopping at a surface-level explanation like, “I’m defensive because my parents criticized me growing up.” That might explain where the reaction started, but it doesn’t fully examine how the wound is operating now. Understanding can require looking back, but the process doesn’t always move in just one direction.
A lot of what you uncover through shadow work comes through the discoveries you keep making as you continue engaging with the process. Sometimes it’s journaling consistently, doing something creative, talking through what’s coming up, going to therapy, or working through it mentally, and the revelations start coming to you. One realization can lead you into another direction, then that can bring up another question, and now you’re looking at something you didn’t even realize was connected. It’s really through repeatedly externalizing what’s happening internally and continuing to work with your mind as more things come up. The following questions are examples of what you might begin asking yourself, or even what you might naturally uncover answers to, as you move through the shadow work process: “Where did this start? What does this reaction think it's protecting me from? What does this moment remind me of? Where have I felt this feeling before? What self-belief may be underneath this behavior?”
A lot of patterns begin in childhood, but not always. Sometimes the root comes from later experiences or repeated situations that taught your nervous system to respond a specific way. But once you connect the reaction to its root, the pattern becomes less abstract. You begin to understand the behavior isn’t coming from nowhere and that it has a history. Now your mind has an opportunity to conceptualize the situation differently in a way that supports your healing and inner peace—and also, you’re able to navigate your nervous system safely when situations that trigger the wound arise. Usually from there, the emotional hold it had on you begins to weaken as you take your power back from how the wound was operating through your shadow. Taking your power back happens through integration.
Integration
Integration happens through small, consistent choices that move you toward the person you want to be. This is where the work becomes behavioral, at this point, you could still feel the emotions connected to your reactions and internal responses. So you could still feel sad, irritated, defensive, hurt, embarrassed, triggered, etc. but now you have enough awareness to recognize what’s happening before it becomes your behavior. The old pattern, or the shadow, no longer has full control. Instead of letting the reaction decide for you, you begin choosing responses that help heal the shadow instead of feeding the same pattern. Now you’re able to pause, acknowledge what’s coming up, and choose how you want to respond from a place of awareness rather than impulsivity. It’s like you're working with your shadow now instead of your shadow taking over and deciding for you how to move.
When integrating your shadow, you have to actively ask yourself, “Who do I want to be? & who do I know myself to be?” Every time you choose not to react automatically through your shadow, you’re changing the way that energy operates within you. Funny enough, these “actions” usually show up in what you don’t do. So like not sending the text you were about to send to the person that you know isn’t good for your mental health. Not escalating a conversation that doesn’t need to be escalated. Not withdrawing the way you normally would. Not trying to fix the discomfort immediately just to get out of it. You stop following the same urge automatically and you stop reinforcing the same behavior.
Installing micro habits/practices is a healthy practice for healing the shadow as well because you’re learning how to stop falling into old patterns and building new habits. Doing the things you know you’re supposed to do, the things you know are good for you, or the things you want to become more consistent with also helps heal the shadow. Externalization practices for example, they count too. Through not falling into old patterns and installing new habits, you start getting to know your shadow and healing it.
There’s now space between what you feel and how you respond, and that space is what allows your responses to change in ways that are foundational to your identity. Integration allows you to live in alignment because your behavior starts reflecting the person you know yourself to be instead of the pattern you were used to surviving through. At first, you might still feel triggered and have to consciously and intentionally respond differently to situations as they come up, but as you continue the practice, there comes a point where the same situations no longer trigger you in the same way. The response begins to come naturally because the pattern has been transmuted through the integration process.
What Shadow Work Isn’t
Journaling without awareness
Journaling is usually one of the first steps to shadow work and a huge part of shadow work, but just because you journal doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing shadow work. I want to clarify the difference between journaling as a way to release and cope, and journaling for shadow work. When you journal for release, you’re writing as a way to process and cope about something (an amazing coping mechanism, by the way). Still, you may not always see where your shadow is showing up in the situation just by journaling as a means to release. But when you journal for shadow work, there has to be an insight component. You’re writing to release the emotions, and you’re also writing to eventually discover something that was stuck in your psyche and unconsciously affecting you. You’re trying to see your true relationship to the situation(s), or emotion, how you’re showing up in it, and why you may be showing up that way. Shadow work doesn’t mean you have to find the root of everything right away or have every answer in the moment, but there does have to be a willingness to look at what's coming up and ask what it’s showing you. That’s why in shadow work you usually end up going down memory lane and revisiting childhood or earlier memories to make connections. Part of the work is using your mind to make connections; without that, journaling can easily turn into a loop where you keep writing about the same situations over and over again without really understanding why you keep ending up there. That insight component is what separates journaling for release from journaling as part of shadow work. Once you start bringing awareness to your journaling and making connections, that’s when the shadow work process begins.
