Understanding Shadow Work in Psychology

Shadow work involves integrating repressed traits to regain clarity and wisdom in one's life, challenging ego identifications and judgments.

### Understanding and Reintegrating the Shadow: A Comprehensive Guide
* 🌑 The shadow, originating from Carl Jung's psychological model, contains traits we **repress and disown, both negative and positive**.
* 🔍 The shadow distorts our reality, leading to **blind spots and self-deception**, as it projects onto our experiences.
* 🔒 Repression is an active process, forming the shadow through **identification, judgment, and trauma**.
* Shadow work involves **reintegrating these traits** by accepting and uniting the **opposites within ourselves**.
* To identify the shadow, examine your judgments of others, as they often reflect **repressed aspects of yourself**.
* 💡 Reintegrating the shadow does not require expressing negative traits; instead, it involves **acknowledging them without judgment**.
* 🦋 Ego dissolution or enlightenment makes the shadow obsolete by **transcending identifications**.
* 🌱 Integrating the shadow is a **complex and ongoing process**, akin to **untangling a vast knot of cords**.

hi, this is Emerald, and welcome to the Diamond Net. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about shadow work. Alright, so before I talk about shadow work, I want to give you a little definition of what the shadow is just to give you some context. Now, if you want a really deep definition of the shadow, I recommend checking out my video about the shadow that's on my channel. But basically, the shadow is part of the Jungian psychological model. That's where the term the shadow originated from. Basically, Carl Jung's theory was that you have your ego, which is basically the main center of your personality, and it's your primary self-concept. Anything that you don't want to have associated with that self-concept ends up in the shadow. So, the shadow is home to all the traits that we don't want to see in ourselves. Now, it's not as though these traits go away. In fact, oftentimes, many people can see our shadows more than we can actually see our own shadow. It's that whole phenomenon of you can

see the splinter in someone else's eye, but not the log in your own. Now, it isn't just negative traits that get relegated to the shadow; positive traits can get relegated there too. So, let's say, for example, if you grew up in a family that thought that emotional sensitivity was a negative thing, and you're a naturally emotionally sensitive person who has a strong relationship to their emotions, there might be a repression of that part of yourself, even though you can very well use it to beneficial use. Because the shadow is part of our unconscious mind, basically, the shadow starts to project out upon our reality without our awareness, and so it causes a lot of distortions to our experience of reality, and we lose a lot of clarity and wisdom about the situation that we're interacting with. But when we do a process like shadow work, we start to reintegrate those disowned and repressed aspects of ourselves, and then we start to regain clarity, ease of living, and also our wisdom, and it just feels better.

to have a shadow that's not so dense, but you may wonder how and when a shadow is formed. Now, every person has a shadow, with the exception of somebody who is fully enlightened. A person who is fully enlightened has no fear of any of these traits or concepts about being weighed on to the self-image or damaging the self-image in some way because they recognize that the self-image is illusory. So, they're able to let that go and allow all things into their awareness and into their reality. So, only someone who's fully enlightened doesn't have the distortion of the shadow and the ego to deal with. But for everybody else, we do have this trait to us. But how is the shadow formed, you might ask? Well, basically, whenever you're born, you pretty much know nothing about the world. You don't know how your body works, you don't know how reality works. All you have is basically your urges and instincts, but you don't really have a mental framework or idea about the way reality works. And the shadow always has

to do with ideas foremost. So basically, when you're a very, very small child, or more so a baby, you don't have a shadow at all. But it quickly starts to sort of build up as you go. So as you start to identify with things, you learn your name, you learn what you look like, you learn, Hey, this is me here, and then the rest of the world is this out here. Oh, or maybe I like carrots, or maybe I don't like carrots, and these little things start to kind of attract around your self-concept. This becomes your identity. Now, whenever you get a really strong bit of identification where you think, Oh, maybe I'm a good person, you might repress away all of the traits that you have labeled as bad. Never mind if they actually are bad or not, but if you've labeled them as bad, you start to repress them away, and those aspects of yourself that are in line with what you've considered bad, what you've judged as bad, get relegated to the shadow. So here's an example: my daughter right now.

