The Shadow -What Jung Meant and Why It Matters for Your Healing
Carl Jung gave us many things but perhaps none more practically useful than the concept of the shadow.
The shadow is, in simple terms, everything we have disowned. The parts of ourselves that were deemed unacceptable by our parents, our culture, our religion, our peer group, or our own developing sense of who we needed to be to survive and belong and were therefore pushed below the threshold of conscious awareness.
This is not the same as everything dark or negative. The shadow contains our rage, yes, but also our vitality, our sexuality, but also our creativity our selfishness, also our ambition and our power. Whatever was not welcome in the environment where we grew up whatever we learned to hide, suppress, or pretend did not exist went into the shadow.
Where the Shadow Goes
The shadow does not disappear when we push it down. It goes underground and continues to exert influence from there. It leaks out sideways. In the intensity of our reactions to other people. In the things we judge most harshly in others which are often the things we cannot tolerate in ourselves. In the sabotage that happens just when things are going well. In the compulsions and repetitions that we cannot explain rationally.
Jung's famous observation was that we do not see the shadow; we project it. What we cannot own in ourselves, we see in others. The person who cannot access their own anger becomes expert at identifying anger in everyone around them. The person who has buried their neediness is endlessly irritated by needy people. The person who suppressed their ambition resents those who express theirs.
Projection is not a moral failing. It is the psyche's way of keeping the disowned material at a bearable distance while still finding some expression for it. The problem is that it prevents genuine relationship with others and with ourselves because we are always, at some level, in conversation with our own projections rather than with reality.
The Gold in the Shadow
Jung also said that the shadow is ninety percent pure gold. This is perhaps the most important thing to understand about shadow work: it is not primarily about confronting our worst impulses. It is about recovering what has been lost.
When we exile a part of ourselves, we exile the energy that went with it. The child who learned that anger was dangerous does not just lose their anger. They lose the aliveness, the boundary-setting capacity, the ability to say no that anger contains. The person who learned that ambition was selfish does not just suppress the drive. They suppress the creative force, the vision, the motivation to bring something genuinely their own into the world.
Shadow work is the process of recovering that energy. Meeting what was exiled with compassion rather than shame. Integrating the disowned parts so that their energy becomes available again, not as uncontrolled acting out, but as conscious, directed, alive capacity.
How We Work With It
In Sacred Alchemy sessions, shadow work happens through multiple modalities. Sometimes it is a direct conversation with the exiled part using hypnotic and shamanic processes to make contact with what is below the surface and to begin a different relationship with it. Sometimes it is working with the projections themselves noticing what we cannot tolerate in others and asking what that tells us about what we cannot tolerate in ourselves. Always it is held within a framework of compassion and respect for the intelligence of what has been exiled.
Meeting the shadow is some of the most powerful and most liberating work a person can do. It is also work that requires a skilled and experienced container. If you are ready to look at what is in the shadow, come and talk to me about what that might involve.
Alexia Elliott is a hypnotherapist, shamanic practitioner, and psychospiritual therapist based in Leicester, 30 years of experience in mental health, and Sacred Alchemy practice. Sessions available in person in Leicestershire and online worldwide.