How Supressing Your Dark Side Can Ruin You

There is something inside every one of us that has the potential to ruin your life. And that same thing also is the key to unlocking your full confidence and capability. You see it in Fight Club, where Tyler Durden is simultaneously the most destructive, dangerous aspect of the narrator. We're not killing anyone, man. We're setting him free. Bob is dead. They shot him in the head. You want to make an omelet, you gotta break some. And he is the most effortlessly confident and capable part of him. I want everybody out of here right now. Hey, you should join our club. So in this video, I want to break down the psychological reason that we all do this, the shadow. And I want to help you see these shadow patterns so that you can avoid sabotaging your career, your relationships, or any other area of your life. Welcome to Fight Time. First, though, let's back up and talk about what the shadow is. The shadow was first identified by Carl Jung, and it is the unconscious, repressed aspects of your personality. These are the parts that are considered undesirable or socially unacceptable by your conscious mind. For instance, boys tend to be ridiculed for crying past a certain age. So crying gets forced into their shadow. Did you shed tears in yourself? It's difficult for me to answer the question. You cried. There were tears that ran down my face, but I did not cry. I mean, that's crying. And girls tend to be judged for expressing their anger directly. So aggression gets put in the shadow. I love your skirt. Where did you get. Was my mom's in the 80s vintage. So adorable than that is the ugliest effing skirt I've ever seen. So we have these pieces of ourselves, pieces of the way that we naturally are, that are not loved by the people around us. This is terrifying. We might be abandoned. If the people around us don't love us for who we are, what am I afraid of? What the fuck am I afraid of? You're afraid of me. You're afraid that I won't love you back. So what do we do as small children? Well, we attempt to change who we are. And we do that by cutting off and repressing the pieces that aren't loved by. So, boys, stop crying. Girls, stop yelling. As a man, you're gonna feel like crying. It's gonna happen. But what you're supposed to do is not cry. Because this is a test in mental fortitude. And we convince the people around us and ourselves that we aren't sad or angry anymore. And we are praised for it. Now, you run this over and over Again with sadness, anger, fear, sexuality, whatever isn't acceptable. And you create a whole layer of a personality, or on top of who you really are. Like so many others, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instant. This is the birth of the Persona, your mask. It is the sum of all of your acceptable parts. This is the way that you think you are. Persona is the you that you present when you want people to accept and like you. It's also the birth of the shadow. The shadow is all of those rejected and unloved parts of you. These are all the ways that you think that you are not. Now, most people believe that our shadow traits can be destroyed through discipline. You could be brilliant, but you're a coward. Now stop saying that. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Stop being so weak. You are a worthless, friendless little piece of whose mommy left daddy when she figured out he wasn't Eugene o'. Neill. You yell at a child or withdraw from them and you change them. The anger or the sadness or the fear or their sexuality just goes away. That's good parenting, at least that most people think about it. But this is Carl Jung's brilliant insight. The shadow doesn't actually go away. Sure, the outward behavior, the yelling and that crying may stop, but that doesn't mean that the anger or the sadness disappears. We just lose conscious awareness of those things. And that means that at one level, we still have these feelings of sadness or anger, but because they're not fully felt, those feelings begin to run our lives unconsciously. Now, I know this can all sound very complicated. Like, how can sadness be running my life if I never even cry or feel sad? Well, this is where defense mechanisms kick in. You lecturing me on life? Look at you, you fucking burnout. What winds your clock? A defense mechanism is an unconscious psychological strategy that protects you from challenging emotions like those emotions in the shadow. And there's several defense mechanisms. So I'm just going to lay out a few of them that are the most common ones that I see. First, you have sublimation, where we channel those shadow emotions into socially acceptable forms. Guys like me, if it wasn't fighting, bro, I would be. I'd be in jail. Like, it's not like, like to have. Like, you don't understand. Like, I truly have a deep down urge to kill someone. Like, I can't. It doesn't go away. You also have rationalization where we logically explain how we don't really have shadow behaviors. And for an example, you can take Martha Stewart here she clearly sees cheating as unacceptable when describing her husband's affairs. If you're married and you think you're happily married and your husband starts to cheat on you, he's a piece of shit. And look at him as a piece of shit and get out of it. Get out of that marriage. But when confronted with her own infidelity, which happened first, she has rationalizations of why that doesn't count. But what happened? You had an affair. I had a very brief affair with a very attractive Irish man. And it was just nothing. There's nothing. You also have dissociation, where we can go numb and sometimes totally detach from our experiences. The most extreme cases would be dissociative Identity Disorder, which we see play out in Fight Club and Moon Knight. Why do people think that I'm you? I think you know. No, I don't. Yes, you do. Why would anyone possibly confuse you with me? But it can also just look like periods of general numbness and poor memory. If you don't remember important chunks of your childhood, dissociation