is five years old, and she really strongly identifies as a girl. Like, she has a tendency where, you know, she always wants girls to win in everything, and she likes girl movies. And it's all about being a girl, so that's her really, really strong identification. And even though she doesn't hate boys or anything like that, there's a definite aversion to anything that's boy-like. So she might not want to watch a boy movie, as she would call it, or like boy colors, you know. But that doesn't really have anything to do with her true preferences. Not really. What has to do is she now has this idea in her mind that she projects out onto reality that says, boy-ness is not me, girl-ness is. There becomes this identification there, and then with that identification, the opposite gets repressed away. So shadow is formed through identification, repression of the opposite, or just a judgment in general about some trait as not being you. So, for example, if I identify myself as a humble person, then I might have a tendency to repress away

any drives that I have for assertiveness because I'm afraid of betraying that self-image that I have. That I'm oh this humble person now very often this tendency to repress things away and relegate them to the shadow is compounded if we've experienced a trauma or some really really negative situation relative to a particular identification. So sometimes our repression can be much stronger than just the middle-of-the-road oh that's not me this is me it can be oh I hate that thing either way judgment is always applied there's always an attempt to distance yourself away from particular things and to kind of relate other things that you consider positive to your self-concept. Basically it's the case that an outer judgment begets inner judgment or an inner judgment begins outer judgments so you can look at your judgments and kind of tell you know what it is that you might be repressing in yourself. Let's say that you look down on people who are hippies let's say you look down on hippies it may be the case

that you're actually repressing part of yourself that actually has the traits of a hippie. All right, now let's talk about some of the problems that arise from the shadow. Basically, the main issue is that it causes you to be less aware of what's going on. So, awareness is always 100 percent full, but when you talk about when you hear someone talk about expanding your awareness, expanding your consciousness, basically you are sort of unwire attendence e to habitually repress things and ignore things from your reality. So, basically you're opening up your mind to allow different things into your reality that you would may be judged as bad or judged as not you. But when we do this, okay, but when we don't do this and when we unconsciously separate ourselves out and fragment ourselves in this way, what this does is it causes a distorted experience of your reality, one that is unconsciously influenced by the shadow and your projections onto reality, the identifications of the ego and the

resulting shadow is what obscures the truth of reality from you. But the shadow isn't something that you decide on once and then it's just there for good. What happens is you learn to habitually and perpetually repress the same traits over and over and over again. So repression is a very active process. So the way to get rid of that is to sort of slow down that process, sort of take yourself out of it so that you allow things to come into your experience. This is one of the many benefits of meditation. All right, so here are some problems that come along with the shadow. So one of the issues that come along with having a shadow is judgment. So in a pretty benign example that I can think back on in my own life from when I was in high school, I used to dress very Goth back then and it wasn't necessarily that I identified that way. I had my own thing going, but I knew that I didn't want to seem certain ways like so.

there were things that I would repress the way like I decided that I didn't like punk-rock music because that was lame. And so, even if I could potentially have liked some punk music, I wanted to make sure that that wasn't part of my self-concept. And so, in my mind, I just blank it hated all of punk music. And then there when I was about 15, when I was right in the middle of this kind of like teenage phase that I had, you know, there was this big thing that came up: emo. And liked it pretty much, you know, everyone kind of hated email. Like you got super judged if you were emo. And so, I decided that I didn't like emo either. And that if you were emo, you were kind of lame. You know, you listen to lame music, you dress lame, you know, all this other stuff. So, I had all of these judgments about emo is mostly to sort of make myself more likeable and more socially favorable to like other people. So, anything that emos did, I had to make

sure that I didn't do so. It sort of tied my hands. I could not like the things that they liked. And so, even if there was some repressed enjoyment of actual emo music or emo style or anything like that, I would have never have known because that was unconscious to me. I had no idea, and I still have no idea, whether or not I like emo style or emo music. It's kind of funny, but you see, this caused me to judge other people and also to judge myself very harshly any time I stepped out of line from that self-concept that I held. And it also caused a lot of self-deception in me, which I'll talk about in just a minute. Alright, another problem with the shadow is that it's very, very complex because the shadow develops over your entire life, and because a lot of it is unconscious to us. I relate the shadow to being like a giant pile of tangled up computer cords. Like imagine that you had 10,000 tangled up computer cords that you just had to

