The very first thing you need to do before beginning shadow work is to gauge if you are truly ready to undertake it. Ask yourself this, “Am I ready to accept difficult truths about myself?” Be brutally honest with yourself because you’re only going to do more harm than good if you aren’t. It is difficult to face your shadow personality, it is not a Sunday afternoon ride on a merry-go-round. This is some seriously heavy and dirty work you are thinking about undertaking. Another thing to ask yourself is, “Am I ready to relieve difficult memories from my past?” There is no telling where your work will lead you in your psyche and you have to make sure that you are able to handle reliving any possible memory from your past. I’m not suggesting that you should be looking forward to reliving these memories but you have to determine if you are in a psychologically safe place to handle these memories.
There are different schools of thought as to when you should begin shadow work. One is that you must be in a strong psychological space and at a stable place in your life. This indeed would be a good time to start this kind of work because in this state you will most likely be able to handle all of the things you need to consider before you begin. The other theory is to start it during your long night of the soul. When everything has fallen down around you and you’ve reached a point where you recognize that you have to go within and make changes from the inside out. No matter which place in your life you choose to start from the absolute, and you know I don’t talk in absolutes often, is that this adventure must come from a place of self-love and you have to know that you are doing this not to punish yourself but to work towards a state of integration. Shadow work is done because you love yourself enough to go through some discomfort in order to grow and become whole. It is never about punishing yourself for your flaws, the goal is to accept that you have them and then work with them to the best of your ability on a conscious level. If you can’t face your anger, for example, without punishing yourself for every time you’ve lost your temper then you are not in a place yet where you can take on shadow work until you can recognize your tendency towards punishing yourself and nip it in the bud when it comes up.
It can be difficult for those with a tendency towards a lot of negative self-talk to go through shadow work, because of your programing towards self-punishment. If this describes you and you really want to start your shadow work then I suggest that the first thing you work on is your negative self-talk patterns. Acknowledge about yourself that you do this, make yourself conscious of this behavior and work on correcting it. If you can recognize when you are going into a spiral of negative self-talk and learn to stop it when it starts then you can go on with shadow work.
Shadow work in a sense needs to be something you do out of a sort of selfishness. You do not do it to make yourself more pleasing to others. It’s not about making others like you better or to make you fit in better. Yes, these things may come as a byproduct of the process but they are not the goal. The goal is only to work towards self integration to make yourself fulfilled. People pleasers may have a hard time with this but you must put what you think of yourself before what others think of you.
In order to begin shadow work you need some sense of self acknowledgement to start with. You have to already see and accept that you know you are a flawed individual, that you have a shadow personality, and that it is affecting your life through your subconscious. If you can accept these things then you have taken the first step and you should be able to acknowledge more about your shadow personality as you do your shadow work. If you are not willing to accept that your shadow personality is affecting your life through your subconscious then you’re not going to be able to accept the harder truths about yourself and the way they affect your life.
We all have blind spots about ourselves. To find these blind spots we may need to see ourselves from someone else’s point of view. Ask yourself if you are able to do this. Whether it means actually having a conversation with someone else about your darker aspects or if it’s by reviewing parts of your life from the point of view of the other people in your life. Are you able to take constructive criticism about yourself? Getting someone else’s point of view isn’t about tearing you do and don’t get input from people you know in your life who will do that. But if someone can kindly point out that you say…have a jealousy problem, and that you haven’t realized that it has been part of why your past relationships haven’t worked out are you going to be okay with hearing that hard truth?
When doing shadow work can you observe yourself without judgement? It’s easy to judge ourselves for what we’ve done but shadow work isn’t about judging. Can you look at yourself and accept you for you? Yes, shadow work is going to result in you making changes about yourself and you may not particularly like how parts of your shadow self have had caused you to behave but shadow work is about observing without passing judgement. If you are a judgmental person this could be a particularly hard part of the process for you. This is again where starting with some level of self acknowledgement is helpful. When you know starting out that you are judgmental you can recognize when you are becoming judgmental and work to change that reaction.
If you are the kind of person that has a tendency to fall into victim mode it can make shadow work difficult. Though not impossible if, like I’ve sated before, you have a level of self acknowledgement from the get go. You’re going to be exploring where the aspects of your shadow personality come from and when you uncover that your issues of abandonment come from when your parents divorced it would be so easy to become the victim and blame all of your failed relationships because you held back due to a fear of abandonment on them. Yes, your fear may stem from that event but you are ultimately responsible for your actions even when they stem from your shadow self. Are you willing to take responsibility for all of your actions and not play the blame game?
Be ready for a lot of letting go. Shadow work will have you let go of a lot of things that you don’t want to keep around and that’s the easy part. It will also require us to let go of some things that don’t serve us but that we are still desperately clinging to. Doing shadow work is an all or nothing proposition. Meaning that you have to be willing to go into any part of your psyche and any part of your memories. You can’t rope off certain sections and say, “I’m willing to work on anything but this.” Chances are if you try to do that you’re shadow work will just keep leading you back in circles to that until you either deal with it or are forced to quit trying shadow work.
You’re going to experience cognitive dissonance at some point during the process. Shadow work will show you times in your life when your shadow personality has caused you to behave in ways that don’t jive with the image you have of yourself. Like the one time you were petty even though you don’t consider yourself a petty person. Cognitive dissonance never feels good, are you ready to experience that kind of discomfort?
If you have anxiety or depression it’s probably not the best idea to undertake shadow work on your own. Do it as a compliment to conventional therapy so that you have back up if you get in over your head or just need some help processing something you’ve uncovered during your shadow work. Let your therapist know that you’re doing shadow work so that they can support you through your process.
This is not a process full of good vibrations. It’s going to make you feel uncomfortable at times and for the most part you have to process things and work through that. If at any time though you start to panic or to dislike yourself then you should stop the process. You may not like the way your shadow self has caused you to handle situations in life, that’s okay, but if it starts turning into a dislike of yourself overall and as a person then this simply isn’t the time for you to be doing shadow work and you need to put it away for now.
It can’t be stressed enough that shadow work is a very individual process and everyone’s experience will be completely unique. The process is gradual and organic. There is no quick fix here, the process takes time and will have to be undertaken more than once in a lifetime. When you decide to do shadow work you are making a commitment to dedicate time and love to yourself. If you have decided that you are ready to take on shadow work my next blog post will be all about exercises you can use on your shadow work journey.