is likely at play. And then you have the one that I personally just find the most interesting. This is projection, where we spot the unacceptable feeling in someone else and it triggers us. This is what's going on when you see all these anti gay people getting busted in homosexual relationships. I'll do a whole video on this because there is a ton to say about it. So let me know if you're interested. But the common factor with any defense mechanism is that we don't actively, consciously choose them. They all just seem to happen to us. And we tend to defend our defense mechanisms intensely because if we were to lose those defense mechanisms, we'd have to come into direct contact with our shadow. All this time I thought I was the original, but I'm just something that you made up. Say it. Because we're the same person. Now, we need to pause here to make clear that these coping strategies, these defense mechanisms, work really, really well. Most of the world is unaware of their own shadow, so almost no one is going to catch on to yours. In fact, most of the world will encourage you to keep sublimating, rationalizing, dissociating from and projecting your shadow, because if you stop, they might have to face their own. And that is way too threatening. So most people make it through their twenties fully repressing their shadow. And honestly, it works just fine for them. What I've noticed though, is that if you don't start integrating your shadow in your 30s, problems tend to arise. In my case, my unaddressed fear of being alone manifested in me having a ton of money stolen. And it never would have happened if I'd integrated that fear. You can check out the video that I made on the topic if you want more of the details. So by your mid-30s, you can expect to see some major issues cropping up, like consistent business struggles or difficulty in relationships, things just feeling off even when the outside world is going. Well, if you haven't started integrating your shadow, and if you don't address it by 40 or later, you may be in store for a full blown midlife crisis, which will confuse you because you have done everything that you're supposed to. You've become everything you're supposed to. But at some level, you can't stand rejecting aspects of yourself anymore. This is where the shadow takes over, acts out and destroys what you've built. Think of that new young wife that the middle aged man gets. Or the risky business investment that bankrupts him. The thing that obviously won't make you feel better, but you just can't say no to. And I believe this is exactly what happened with Will Smith. After years of being the good, spirited, happy, understanding guy, Will Smith turned the biggest professional accomplishment of his career into a near career ender when he slapped Chris Rock. Oh wow. This was obviously triggered by a joke. But the real cause was years of repressing his frustration and smiling through boundary violations. I would say don't just start filming me without asking me. I got into an entanglement with August. That's what I said. An entanglement? Yes. Every time he didn't stand up for himself came out in that one moment. So what do you do to avoid a massive meltdown in your own life? Well, I've mentioned the word integration a few times, and that means instead of running from the shadow, which just lets it run your life from the background, like my hidden anxiety or Will Smith's slap, you turn and face the shadow. You integrate it back into who you are, who you see yourself to be. In the words of Carl Jung, until you make the unconscious conscious. It will direct your life and you will call it fate. So you make the unconscious conscious. This means that you're going to have to feel all of those feelings that you split off into the unconscious shadow. Oftentimes that means decades of repressed anger, grief and shame. Now, I won't sugarcoat this. This is hard work. It is not a surprise that most people postpone it or avoid it indefinitely. But as you begin to feel those feelings through therapy, dream work, free writing, Breathwork, there's tons of options. You can develop what seem like superpowers because the shadow doesn't just actually contain things that are going to ruin your life. So when you get into a conscious relationship with your own shadow, you actually unlock your full potential. Your intuition comes online and you're able to make brilliant decisions with almost no effort. Your relationships get so much more fulfilling or end as your standards will naturally rise. Your confidence shifts from being based on external approval, which is shaky, and to being based on internal alignment which is untouchable by the outside world. So many of the things that took work become easy because you did the real work of integrating your shadow, of becoming whole internally. So you skip all kinds of self sabotage that will bring down others and actually live up to your full potential. Now I am working on a video on the steps to embrace the warrior aspect of your shadow. So if you'd like to make sure that you see that when it comes out, make sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell. And in the meantime, if you'd like to work directly on your charisma and your confidence, which was definitely aspect of my shadow at one point, you might be interested in Charisma University. It's our flagship course and the fastest way that I know to develop next level charisma and confidence inside of just 30 days. 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So many more meaningful conversations, My friendships have improved and my interactions with total strangers are a new, exciting, fulfilling thing. I want to recommend this to everyone. This should be in our basic education system. The whole course comes with a 60 day money back guarantee for any reason, so there's no risk. If you want to just try it out and Honestly, if you like the channel, I recommend it. Either way. I hope that you've enjoyed this video and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.