Assigning blame
Shadow work isn’t assigning blame to the people in your life who hurt you as a way to explain your patterns. But it’s also not ignoring what happened to you, excusing what they did, or acting like the pain is your fault. When people hear terms like “taking accountability” in shadow work, I think it can get confused with excusing what happened or blaming yourself for it. Shadow work requires you to acknowledge and validate your pain first. You have to be honest about what happened to you, who hurt you, and how it hurt you. But the work can’t stop at “this happened to me” or “this person did this to me, and that’s why I am the way I am.” Shadow work is asking you to understand how it affected you and how you are showing up today. You’re not taking accountability for the wound being created. But, you’re taking accountability when you understand how the wound is moving through you, because sometimes when you operate from your shadow, you may hurt other people from a place of pain without realizing it. Shadow work is being willing to see that without invalidating what happened to you, so you can understand what still has power over you and how you can begin to take your power back.
Perfecting yourself
Shadow work isn’t an attempt to perfect yourself. The goal isn’t to remove every single flaw or reach the final version of yourself where nothing ever affects you ever again. Life is going to keep lifing, you’re still going to go through different seasons, experience disappointments, have new beginnings and endings, and yes, you’re still susceptible to gaining trauma even after doing shadow work. Shadow work doesn’t erase the fact that you’re a human being living a human experience. When shadow work turns into constant self-correction, that means you’re constantly monitoring every little reaction, becoming judgmental of yourself (and sometimes others), and trying to hurry yourself into the “right” version before you even understand yourself. Don’t turn the work into performing growth; you’re supposed to be experiencing growth, and it takes time. But even with that, this is still a very common phenomenon when you begin shadow work, so if you find yourself in that stage, it’s okay. It’ll get better in due time <3.
Self-Awareness without integration
The self-awareness stage can become the point at which people mistake their newfound awareness for the work being done. The first connections they make can become the resting point where they stop engaging in shadow work, rather than the point where they truly begin the journey. For example, someone makes a profound connection about why it takes them a long time to leave toxic relationships and relates it to a childhood experience. Then they hold onto that explanation as proof that they fully understand themselves. People can understand shadow work as only “owning” those parts of themselves. But, without integration, it can become the defense mechanism I mentioned earlier —intellectualization—an intellectual way of explaining themselves rather than an actual process of integration.
Awareness is a powerful step in shadow work, but you have to go deeper. You have to keep exploring how what you discovered is showing up in different areas of your life because patterns don’t always show up in one obvious way. And then you have to integrate what you find. Shadow work is an ongoing process, and it requires ongoing integration.
How Long Does Shadow Work Take?
There’s no set timeline for shadow work because everyone is on their own unique path. But just because there’s no specific point where the process officially begins or ends doesn’t mean that you’re going to spend the rest of your life constantly trying to heal yourself from old wounds.
The actual shadow work process can take years, especially when you’re first working through wounds that have been affecting you for a long time. But there comes a point in the journey where you’re no longer so heavily inside the process of trying to heal from those wounds, and you’re able to live. You’re not just healing, healing, healing all the time. You reach a space within yourself where you feel stable in the identity you’ve built and the person you’ve uncovered and integrated. You have your sense of self, and you have your sovereignty.
As the practice becomes ingrained within your identity, you’ll begin transmuting things more naturally. You already have a relationship with yourself, so when something comes up, you know how to move through it. You also gain more appreciation for your emotions because they’re able to move freely through your body now. It’s not as though you become a stickler with your emotions or stop feeling them; you actually feel them more, but now you also have more control over how you hold them. You gain more capacity to feel and hold at the same time. You could actually become more emotional and more expressive, because now you know how to hold what you feel in ways that help you and transform you, and they don’t hurt the people around you. This doesn’t mean you’ll never have to return to shadow work. There might be situations in your life that bring you back into the process, and that’s okay because that’s part of life. Each process can look different and take a different amount of time depending on what you’re working through.
Prompts Section
What tends to trigger me more than the situation actually calls for?
What reactions do I immediately defend instead of taking a moment to pause and question?
Where am I ending up in the same kind of situation, just with different people?
What feelings do I have a hard time sitting with in the moment?
When I feel the need to control something, what am I afraid might happen?
What version of myself am I always trying to hold together, and what parts of me get pushed aside to maintain it?
What emotion am I most uncomfortable letting other people see, and why?
When I feel misunderstood, what do I immediately assume about the other person?
What do I usually make situations mean about who I am?
Where do I feel like I have something to prove, and who am I trying to prove it to?
Thank you for reading. Happy shadow work :)
— SIBYL¹¹ ꒷꒦♛❤︎