“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” –Carl Jung

I've been hearing a lot about "shadow work" recently. It has a rather sexy, dark ring to it, doesn't it? But what is shadow work, exactly? And why do we need it?

Carl Jung first coined the term shadow to describe the aspects of our psyches that have been relegated to the unconscious. These are psychological "blind spots." Often, the shadow is made up of personally and culturally unacceptable qualities we want nothing to do with, and which we use various psychological strategies to avoid acknowledging (e.g., projection, sublimation, and repression). For example, if, as children, we were met with disgust or rejection when we cried or acted "too needy," we may have learned to strive to be independent, undemanding, and emotionally controlled.

This all sounds a lot like adaptive behavior learned to survive in our early environments, right? Like a trauma response? Or an attachment style? Yes, the concept of shadow........

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