“There is no light without shadow,” said psychologist Carl Jung. Proponents of shadow work, a form of psychological exploration, agree, believing the practice absolutely necessary for self-realization and personal growth. We spoke to experts to help you get started ASAP with an accessible technique called shadow work journaling.
Have you ever surprised yourself with an outsized negative reaction toward a person or situation and wondered where all that emotion was coming from, especially if you consider yourself a generally calm and agreeable person? Maybe you found yourself becoming very upset when you sensed a friend was being condescending toward you or really, really hated it when you thought a coworker was being incompetent.
These massive emotional reactions to not-so-major triggers may be signs that it’s time to do shadow work, a practice you might already be familiar with if you’re on mental wellness TikTok.
What Is Your Shadow?
The concept of the shadow was developed by famed Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who first wrote about it in his book The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1934–1954). A person’s shadow, Jung wrote, represents their unconscious, or all the aspects of their personality that they repressed over the course of their childhood.
“If we think about the mind like a room, the unconscious would be the junk closet, with piles of things you have forgotten about stuck inside” but still very much present in your home, says Danielle Massi, licensed psychotherapist and best-selling author of Shadow Work and The Shadow Seekers Journal, who spoke with DailyOM for this article.
How do these qualities end up in the junk closet in the first place? They’re usually the result of trauma experienced during our earliest, formative years. “For example, if someone is quick to anger and extremely jealous, lashing out at their partner consistently without any reason for that behavior, we could use shadow work to uncover why,” Massi says. “We would use a meditative state to open up access to that unconscious and see this person at 6 years old, hiding in a doorway, witnessing their father verbally abusing their mother with cheating accusations.”
You may think you can keep your shadow issues safely stored away, but nope. Over time, our junk closet will start to overflow. “What that looks like in the human body is anxiety, depression, skin issues, gut problems, even autoimmune illness,” Massi explains.
Shadow work journaling is all about exploring those aspects of our personalities that throughout our lives we’ve rejected, or deemed bad or shameful.
Not only can our unexamined shadow cause mental and physical illnesses, but we may also begin to project our own undesirable qualities onto other people. So those traits we dislike about our personality — say, our moments of pettiness, condescension, or tendency toward impatience — can lead us to persecute others when we sense those qualities in them, whether real or imagined. This prevents us from growing as people, impacts how we move through our lives, and can be extremely harmful to our relationships, both personal and professional.
That’s why Jung believed it was so important to reintegrate the shadow back into our personalities, rather than attempting to keep this side of ourselves hidden away. Without conflict, he explained, there can be no growth, and reintegrating our shadow is how we evolve as people.
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Meeting Your Shadow
This process of reintegrating your shadow is called shadow work. The aim of shadow work is to recognize those negative personality traits within yourself, reintegrate them into your understanding of who you are, and accept them as a part of you rather than denying their very existence.
Shadow work is often done with the guidance of experts such as therapists or religious practitioners. Massi works with her clients to help them achieve a meditative state that allows them to access their unconscious.
An obvious benefit of this process is that it can help you to become more compassionate with those around you. As mentioned above, your shadow tends to show up in the form of projection, or disliking qualities in others that you actually despise about yourself but are unable to recognize. If you can take those traits you don’t like about yourself and interrogate them and your beliefs about them, you might be able to see them in a new way and understand them better when you spot them in yourself and others. Massi calls this emotional regulation, which is important for overall health and well-being.
Benefits of Shadow Work Journaling
While it can be extremely helpful to have the guidance of a professional therapist, shadow work is also something you can explore on your own through journaling. There are wonderful options available for guided journals (such as Massi’s The Shadow Seekers Journal). One that’s going viral among TikTokers is The Shadow Work Journal by Keila Shaheen, the creator of mental health e-commerce store Zenfulnote.
Shaheen believes the reason her journal has resonated with so many is a growing interest in mental health and self-improvement on TikTok, with shadow work being a unique approach to exploring these topics in short, relatable videos. “We all have aspects of ourselves that we keep hidden or suppressed, and the journal provides a safe and structured way to bring these aspects to light,” the author told DailyOM for this article. Through prompts and exercises, she says, “users can gain a deeper understanding of themselves and their behaviors, and ultimately move toward greater self-acceptance and healing.”
How to Do Shadow Work Journaling, According to Experts
1. Emotionally Ground Yourself
Shadow work journaling is all about exploring those aspects of our personalities that throughout our lives we’ve rejected, or deemed bad or shameful. This can trigger painful memories. Shaheen recommends that when we sit down to do shadow work journaling, we should make sure we’re in the right mindset to do so, at a time when we’re feeling calm and open to growth.
To help you get centered, Massi recommends doing some breathwork before getting started, suggesting you close your eyes and breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth fully. That allows your body to be in a more neutral state before you begin to write.
2. Create a Compassionate Environment
To be in a grounded headspace, be mindful of your external environment, too. “Wear comfortable clothing, dim the lights, light a relaxing candle, silence your phone, and make yourself uninterruptible,” Massi says.
