Shadows & rainbows

The Courage to Meet Your Shadow

Fighting against your shadow aspects creates internal opposition. When you avoid the parts of yourself you don't want to see, the feelings and aspects you've buried, you're essentially waging war with yourself.

Carl Jung saw the shadow as the repository of everything we've disowned about ourselves, not our evil selves. The dark sided traits we were told by society, our teachers, or our family, that were unacceptable. The autonomous impulses we learned to hide from or become ashamed of. The parts of us that didn't fit the story we wanted to tell about who we are. Jung believed that integrating the shadow is essential to becoming whole. He called this process individuation: the journey toward becoming your authentic self.

The resistance to look at your own darkness will keep casting a larger shadow. The more you avoid it, the bigger it gets. What a paradox! This can be seen on the physical level as an influx of stress hormones, like cortisol, which disrupt synapse regulation, resulting in cognitive impairment, social inability, or immune dysfunction. The chronic denial, the internal conflict, the constant vigilance required to keep parts of yourself locked away.

“Your body keeps the score”, as trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk would say. When you're at war with yourself, your nervous system stays on high alert. You might find yourself irritable, forgetting things that used to come easily, getting sick more often, or feeling disconnected, even in rooms full of people. This is what unintegrated shadow does. It leaks out. It shows up in your relationships as projection. It appears in your body as tension and illness, and it manifests in your life as patterns you can't seem to break, no matter how hard you try.

Making a choice to witness your darkness, allowing yourself to experience self-compassion, releases oxytocin, countering the effects of cortisol. When you stop fighting and start witnessing, when you look at your shadow with curiosity instead of judgment, your entire system begins to shift. Oxytocin floods in. It's the same chemical released when you hug someone you love, when you feel safe, when you're loved. Self-compassion is biochemically radical. It's choosing to hold yourself the way you'd hold someone you care about who's struggling.

Jung talked about the shadow work as a moral problem, as it takes real courage to face it. It takes intention and devotion to be available to face your shadows. You can't do it while scrolling or multitasking. It requires presence. It requires you to sit with discomfort. To feel what you've been avoiding. To admit what you've been denying.

There is a higher and deeper self within you who can do this, without feeling shame and guilt. Jung called this the Self with a capital S—the center of the psyche that holds both consciousness and the unconscious, both light and shadow. This higher/deeper Self is not fragile. It's not the ego that needs to protect its image. It's the part of you that can hold paradox, that can witness without freezing, that can see your ugliness and your beauty at the same time.

When you encounter your shadows, your eyes adjust, and you inevitably shine a light on it. This is the alchemy Jung spoke of. The moment you turn toward the shadow, it begins to transform. It won’t vanish, but it may change color, and you can finally see and define the shapes. It's like walking into a dark room, at first, you can't see anything, but if stay long enough your pupil expands so that you can capture more light and see.

The mind, the body, and the spirit are not separate, even if they are working in opposition. Anglo-Saxon culture loves to fragment us, to treat thoughts as separate from feelings, feelings as separate from physical sensations, the body as separate from the soul. But you are an integrated system. When your mind is at war with your shadow, your body shows. When your spirit is disconnected, your mental health suffers. Shadow work asks you to come back to yourself as a whole person, not a collection of acceptable, or semi-acceptable parts.

The courage to do this hard work is the key to meeting your rainbows. As Jung said, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” Your capacity for joy, for creativity, for deep connection lives on the other side of your willingness to face what you've been avoiding. When you face those hidden parts you stop spending so much effort on suppression. With practice, new neural pathways are formed, and are reflected into new habits and behaviors. Every time you choose to witness your shadow with compassion instead of judgment, you are literally rewiring your brain. You're creating new patterns. You start behaving differently in your relationships.

You are not your shadow. Your shadow is the part of you that needs your insight. It’s the disowned parts waiting to be integrated. And when you look at it, when you offer it the attention it's been demanding, it will inevitably brighten up.

Remember that your eyes can see in the darkness if given a chance to. Don’t be afraid of your shadows. They coexist with your brightness, and all the shades in between. You are not your shadow. I repeat: Your shadow is the part of you that requires your insight.