Why Your Shadow Self Keeps Destroying Your Love Life (Jungian Philosophy)

All right, team. Welcome back to the Man Talk Show. Connor Beaton here. And today I'm going to be sharing how your shadow sabotages your relationship. How your shadow gets in the way of the connection, the intimacy, the sexual expression that you deeply desire in your relationship. So let's start with Mr. Jung himself. He said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. And in this, he's kind of giving us a clue. He's saying, the shadow is at work. Until you take these parts of yourself that you have made unconscious and bring them into the conscious mind, they will have their own form of intelligence to direct your life, and you will call it fate. You'll wonder why things are unfolding that way. And I see this all the time. You've probably seen this, too. So many of the men and the couples that I've worked with say something along the lines of, I don't know why this conflict keeps happening. I don't know why I keep acting this way. How come I keep effing this up? Why do I keep acting so needy? How come I keep shutting down? I don't know. Well, it's happening because your shadow is at play. Your unconscious is getting in the way. In my book, Men's Work, I had a line that says, your pain has its own intelligence. Well, guess what? Your shadow has its own intelligence, too. Your unconscious is a form of intelligence. Your shadow is a form of intelligence. And if you are unaware of it and you don't make yourself aware of it, it will begin to leak out and cause all kinds of havoc in your life. Why? Because it wants to be integrated. It wants to be a part of who you are. But somewhere along the way, you have learned that these elements of you, these parts of you, are not welcome. They shouldn't be allowed in your relationship. So that brings me to what the shadow is is. I'm going to talk about what the shadow is, but first, I want to give you one little nugget that I'm going to talk about in terms of why we always screw up our relationships or how our shadow gets in the way. Okay, here it is. You will always, always attract someone who represents a part of your personal shadow. You will always attract someone who embodies and represents a part of your personal shadow. Now, I'm going to leave that there for you. We're going to come back to that in a second. I'm going to give you a quick breakdown of the shadow first, and then we'll dive into how your Shadow continues to sabotage your relationship. So the shadow, very, very simply, it's the hidden, the repressed parts of you, the parts of you that you have deemed unnecessary, unacceptable, unworthy, unlovable, unlikable, unlike. It's the parts of you that you don't like, and it's the parts of you that you think make you unlikable. So you hide them, you reject them. These are your insecurities. These are your fears. These are your doubts, your worries. But the shadow isn't all bad. The interesting thing about the shadow is that for pretty much all of us, everybody, you also put not just the bad parts of you into the shadow, but through different circumstances and events that can happen when we're growing up, you can discard some of your positive strengths. You can discard some of your power, some of your potency, right? So things like compassion can get tossed into the shadow. Things like your anger or your assertiveness or your ability to set boundaries and say no. Your ability to stay grounded when other people are displeased with you. Those types of things can get thrown into the shadow as well. So there is gold in the shadow. And in order for you to have the quality and the depth and the kind of relationship that you ultimately want sexually, in the communication, emotionally, you have to be able to go into your shadow and understand how it's impacting your life and your relationship and to begin to bring some of these things into the forefront of. Of your consciousness. So how do you know that your shadow is active? How do you know that it's. It's present? Well, reactivity. Your reactivity is a neon sign pointing to the shadow. Whenever you are reactive, whenever you're defensive or attacking or combative, whenever you are checking out or becoming needy, all of that reactivity is a sign that. That the shadow is at play. And the shadow, in some ways, loves to sabotage love. Loves to sabotage love. It shows up in relationship probably more than anywhere else. If you're a high performer at work or you're an athlete or a musician, it can show up very strongly in those areas as well. But for most people, where the shadow, where your shadow will show up the strongest is in. In your relationship. And there's a reason for that. Jung wrote, everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. And where is that more potent, more strong than in our intimate relationships? Right? That's the ground where. Where we are able to be known the most, right? Where you feel the pull and the draw to be known at a very deep way. So this is where the shadow gets activated the most. This is where all the fears, all the insecurities, they will be the strongest in your intimate relationship because it is, generally speaking, the place, the arena where you are going to be known in your fullest or the deepest parts of you have the capacity of being known. So the shadow says, hey, this is an opportunity for me to integrate. This is an opportunity for me to be a part of the whole self. So let's talk about how the shadow does that. There's the obvious ways that the shadow is going to sabotage your relationship. There's insecurities, there's neediness, there's needing validation. There's, you know, not feeling good enough and continuing to perpetuate this story that you'll never be enough for the other person or their way out of your league or whatever it is. There's all of those obvious examples. But what I really want to focus in on, because this will help you to integrate your shadow, is this one simple thing, which is that you will always attract a partner who represents and embodies a part of your personal shadow. So I'll give you an example to make this very clear because I see this dynamic playing out in so many modern relationships. Take the nice guy or the people pleaser, right? Low boundaries, disconnected from anger, disconnected from assertiveness, disconnected from being able to say no, chronically trying to take care of other people in the hopes that maybe you'll get rewarded and validated in return. All the COVID contracts, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, what those men generally attract. And this is almost comical at this point because I see this all the time, and it is. It's almost like a mathematical equation at this point. When I talk to a nice guy and he starts to tell me about his relationship issues, or I talk to a people pleaser and he starts to tell me about his relationship issues, I say, let me guess. The woman that you're dating is fiery. She's extremely assertive. She's very outspoken. She's not afraid to tell you. No, she's not afraid to tell you what she thinks. She's very direct and they're like, yeah, how did you know that? Do you know my. Do you know my girlfriend? Do you know my wife? Like, no, I know the archetype of what's playing out. I know the pattern of what's playing out. So what's happening is that again, we attract a partner who represents a part of our personal unconscious. Nice guys, people pleasers, you have discarded your assertiveness, your directness, your anger, your ability to stand up for self and prioritize self.