somehow go in and unwire each one. That is sort of the task of letting go of all of your shadow. So, in order to do this, you have to first become conscious of what you're doing. Become conscious of what's there. Then, you have to try to pull out one of those computer cords. When you find that you're identifying a certain way making you repress something. So, when you pull on that computer cord, you might find that it gets caught up on other cords within the giant jumble of cords. So, you have to actually go in to those different areas, become aware of them, and untie it from within. And then you can pull it out. This is the way that shadow work works. So, because you're not dropping your entire self-concept and just getting rid of all of the computer cords. You're basically going in piecemeal, and you're pulling out shadow trait by shadow trait by shadow trait, and reintegrating them one by one. But it's a very complex task, and it takes a long.

time to do because there are just so many ego identifications to see through and to be able to integrate its opposite or its opposing things. This is also extra challenging because a lot of times our identifications will sort of get tangled up with one another. Another problem with the shadow is that it becomes a filter for your experience of reality, and this causes a lot of blind spots, a lot of distortions, and not only to your experience of yourself but to your entire experience of reality. In fact, self-deception is at the very root of the problem of the shadow because we're constantly telling ourselves thoughts, stories; we have our mind constantly going, and because we identify with our thoughts, we think, Oh, if I think it about myself, it must be true because I know myself, I know what's inside of me, I know what I want. But we have really just the tiniest, slightest idea of who we actually are, and so we have to make up a lot of stuff, and so we make up a lot of concepts, and we think, Oh, yeah.

this describes me, but what that's actually doing is that's creating a denser shadow every time you do that. So let's say that I'm thinking, Oh yeah, I'm such a good person and I do this for people and I do that for people. And you know, I would never judge anyone. And you know, like what just a list goes on. Or you might even have negative judgments about yourself like, Oh, I should be doing this more. Or maybe, I don't fit in. You know, that also adds to the ego identification. But there's also other things to get repressed in that because we start to fall in love with our ideas about who we are. But the problem is this causes blind spots because we don't want to accept anything about ourself that falls outside of our self-concept. So I wanted to bring up an example of a character that I think really epitomizes this idea. So if you think about Judge Frollo from the Hunchback of Notre Dom, so you know he was very highly identified with piety.

you know, he was a religious man. He was very, very proud of being righteous, and he, like, you know, kind of tooted his own horn that he was better than all of the citizens in Paris who were weaker, less pure that he was. And so we had this real identification with the light side, with piety. The problem here, of course, was that in his identification and in his desire to be this pious person, he had a complete and total blind spot to his own cruelty. And so he was able to be cruel to Quasimodo, and he was able to be cruel to Esmeralda. And in fact, when he started to feel lusts toward Esmeralda, he didn't think, Oh, this is me feeling that way toward her, so it's just what's coming up in me. It was, No, Esmeralda's a witch, and she's bewitching me, and so I have to burn her because she is from the devil. So he was also projecting onto reality, onto Esmeralda, his own shadow. Another

issue that comes along with having a shadow is that it creates a distance from yourself and others. So whenever you're identifying through the ego, you're saying, this is me, this is not me. The not me ends up in the shadow. It's a thought, this isn't me, so it's not important, and so it goes to the shadow area. I don't need to be conscious of it. And would we do this with our traits too, we end up putting it down in the shadow. Another problem with the shadow is that it creates a sense of distance between ourselves and other people. So if we start to hold up the idea, these x, y, & z are the good traits, so we're going to try to identify ourselves with X, Y, & Z. And then in order to sort of bolster our idea that we are the best at X, Y, & Z traits, we're going to be looking for other people that maybe aren't as good as X, Y, & Z traits, and we're going to be consciously or unconsciously judging them. So let's say that you yourself

value being a hardworking person, so you think hardworking. This is like the trait, so you're going to start looking out at people, and you're going to be like, Oh, well, maybe this person is kind of hard-working, but they're definitely not as hard-working as I am. Or, Oh, look at those losers over there. They're totally lazy. They have no work ethic whatsoever. And you know, all this time, you're trying to bolster yourself up as, Oh, I'm the best, and they're not as good as me. Or even if somebody you admire, let's say, has the trait, you know, you want them to have less than you. So automatically, there's this hierarchy that happens in your mind that I'm the good one, and these other people aren't as good. Or in the case that maybe you find somebody who's more hard-working than you are, and then you feel jealous of them, and you start to get resentful, and maybe you even feel very negatively about yourself because you weren't able to match up to your own.

