How To Integrate Your Shadow
Your Goal Isn’t Perfection, It’s Wholeness
Unfortunately there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is — Carl Jung
The Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung described the shadow or the dark side as traits we repress about ourselves.
As individuals and societies, we can benefit from embracing our darker side because if left neglected, our shadow can get out of control and threaten our stability and of that of those around us.
Below are four ways we can integrate the shadow into our personality.
- Liberate Yourself From Social Codes
At times, the codes society has created can be a burden to our individuality. We mistakenly think the value judgements imposed on us by our families, friends or schooling are weaved into the fabric of reality. Often those moral codes are defective and need overcoming.
Strict adherence to these codes can breed resentment in you. The best would for you to call out these social conventions and assert your opinion. Others may disagree with you but this may actually be the right time for you to express your shadow and disagree.
Letting your shadow show when you have control is more beneficial to you than repressing it, running the risk of manifestation at an inopportune.
2. Explore Your unconscious Mind
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung differed bitterly over the unconscious. Freud was of the view that our unconscious was nothing more than our repressed sexual desires. He famously said that civilization is a tool to repress our biological instincts through stories and laws.
Jung believed the unconscious housed what he called our collective unconscious — a sphere of stories, imagination and dreams.
Either way, our unconscious mind has a wealth of information out of limit from our conscious interactions. This information includes memories, dreams and other experiences out of reach of our conscious mind.
Taking a walk or engaging in ‘banal activities’ as Robert Green writes, brings our unconscious to the fore: connecting random ideas and fueling creativity.
3. Explore Your Difficult Feelings
Relationships are a case to talk about here. Many cases of intimate partner violence rarely happen in a vacuum. Almost always there’s a history of one or both parties not being able to have difficult conversations that stem from difficult feelings.
Failure to express your deepest concerns to your partner can be catastrophic for both of you.
Seeking a divorce, for instance, can be a very difficult conversation to have with your spouse. This isn’t made any easier by the fact that divorce is frowned upon in most societies. Even in the societies were divorce laws are not too strict.
This may lead to people sometimes staying in a relationship that is not healthy. The bottled up feelings of staying in a toxic relationship may lead to self-harm practices or worse Intimate partner violence.
4. Pay Attention To What You Dislike In Others
Have you ever complained that someone is full of themselves? Or you don’t just like their attitude. Chances are what you dislike in the people you interact with is probably a reflection of repressed habits in you. Jung said:
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves
Final Thoughts
Two aspects govern our subconscious: culture and our biological instincts. Culture can be malleable as it is recent in our history, probably not before the cognitive revolution. I can be a communist today, an atheist tomorrow or a christian next year.
Our biological instincts are old; like very, very old. Sexual reproduction is 600 million years old. We have to be very precise with what we mean by saying we’re control of something very old.
The notion of self-control may at times be a fallacy. It necessarily involves you repressing what you want to do. This may be helpful at times of course. We can’t act on every impulse of aggression. The trade-off is we amass tension, boxing it into a corner of our being up to such a day that we will inevitably explode.
The secret is not repression but early recognition of our shadow and integration of the shadow into our personality and possibly channel those primitive instincts into creative endeavors.
Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse, and a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed. The shadow is very much a part of human nature, and it is only at night that no shadows exist — Carl Jung
