Showing results for "Shadow" in Psychotherapy

If you experienced emotional trauma in childhood—neglect, parentification, physical or sexual abuse, or unhealthy family dynamics—your core wounds may be deep or even hidden. You may struggle with relationships, or feel like you just don't belong. And if you've sought refuge as a spiritual seeker, you may feel alienated by the dogmatic and inevitably shallow "love and light" spirituality scene that can often bypass real struggles of mental health, trauma, and loss. It's time for an in-depth approach to healing.

Our “shadow” is the collection of negative or undesirable traits we keep hidden—the things we don't like about ourselves or are ashamed of, but it also includes our positive, untapped potential. The shadow is often a source of creative inspiration and greater self-acceptance. Befriending the shadow makes fear an ally and enables us to live more authentically. It also automatically improves our interpersonal relationships, because we are freed from the need to project our own negativity onto others, and we become more acutely aware when theirs is projected onto us.

Shadow work is a well-known method to manage your hidden sides and acknowledge and integrate suppressed desires to live a more balanced life. Exploring your shadow can help provide answers that can change the course of your life and help you uncover the best and most authentic version of yourself.

"Our shadow," teaches Robert Augustus Masters, "is our internal storehouse for the parts of us that we’ve disowned or rejected, or are otherwise keeping in the dark." Everyone has a shadow, but all too many of us are unaware of it. It holds the feelings and beliefs that we are most ashamed of or cannot accept about ourselves. For some, it may contain unacknowledged anger or grief. For others, pain or fear. Our shadow contains our unfaced conditioning. And the more unaware we are of our shadow, the more it influences and controls us.

In the Shadow of Fame, by the daughter of world-renowned psychoanalyst and theorist Erik Erikson, is the intimate story of her struggle to come to terms with her father's fame and to develop a sense of self in a family, and world, in which being famous is the very definition of being a worthwhile human being. And, while her story is unique in its personal details, it is also a description of the struggle faced by all of us in a modern world.

Anthony Stevens argues that Jung's visionary powers and profound spirituality have helped many to find an alternative set of values to the arid materialism prevailing Western society.