Dogma and your own standards. Another issue of the shadow is that it creates a lot of pressure. Basically, when you have a strong ego identification and a strong and dense shadow, you're going to be trying your hardest in all of your daily interactions to not seem like you're anything like the shadow. So, let's say that you have an extreme judgment of people who are weird. Like, let's say. And so, in all of your daily interactions, you have this fear in the back of your mind. Oh my god, what if they think I'm weird? What if they think that I'm the type of person, like the type of person that I'm constantly judging consciously or unconsciously, of course, you know. So, you might tend to sort of stay away from activities and conversations that might make you seem weird. Or, you know, you might even stay away from people altogether because you're so afraid of being judged in that way. So, your inner judgment always begets outer judgment. And your outer judgment always begets inner judgment. So, it happens like this vicious perpetual.

cycle another problem with the shadow is that it's very very difficult to let go of because we identified with our ego a particular way because we thought that it was going to benefit ourselves in some way or we repressed certain traits away from us because we felt like it was of some benefit to us to do this. So for example, if we live in a family that looks down on us for being creative, maybe we will repress away creativity, and then when we bring the creativity back into our personality, we worry, Oh my gosh, now am I going to have to deal with negative judgment for my family? And the final point that I'll talk about that's problematic about the shadow is that we have this constant underlying fear of undermining the self-concept because we relate our ego, our self-concept to ourselves. We feel like that's what makes us important, that's the thing that we need to have continue going, that's the thing that we're trying to protect at all times despite the fact that it's just

the concept, but we treat our ego. We treat our self-concept as though it were the physical body, something that could actually get hurt. And this is why we start to repress things away in the first place. So there are two main ways that I know of to reintegrate the shadow. One is to dissolve the ego because the ego and its identifications are what causes the shadow in the first place. Because the shadow is basically the counterpoint to the ego. It's everything that the ego is not because the ego identifies a particular way, you know, it creates the shadow. So if you have transcended the ego or dissolved the ego, what that's going to do is it's going to make the shadow obsolete now because since I just mentioned that the shadow and the ego itself, it's not really a real thing. It can't really be harmed by any concept. So even if you think negatively about yourself or recognize a negative trait in yourself, you have to understand that there's nothing substantial about the self-concept. It's

all an idea, and so an idea cannot be harmed. So, when someone transcends or dissolves the ego, there's no longer any fear of any traits that are in the shadow, and those traits just sort of bubble up to sort of meet you at your conscious mind. And I know this from firsthand experience because when I was twenty, I had two experiences of ego transcendence, and that was one of the most astounding things that I experienced. It was just all of a sudden I had no fear of anything, and I saw things very, very clearly. All of the lies that I had told myself that had built up my shadow. And so it was as though all of these traits sort of bubbled up into my awareness, and with that, they carried with them wisdom, more awareness of what was like before. My awareness was like this big because everything outside of this range was scary to me. But then in recognizing that the ego wasn't real, it just opened up my experience of reality so much, and I was able to truly embody.

more of myself. This is exactly why I have a little catchphrase at the end of the video, keep becoming more you. But enlightenment and ego transcendence isn't the method that I'm talking about this time. This time I'm talking about shadow work. That's what this particular video is about. If you want to know more about enlightenment, or you know what I've personally found as a seeker of enlightenment and someone who's had a couple of experiences of ego transcendence, you can go ahead and peruse around my channel and look for those videos. But basically, this is about shadow work. So you're going to go in peace me and you're going to find these traits that you've repressed, and you're actually going to find acceptance and approval for them, and sort of invite them back into your experience. So with shadow work, you're going to maintain your identification with yourself, but you're just going to sort of unite the opposites in terms of like things that you've identified with. So let's say that