If listening to calm music helps to quiet your mind, you can do that as well, Shaheen says. The goal is to get the most out of your shadow work time by making yourself feel as comfortable as possible.
3. Set Your Intention or Choose a Prompt
There are many different ways you can start your shadow work journaling session. Sometimes you may go into it with a specific idea you want to explore. If not, Massi suggests reflecting on what might have triggered you over the course of your day, even if it was something small, like being extremely annoyed that your dry cleaning wasn’t ready on time.
“Our triggers are a window into the unconscious mind and will directly lead us back to the things in our psyche that need to be dealt with,” she says.
To begin your journaling session, ask yourself the following questions:
- When did I feel triggered or annoyed by someone or something today?
- What was happening in the situation that may have caused that reaction within me?
- When is the last time I can remember experiencing that reaction?
- Is that something I feel regularly?
- What is the first time that I can remember having an internal experience like that?
- How does that early memory impact me today?
According to Massi, following this line of questioning can help you unearth some of the shadows you’ve been repressing and start the healing process.
If you’ve decided to purchase a shadow work journal to help with your process, you can also try turning to a random page and answering the prompts there. You might find questions like these, which are from Shaheen’s The Shadow Work Journal:
- What parts of your parents or guardians do you notice reflected in yourself?
- What traits, both good and bad, are you inheriting from them?
- What color is your sadness? Why?
- What do you try your best to avoid in life? Are there certain emotions attached to these things that you don't want to experience?
When you begin to write, it’s important not to edit yourself as you go. “Don’t think about your grammar or spelling — just flow without judgment,” Shaheen says.
4. Find a Meditation Practice That Works for You
Doing the heavy work of exploring your unconscious and wrestling with your imperfect qualities is only half of the equation of shadow work. Next up is the reintegration, or healing process. Keep in mind that the goal isn’t to resolve or work on these traits; it’s to develop a deeper understanding of them and their place in your personality.
There are different techniques for helping you get there — for example, through meditation. Massi tells DailyOM that when we’re born, our brain is like a blank slate. As we grow, our brain creates neural networks that inform how we should react emotionally, physically, and energetically at any moment.
“Shadow work brings us back to the earliest moments that a unique neural pathway was created, which is often during childhood, but can also be from any other point that our brain created a new neural pathway,” she says.
Remember the example of a child who witnessed their father screaming cheating accusations at their mother?
“That moment would cause a protein reaction in the brain that creates a new neural pathway (synaptogenesis), and that neural pathway would be associated with an autonomic nervous system response (fight/flight/freeze/fawn) that forever changes that child’s thoughts and behaviors,” Massi explains.
To induce a meditative state that allows us to break this neural pathway, Massi says we need to enter a theta brainwave state, which we experience whenever we’re sleeping. It can also occur when we’re deeply relaxed, like when we go on autopilot or, in this case, meditate.
“This meditative process involves bringing the earliest memory of the triggering experience to light while simultaneously interrupting the subconscious feedback loop (how the brain stores memories) to permanently change our neural wiring in the brain, as well as how the body stores the trauma,” she says.
Another form of meditation Shaheen recommends is emotional freedom technique (EFT) tapping. Proponents of EFT believe that energy flows through the body, passing through meridian points, a concept that originates in Chinese medicine and is also used in acupuncture.
According to the website of Gary Craig, who developed the acupressure technique in the 1990s, tapping these meridian points can alleviate anxiety and promote healing from emotional and physical setbacks.
5. Bring Your Meditation Practice Back to the Page
If you prefer to keep your shadow work session on the page, you can incorporate journaling into this step of the process by following a prompt. One example prompt from Massi’s The Shadow Seekers Journal is: “What thought are you consistently wishing you could change, and what is the origin of that thought?”
According to her, you can read this prompt and allow your mind to bring you to the first time you remember thinking it. “And when you remember the moment, that’s when you would be attempting to interrupt the subconscious feedback loop by changing the way you breathe during the meditation to calm the autonomic nervous system,” she says.
Shaheen’s The Shadow Work Journal, Second Edition also provides the following exercises to help with introspection and integration: visualization meditations, fill-in-the-blank reflection prompts, profound shadow work prompts, trigger tracking logs, wound mapping, mirror gazing, breathwork, and inner child affirmations.
6. Wind Down With Self-Care
Coming out of a shadow work session, you may feel emotionally exhausted or agitated. For this reason, it’s important to re-ground yourself with self-care.
Shaheen says this may look like taking a hot shower or bath, reciting affirmations, or doing body movements like yoga, tai chi, or qigong to release tension and promote mind-body awareness.
Again, as you wrap up this often difficult process, remember that shadow work is about identifying your undesirable qualities to foster growth with and around them.
“By embracing your shadow, you can cultivate self-acceptance, forgiveness, and unconditional love,” Shaheen says.
