Reveal and Recognize Your Shadow

All right, team, welcome to the Mantalk Show. I'm Connor Beaton and today I'll be sharing the third installment of the four part series that I put together for Mental Health Month in May. And I'll be sharing the arguably one of the most important things that I did for myself in my mental health journey, which is discovering my shadow. So this episode is about how I discovered my shadow and how I began to integrate it. I'm going to talk a little bit about deep therapeutic work within this episode. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to define what the shadow is, just give you a little bit of an understanding and context if you aren't familiar with it and maybe add a little bit to it if you are very familiar to it with it. I'm going to talk about how I came into contact with my own shadow and sort of discover it and integrate it. And then at the end of the episode, I'm going to give you some very tactical things that you can start to implement to understand your shadow and begin to work with and begin to integrate it. And I'm going to give you very specific questions that you can use for journaling as a means of prompting you so that you can begin to unearth what your shadow looks like. So the shadow, in my opinion, is arguably one of the most important parts of our development as human beings. And Jung believed that in many ways it was at the beginning of, of our journey, in.

In our process of, of creating wholeness, of not just individuation, but of being able to find meaning and fulfillment within our lives as human beings. And he said that everyone carries a shadow and that the, the less embodied that that shadow is in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it becomes. And the, and that by all counts it, it then serves as an unconscious snag that aims to thwart our most well meaning intentions. And so what Jung was saying was that the shadow, when we aren't conscious of it, when we are not aware of it and its intentions and the way that it acts and, you know, its desires to sabotage us when we don't know about, really shows up when we least want it to, right? When we most, when we are, you know, sitting down in front of the job interview of like the lifetime or on the date with somebody that we, that we think that we really like or, you know, we're in our relationship and it's going really well and we, you start to feel ourselves sabotaging. We just can't figure out why. That's when the shadow shows up. The shadow is an amalgamation of all the different parts of ourselves that we want to reject, avoid, or deny, and they are the perceived inferior parts of yourself. So for me, like growing up, my inferior part was my intelligence. So I spent a lot of time trying to hide from people that I was insecure about my intelligence. I was. I also spent a lot of time trying to pretend like I was smarter than I was or that I was more capable than I was. So that's just an example. But the shadow is comprised of all that which we have to repress or suppress as a means of believing that that will help us belong in a relationship, in a group, in a society. And so many of us hide away or avoid these parts of ourselves as a means of trying to fit in, as a means of trying to belong, as a means of trying to seem better in some way than we actually are. And for me, I came into contact with the shadow about 12 years ago when my life just completely fell apart. I hit a rock bottom. My relationship fell apart, my career was on the rocks. I really isolated myself and I began to go through what many people refer to as a dark night of the soul, or in alchemy, they call the negredo. And that's a period of decomposition where our lives start to break down, things fall apart. You know, we enter into sometimes depression or we feel very lost and we don't really know where we're going. And so I came into contact with the shadow when my life sort of fell apart. And what I started to realize in that period of my life was that I had hidden a tremendous amount of who I was. I hid insecurities. I lied a tremendous amount. Lying is a very. A good indicator that the shadow is at play. Whenever you're trying to lie, you are, hi. Hiding or avoiding something, you're rejecting something. I started to realize that I was hiding a lot of who I was and who I viewed myself to be. So how did I start to come into contact with the shadow? There's a few things that I want to share with you, but first I want to share a direct quote from Carl Jung. He says the confrontation of the shadow is the first test of courage on the inner way, a test sufficient to frighten off most people. For the meeting with ourselves belongs to the more unpleasant things that can be avoided so long as we can project everything negative into the environment. But if we are able to see our own shadow and can bear knowing about it, then a small part of the Problem has already been solved. Okay, that one's important. We'll come back to that. We have at least brought up the personal unconscious. The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with us in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness. The problem is exceedingly difficult. The shadow is exceedingly difficult because it not only challenges the whole being, but reminds us at the same time of our helplessness and ineffectuality. So what Jung is saying here, that's really important when it comes to the shadow, is that it is a living entity within you. It is a part of you that when we begin to reject and suppress all these parts that we put into our psychological basement, that part, that energy will show up later on in our lives. So you can just think about, you know, the last time that you sabotaged, you know, a healthy habit that you were setting for yourself. A morning routine, a relationship, a promise that you made to yourself. Right? I'm not going to stay up late and eat. I'm not going to watch porn. I'm not going to, you know, whatever it is, anytime that those things happen, your shadow is active. Its intelligence is at play. So how did I come into contact with my own shadow? There's a few key pieces that are incredibly important when it comes to being able to identify our shadows. So number one is I spent a good amount of time understanding and sort of cataloging the things that I was lying about, the things that I was avoiding, and the things that I rejected about myself. Now, this was a really fucking hard process. It was really challenging because. Cause for a while, what I was really doing was. Was admitting to myself all of the things that I rejected and that I hid from other people. And honestly, it was a lot. I was hiding a lot. I was hiding a lot about, you know, infidelities within my relationship. I was hiding a lot about, you know, how I viewed myself, insecurities, inferiority complexes, bad relationships with friends, how I wasn't showing up financially in my own life. I mean, it was like. It was terrible for a little while. It was really hard. But I started to catalog that, and I journaled about what I avoided today. At the very end of the day, I had a process where I would just sit down, I had my journal there, and it was just like, what did I avoid today? What did I lie about? And then I practiced catching myself in the act. And so I practiced what I now refer to as autocorrect. Just like your phone has autocorrect. Where you type in the wrong word and. And then it autocorrects for you. I practiced autocorrecting myself when I caught myself in the act of avoiding something, rejecting something, or lying about something that I actually knew to be true. And this was very helpful because in my relationships, I avoided boundaries. I didn't tell the truth. I mean, I really was kind of a mess, actually, that I'm saying this out loud, but I really was kind of a mess. And so one of the things that was really helpful was to bring forward that autocorrect mechanism. So every day I would just practice just catching myself as often as I could in not saying the right thing, in avoiding a conversation, in hiding something about myself. Right. If somebody asked me a question about, you know, did you get up and meditate this morning like you said you were going to, instead of lying about it, I would say yes. Or if I lied about it, then I would catch myself in the act and I'd say, actually, that's wrong. I didn't do that. And I informed the people around me that I was going through this process so that they had context for, you know, me calling myself out, me catching myself in the act. So that's number one, the big piece. Cataloging, tracking, and autocorrecting my avoidance mechanisms. And you can play around with this however you want, but I really found, as I said, that every single night, just sort of cataloging that and then going through the action of being able to correct myself in the moment was very helpful and empowering. The second thing is I started to come into contact with my own reactivity. So reactivity is when we go on the attack, when we become defensive, when we are judgmental, Judgment is another form of reactivity. And when we are generally aggressive in some capacity, when we are in that space, we are reacting rather than responding from a conscious, grounded place. And so in some ways, you can think about this in the sense that when we respond, we're responding consciously. When we react, we're reacting from an often unconscious place. Now, you can probably identify this very quickly and easily. If you're in a relationship where you get defensive, where you become hostile, where you are, you know, maybe combative and argumentative in those spaces is generally where you're going to find your reactivity. So again, after my avoidance month of tracking and cataloging and autocorrecting my avoidance, I moved into a space of noticing what I was reactive about. And that was an ongoing process that admittedly took quite a long time and still is something that I, that I'm aware of. You know what I become reactive about, what I'm judgmental about. I still notice those things because they're very important for us to note. But I practice specifically noticing in relationships, noticing in my, in my work, noticing with my family what I was becoming reactive about, what caused me to be combative and hostile towards other people, what caused me to not be empathetic or compassionate and to really get clear about what in that moment I was either avoiding about myself or what story I was telling myself. So a prompt that's really helpful for that is when you catch yourself being reactive, ask yourself, what's the story I'm telling myself about this situation or the story I'm telling myself about this is. And that can really help you understand where you might be acting from an insecure or inferior place. And what I started to notice is that behind my reactivity was often an inferiority or an insecurity or a fear that I wasn't either conscious of or I was conscious of. And I was actively trying to suppress it because it seemed to me like weakness. And so once I started to realize those pieces, then I could just be honest about the, the deeper, the deeper component. The last thing that I, that I did in terms of embarking in, on.