you've identified yourself with righteousness. You're going to look in your experience for what you consider non-righteous, and you're going to look for those aspects in yourself and how they express themselves. And even if the trait is negative, you're going to accept it into your reality. Now, if a trait is negative, you might think, Well, Emerald, how am I supposed to integrate that trait? If I integrate that trait and express it, then that's going to be terrible for me. You know, what's going to happen if, let's say, I have some really negative urge for greediness come up? Do I have to be greedy? Do I have to, like, come to terms with the fact that I'm greedy and then actually express it? And the answer to that question is no. And I'll be talking about that in just a short minute after I go into the actual integration process. But you'll probably have questions about that because that was a big confusion point for me as well. So, when you invite the shadow back into your conscious mind and accept it, this

is called reintegration, and this is an idea that was true in Jungian psychology. You can even find it alluded to in alchemy and a lot of other religious traditions throughout the past. So basically, when you're doing this, you're uniting the opposites. You're bringing polarities together. So let's say, for example, if I identified strongly with being female, I would try to find the male counterparts to that that are actually in my personality that I'm actually experiencing. And instead of repressing those away and thinking, Oh, that's not proper for me to express because I'm female and that's my self-concept, you go ahead and you cultivate that in yourself. You find those traits, and then you develop them. You kind of exalt them to their highest expression. Or maybe you identify with being very proper and sophisticated. What you're going to want to do is you're going to want to look for the opposite within your personality. Find the ways that you are repressing away its opposite. So let's say, for example, you find yourself

resisting wanting to have fun because you have this identification of being proper, and so you won't let yourself get dirty. You won't let yourself go and play outside, even if you want to. So you want to look for those traits in your person, or maybe you think it's like, maybe you think proper people are snobs. Maybe you're like one of those people who are like, I'm a ruffian, and I'm proud of it, you know? Then if you're that, then you want to look for the inner proper, inner sophisticate, and start to integrate some of those traits. So again, if you have a strong identification, look for its opposite, or things that seem in opposition to it, and find ways to integrate those traits in the most beneficial way that you can. And this next part is probably the most important part in integrating the shadow. So one way that we can get a really, really good litmus test for what our shadow actually is, is to look at our judgments of other people. And I know a lot of people have a

tendency to sort of squint their eyes and sort of like lie to themselves, and say, oh, I'm not judgmental, I don't judge people, but you really want to be honest with yourself. You want to look inside and you have to pick up on your subtle and maybe more extravagant judgments of people. So again, let's say, for example, that I identify with being educated and intelligent, and maybe I look around in my reality and I see people who don't care about that. Maybe people who maybe not necessarily aren't as intelligent because that's more of an innate physiological trait, you know, with IQ, but maybe people who just don't give a care about education. And I think, oh, how terrible, they're causing social decay in their dumbing down the nation, and this is why we have so many problems because people are like this, you know, these kind of inner judgments, or oh, if only everyone could be educated and everyone could have common sense, and all of that. So I would want to look at the people that I

judge the most and notice their traits, and then try to find those traits to myself because chances are if I've judged an entire group of people, there are traits in there that I actually do have. And then I would want to take those traits again and then express them in the way that's most beneficial to me. So when you judge other people for having traits that you've repressed away into your shadow, this is actually called projection. So think of it as you have this whole framework in your mind, and then you have these shadow traits back here that you don't want to look at, and those things that you have bitterly repressed in yourself that you constantly have these judgments about. And then it gets projected over reality to where you can't actually see the reality itself. This is what causes the distortion. The projection is a huge problem of ego and shadow. So I want to give you a bit of an example from my own life. When I was about 10 years old, I became very misogynistic for a variety of reasons.

