Shadow work is a big part of a lot of people's practices, and I feel like it is often something that is somewhat misunderstood. Some people think of shadow work as getting rid of the negative traits or aspects, while others see it as learning to accept and work with those less desirable bits of yourself. Some people think of it as harnessing the monster inside, or even chaining it up so it is 'harmless'.
But what is our shadow? The shadow self is a concept that was developed by Carl Jung, and he saw it as the hidden parts of our being. It's the side of ourselves that we don't let let out in public. Jung believed that the shadow needed to be expressed, so we could live our lives fully.
A lot of our ideas of what our shadow is are formed by societal pressure. We are raised to believe that people should act a certain way in public (and also in private, though often more is allowable in private), and the things that aren't considered proper are things that form our shadow. In many ways, the shadow is everything that doesn't fit the idea of perfection, and many people would have you believe that letting your shadow manifest at all is a bad thing.
But here's the twist....things that we tend to associate with the shadow are often highly situational! Most people would agree that falling into a rage and lashing out physically isn't a good thing, but there are situations where that would be an appropriate response.
I do think that many people come to this conclusion by doing shadow work. When they really tune into those shadowy aspects of themselves, they see that these things aren't always bad, they just may not be coming out at the right times.
What I think many people fail to notice is that traits we often assume are good can be shadow traits too....when they come out at the wrong times. The one that immediately comes to mind is that of a helicopter parent. Most people would agree that protecting your children and being involved in their lives is a good thing, but in the helicopter parent they are overly invested and they end up smothering their child. It is a good trait that has been taken to a shadowy place.
Now, many people are aware of some of these traits that may be out of balance in themselves, but we don't tend to call it shadow work. The most frequent term I've heard for working through some of these things is doing self-care. We often see these unbalanced positive traits as areas in which we need to set boundaries and perform self-care. When we know we like to help others, but we can spread ourselves too thin trying to help everyone, we see that as a self-care practice, not a shadow practice.
I actually think shadow work is self-care, and vice versa. But separating it into this idea of dealing with the good and dealing with the bad creates a line in qualities that can be harmful. We tend to think more favorably about people who say they struggle with self-care when compared to those who say they struggle with shadow work. And yet both can be devastating, both to themselves and to those around them. The world at large is harmed by both types of people, and working on both is really the ultimate goal.
One of the reasons why it's helpful to think of the two practices (shadow work and self-care) as being two sides of the same coin is that many behaviors can be thought of as paired...and too much on either end is problematic. If we think of laziness as a shadow quality, the other end of that would be activity, which seems good, but if you are constantly needing to be doing something, every minute of every day, that leads to burnout (and often indicates that you are trying to avoid something or that you only feel 'worthy' if you are doing something...both qualities that are troublesome). If we look at this as a slider between rest and activity, and not just that but as a slider that is constantly moving depending on what is going on around us, we start to see a healthier way to interact with these parts of ourselves.
The trap is that we often think of self-care as a purely physical practice. It's typically a reactionary thing, we work on self-care when we feel the effects of issues in our lives. Sometimes we do self-care as a precautionary thing, almost like spiritual vitamins, things we do because we know that we are going too be depleted (or just as part of our regular regimen, to keep us from spiraling).
The issue with this is that self-care often addresses the result, not the root. It's the shadow work that really delves into what got us to the point we needed to take reactive self-care...or what is going to bring us back to that place in the future.
Both practices are necessary! We need to do the shadow work to see what is going on, and how we need to adjust, but we also need the self-care to actually start shifting that slider so we are in a more healthy space (and to keep it nicely lubricated so it can adjust as life throws things at us). But when we start delving into the shadows, we need to remember to look for the places where the light is shining too bright as well, or we will find that we have places where we stay off-balance and can never get to that flexible equilibrium that we need to be whole.
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