Discovering my shadow and integrating it was engaging in really deep therapeutic work. So I engaged in one on one work. I sought out group dynamics where I could do a variety of different processing. But what I found to be really helpful was group dynamics that allowed me to witness other people's pain, other people's shadows, and allowed me to process things from a somatic standpoint. So all that, that means was I, you know, found group dynamics where there was a gestalt process that I could be led through, where I was able to feel some of those fears, some of that anger or rage or sadness or whatever it was, and to be able to express that part. What I would just want to say about this is don't settle for half baked therapy. I see a lot of people entering into this work and starting to explore and they, you know, work with one person, they're like, yep, I'm just going to ride this out, even if it's not effective. And they talk about the same problem week after week after week after week after week. Find someone or a group environment specifically find a place where it feels uncomfortable. Find that. Some of the best work that I've ever done has been work where I walk in and I'm like, I know this is going to be confronting I know this is going to be uncomfortable. Those are the spaces that we want to play. So start to find some of those spaces where you know that somebody or a group is going to be able to push you a little bit to get uncomfortable. Because meeting our shadow is not comfortable. Coming into contact consciously with the parts of ourselves that maybe for decades we've been rejecting. Avoiding lying to ourselves and other people about is fucking hard work. It's not comfortable, it's not easy, and it's really for those that are willing to do it right. Not everyone at every point in their journey is willing to do it. It took me a while to get to the place where I wanted to engage in that type of work. So that's the last piece that I would say find group dynamics. You know, in man talks, we have quite a bit. We've got the alliance. I lead small groups for men, for women, that engage in this work. But find somewhere that resonates with you that you know you're going to feel as comfortable as possible in being confronted, in being challenged, in getting uncomfortable. So the last piece that I want to leave you with are the tactical components, the questions that you can begin to journal with. Uh, and these, I'm just gonna read off a few of them and you can write them down. I hope that you enjoy. I. I do hope that you dig into these in your journaling practice. So let's just start off with a few light questions. So what I tend to avoid about myself is what I tend to avoid about myself is what I least want other people to know about me is what I least want other people to know about me is.

How I try and sexually control myself is how I try to sexually control myself is how I try to sexually control my partner is.

How I try and exert power over other people is.

How I try and exert power over my intimate partner Is.

I can be manipulative when.

What I reject about myself is.

What I dislike or hate about women is.

What I dislike or hate about men is.

I tend to judge people when.

I tend to avoid people when.

And the really. The really fun one is I tend to use people for. I tend to use people for. So those are just some questions that you can begin to journal on. You can use them as a prompt and just, you know, answer with a sentence or two. Or what I would really encourage you to do is use them as a. As a real journal prompt and actually spend, you know, a few pages for each question trying to think about some examples of maybe when you have used people or what your relationship to power is, or just getting into some of those questions in a little bit more of a depth oriented fashion. All right, thank you so much for joining me on this mini episode. I appreciate you dialing in. If you have further questions about the Shadow, than feel free to DM me. Man talks on Instagram or you can leave a comment below if you're watching this on YouTube. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.