like I can look back, and I could sort of point to the reasons, but I won't go into that. But I had decided that I did not like girls, and I did not like women, and I had like this, like, really sort of idea that women and girls were really and catty and dumb, and that I didn't want to be anything like that, despite being, of course, female myself. And so I had this major resistance, and I had this constant judgment back then that oh, girls are this way, women are this way, but then internally I had to sort of judge myself because it's like, oh my gosh, I don't want people to see me as, I don't want people to see me as stupid. Like I've been judging other people, and so I repressed all of those traits away in myself, even parts that were very natural to me, and I started to identify more with maleness, and I started to identify with being passive and being easygoing and not like getting in any way assertive. And so basically because I had

the strong judgment. I didn't really learn how to assert myself as a person, and even still, I have like residual problems with this because this repression happened when I was at a very, very young age. And so, it's difficult for me to be assertive because there's still parts of me that I'm not yet aware of that still judge women for being assertive or for being, as I called it back then. But of course, this was heavily based in self-deception. It has caused me many problems over the course of years where I just was not able to stand up for myself like most people would be able to because I judged myself very harshly for that because I was judging other people so harshly for being a particular way. So, in order to become aware of your judgments, you want to watch your thoughts throughout the day, sort of check in with yourself five, ten times a day. See it, look, am I judging someone right now? Am I judging someone as lesser than me? Am I using my judgment of this person to bolster up my own

self-concept. Then, you want to look at that person that you're judging, and you want to realize the reason why you're judging them, and also other things that may come along with that judgment, other traits that you might also be judging in yourself. Now I'm going to come back to the concern that I addressed earlier. So, a lot of times, you know, when people say like, Well, you know, if I'm supposed to reintegrate all of my traits that I've repressed, what about genuinely negative traits? What if I happen to be greedy? Or what if I happen to have some kind of like really inappropriate urge, like the urge for violence or maybe sexual exhibitionism out in public? Like if I, if I reintegrate those urges, isn't that going to be terrible for my life? Like these things are not good to be reintegrated. There's a real why I repress them away. Well, yes and no, but here's where you want to draw the line. Now, expression is not the same thing as

reintegration. So, even if you notice a negative trait in yourself, you don't have to express that negative trait. So, basically, if you find out that you have urges toward greed, you don't have to be greedy in order to not repress that trait. But one thing that you want to realize is that traits truly have no negative or positive because nothing in reality is inherently negative, and nothing in reality is inherently positive. So, let's say that you do have some kind of urge toward greed. So, let's look at what greed is at its bare base level. So, if we boil greed down, what that is, is just an extremely strong and overactive use of the driver self-preservation. Now, there's no problem with self-preservation as long as we have it balanced out with preservation of all. So, you would want to be able to use that trait of being able to preserve yourself and to be able to advocate yourself, but you want to also temper it with the idea that you don't want to get in the way of

other people's urge and drive towards self-preservation. So this is sort of a healthier way to reintegrate that particular trait that you might look at is inherently negative. But even if you don't find an expression for the particular trait that you have, like you can't find a positive expression for it, it's not necessary to express these traits necessarily. You just have to become aware of them and accept them. Don't judge them as wrong in yourself and don't judge them as wrong in other people. You want to be able to look at the trait as neutrally as possible, so your internal emotions and urges that come up, you look at those in the same way that you would look at a thunderstorm or maybe some other rainbow happening or some other external occurrence. Because essentially you don't have any control over your internal state. All of those things just sort of come up the way they happen to come up, just in the same way that things in the external world just happened to come up. So don't

blame yourself if something negative comes up. Just look at it neutrally. Just become aware of it and with this awareness and with this acceptance of that being your internal reality, then that will be enough to reintegrate the trait. There's not necessarily a need to express. So, for example, let's say that I work in an office and I'm in the middle of a business meeting and then all of a sudden, you know, I get some weird sexual urge in the middle of the thing. Of course, but like if I go up to Jim in accounting and I'm like, Oh, you're hot, you know, Oh, my gosh, you know, if I go off like that, that's not appropriate, you know. But then what if my reasoning was, Oh, I didn't want to repress anything. I didn't want to put that in my shadow, so I had to express it even if it was inappropriate because it's my own psychological well-being. But no, that's not the way it works. What would happen if you're going to actually

reintegrate that and not repress it away is you're going to want to just notice it and not judge it as bad. So for example, let's say I get my urge toward this Jim fella in accounting and like I think, oh, that's okay, I just felt that way and that's fine and yeah, and that's basically the end of it. Now, if I were going to revere oppressing it, I would be like, no, I didn't feel that way or even if I did, it wasn't my fault, it was Jim. He's always wearing all those tight shirts around the office and it's totally his fault. And anyway, at least I'm not like those other girls down in the office who wear the low-cut tops, shame on them. So that type of thing would be a prime example of how the shadow actually happens. It's these internal judgments and then these external judgments to fortify them. So really, the judgment is toward the self because you identified a certain way, somehow you thought, oh, I am a real pure.