In some ways. Self worth, you've also discarded that into your shadow. So what do you attract? You attract a woman who represents the qualities that exist in your shadow. So generally, again, nice guys, people pleasers, you seem to really attract the women who have high levels of confidence or, you know, they're really put together. They, they, they're very assertive, they're very direct. Sometimes they're just, maybe they're not really put together, but they're just very angry. And so they have a lot of anger in the sort of front of their personality. I call it being very masculine forward, right? There's a lot of that assertiveness direction. I'm going to make decisions, I'm going to orient our relationship, I'm going to decide where we're going. It's a lot of that energy. And so you will attract the partner who represents those things that you have disowned. Right? Because nature abhors a vacuum. So you can't get into a partnership with somebody who's exactly like you, who's also needy and people pleasing. It's very challenging for those things to happen. So we're generally attracted to those polarities. And those polarities are based off of the things that you have discarded within yourself. So in order for those relationships to, to function. And the reason why you continue to sabotage is that when you get in a dynamic with somebody who embodies what you have disowned, they embody what you have disconnected from your assertiveness, your compassion, your empathy, your.

Sense of self worth, your ability to praise yourself and validate yourself and acknowledge yourself. What ends up happening is that you attract people that represent the thing that, you know, unconsciously you need to develop and integrate in yourself. So here's the kicker. It's a beautiful gift in some ways because it calls you to actually stepping into these things. Right? And if you're a man that's not a people pleaser and you're not a nice guy, you know, maybe you're the emotionally shut down man who's completely disconnected from empathy and compassion, doesn't give a shit about whatever is happening in the world or in himself or with his, you know, with his girlfriend or a wife. And I've worked with a lot of military guys, a lot of Navy seals over the years, and this is a very, this is a very common thing. They're at the other end of the spectrum, right? They're very assertive, they're very direct, they're very forward, it's very action oriented, but very disconnected from compassion, very disconnected from empathy, very disconnected from vulnerability and emotions. And guess who those men attract. They attract women who, who are fatigued by being so compassionate. They're compassionate about everything, right? They're watching things on the, the, the videos on Instagram and crying for somebody else that they've never met before. They have endless amounts of compassion and empathy. They just ooze it and exude it. But they have very little, very little assertiveness, very little directness, very disconnected from their anger. So the inverse can also be true. So what do we do? What do we have to know? Well, we have to know. You have to begin by remembering what irritates me about my partner. What irritates me about my girlfriend and my wife. When she's fiery, when she's spicy, when she's overly empathetic. That is a reflection, yes, of a part of who she is. But that irritation is a neon sign pointing to my shadow. It is pointing to a part of me that I have disowned and I have rejected and that I need to reclaim. Okay, Every relationship is a mirror for a kind of self reclamation. I'm going to say that again. Every relationship that we enter into is a kind of mirror for our own self reclamation. Being able to reclaim a part of you in your shadow, whatever it might be, and bring it back into your everyday life, bring it back into your sense of self and identity. So what I would like for you to do is to look at either your previous relationship, if you are single, or your current relationship and say, what activates me? Ask yourself, what activates me? What triggers me about my partner? Okay, about my girlfriend, my spouse, my significant other. What triggers me and activates me about them? Is it how overly empathetic they are? Is it about how overly compassionate they are? Is it about how their anger sometimes gets, you know, blown out of proportion? Is it about how assertive they are or how, you know, they prioritize themselves all the time and it irritates the crap out of me. Me. Right? So that's, number one, identify what irritates you and triggers you about your significant other. And second, ask yourself, how have I disowned this in myself, in my own psyche? Okay, so how have I, how have I? And where did I disown that assertiveness, that directness, that compassion? When did I learn that that was unacceptable, that that wasn't allowed for me to bring into relationship. And then last, what do I need to do in order to reclaim this? Right? So if you're a nice guy or a people pleaser, part of integrating your shadow, part of bringing this part back in, is actually about beginning to embody assertiveness and directness. Making decisions, saying no on a daily basis, practicing being direct, practicing being, you know, being okay. If you disappoint your partner, all of those things are going to allow you to reintegrate this part of your shadow. So remember, shadow is not your enemy. Jung believed that your shadow was a doorway to wholeness. So what you dislike about your partner, yes, it might be a sign that it's not the right relationship. Absolutely. But still, learn the lesson of what's activating you about them. Because it is almost always a sign that's pointing to your personal shadow. Something that needs to be reintegrated, brought back into your sense of self. So enjoy this. Maybe share it with one of your friends, your buddies you can tune into if they're in a relationship or listen to it with your partner. This is definitely one of those episodes that, that you should listen to with your partner. And don't forget to men it forward. I'll leave you with one last quote by Mr. Carl Jung. He said, one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. So that's what this work is all about. Reaching in to the unknown inside of you and reclaiming it. So enjoy. Leave your thoughts and your comments in the comment section, whether you're watching on YouTube or Spotify. And don't forget to subscribe. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell notification so that you get notified when I drop new videos. See you next week. Ciao.