Lately, I have been noticing more and more our tendency not to talk about the things we consider negative or flaws in ourselves. It is true that we all have traits that can trigger us in a negative way. Traits that we are not proud of and that we would prefer to keep to ourselves and hide from our surroundings. The more negative we label them, the more we try to suppress them and make them go away.
The parts of ourselves that are hidden, suppressed, and subconsciously rejected make up our shadow self. The psychologist Carl Jung was the first to mention “the Shadow” as “the hidden side of every human psyche”. I would like to mention an example of the shadow-self that I read and that could resonate well with many of us. If you were teased and scolded that you speak too much as a child, you probably started to be less spontaneous and speak less in every conversation in order to change it. You probably thought that speaking too much makes you seem annoying or saying stupid things to others. One day, before your presentation at work, a colleague tells you that you have put too many words on a slide, and guess what… you are suddenly angry and you do not even know why. The reason is that our shadow self (the parts that we consider negative and hence, we are trying to hide even from ourselves) is triggered in different situations, inflating our ego and sabotaging our own self-evolution and development.
Maybe we are not even aware of what triggers us anymore, since we have been trying to push it away for so many years, but it still leaves us with feelings of anger, sadness, fear, shame etch. The truth is that the unprocessed traumatic experiences of our chilhood can be triggered in so many situations, where we end up feeling the same feelings that the child inside us was experiencing. When these traumatic experiences are not adequately addressed or resolved, they can continue to affect us into adulthood through maladaptive coping mechanisms (such as avoidance) and negative and distorted self-perceptions.
I am wondering, if we cannot accept every aspect of ourselves and if we are not even aware of our own traits, do we really know who we are? How can we consider ourselves whole, complete and authentic, if we are afraid or even ashamed of some parts of ourselves? If we get to know those parts, our shadow-self, we could accept and integrate them in a healthy way. Getting to know our shadow is about developing self-awareness, self-acceptance and compassion. If we accept the “worst” part of ourselves and understand our shadow-self, we will start to realize how our thoughts and feelings affect our behavior.
Surprisingly, we may even realize that those parts, when handled on purpose, could even constitute our way toward freedom. We could move with self-confidence and learn how to love ourselves better, when there is no more hidden self-doubt about the traits that we may loathe. Moreover, our relationships would be healthier and stronger if we could fully accept and love each other, with our egos left aside.
If only we accepted ourselves as we are, we would stop projecting our undesirable traits to others. There are many exercises that we could do to get to know our shadow, but on this page, I will share one of the easiest and quickest ways. In this link (https://authority.pub/negative-adjectives/), you will find a list of many adjectives to describe someone. Having the list in front of us, we could stand in front of a mirror and read each one separately in the first person (I am arrogant, I am selfish). For each adjective that makes us feel something negative, we could dive deeper and think about what would mean for us if this was something true? It will surprise you how many of your “insecurities” can be triggered in this way. You may also come to realize how you have been acting all along to prove that those traits do not apply to you, because deep inside you are probably afraid that they do. In Debbie’s Fork book “The dark side of the light chasers”, many simple and efficacious exercises can be found toward this aim.
Let’s stop being afraid of ourselves, let’s stop trying to sabotage us and let’s try to accept us as we truly are, without conditions.
A documentary on the shadow self: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPTKTbH6qZc
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