person, and I can't have this sexual urge. If that happens, that means that I'm like these negative people that I judge, like Jim and the girls down the hall in the office. But it need not be so. I just recognize in myself, Oh, hey, I felt that way. Now I have that self-knowledge. It's okay that it's there right now. It's not the appropriate time to express that, you know, maybe at some other time. You know, I can go give Jim my phone number or something like that, you know, maybe that would be a better solution. Of course, I'm married. I'm not going to give Jim in accounting this imaginary fictional scenario my number, but it's just an example. Anyway, that's all I have for you today. I hope that you enjoyed this video. If you did, go ahead and click the like button below and subscribe. Also, go ahead, check out my blog at the diamondnet.org. I write in my blog now every Sunday, and I just kind of give just a more personal look at like how I'm dealing with being on.

the spiritual path and just different thoughts and insights and things that come up that I may not be able to share in my videos. So definitely check that out. Other than that, that's all I have for you. And until next time, keep becoming more you. [Music]

Shadow Work Explained - Jungian Psychology - Carl Jung

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The Diamond Net

The shadow, based on Carl Jung's psychological model, contains traits that individuals repress or disown from their self-concept.

Shadow work involves reintegrating these repressed traits to regain clarity and wisdom, ultimately improving the individual's experience of reality.

The formation of the shadow is primarily driven by strong identifications, the repression of opposite traits, and judgments about what is considered as part of the self.

The Impact of the Shadow on Self-Image and Judgment

Repressing certain traits or behaviors can lead to inner and outer judgment, causing a distorted experience of reality.

The shadow can result in a lack of self-awareness and lead to complex issues that affect self-concept and social behavior.

Repression of certain aspects of the self can also cause self-deception and harsh self-judgment, impacting personal growth.

Becoming conscious of our actions and identifications is the first step in shadow work.

Untangling and integrating one shadow trait at a time is a complex and time-consuming process due to the numerous ego identifications and tangled up identifications.

The shadow creates blind spots, distortions, and a sense of distance from both ourselves and others, making it challenging to integrate its opposing traits.

The Negative Effects of the Shadow and How to Overcome It

The shadow creates a hierarchical mindset, leading to judgment, jealousy, and resentment towards others.

It also creates a constant pressure to repress certain traits and fear of undermining the self-concept.

Reintegrating the shadow can be achieved through dissolving the ego's identifications, and realizing the insubstantial nature of the self-concept.

The Power of Shadow Work in Ego Integration

Ego transcendence can lead to the fearlessness of repressed traits, allowing for a clearer self-awareness.

Shadow work involves accepting and integrating repressed traits without necessarily expressing them.

Reintegration, as per Jungian psychology, focuses on uniting opposite traits within the self, allowing for a more holistic self-expression.

Embracing Your Shadow: Integrating Repressed Traits

Resisting fun and playfulness due to a sense of propriety can be balanced by integrating traits of spontaneity and freedom.

Examining our judgments of others can reveal repressed traits within ourselves, allowing us to integrate them in a beneficial way.

Repressed traits often lead to projection and a distorted view of reality, but acknowledging and integrating them can lead to a more balanced self-acceptance.

Repressing assertiveness at a young age has led to difficulty in being assertive and standing up for oneself.

To become aware of your judgments, it's important to monitor your thoughts throughout the day and understand the reasons behind your judgments.

It's possible to reintegrate negative traits without expressing them, by accepting and balancing them with other aspects of self-preservation.

Understanding and Integrating Internal Urge

Suppressing internal urges is not the solution for integration, instead, it's about acknowledging them without judgment.

Expressing inappropriate urges is not justified in the name of psychological well-being.

The key is to recognize, accept, and find the right time and way to address these internal feelings.