“Shadow Work”

An excerpt from Therapizing the Spirit

By Kristen Tryniszewski

I’d like to take you on a little journey. You don’t have to go far; this place resides within you. So when you’re ready, close your eyes and imagine a portal of some sort. It could be an old wooden door, a hole in the ground, or maybe one of those cool secret rooms only accessible by a trick bookcase (house goals!). Whatever your entry, though, know that when you cross over to the other side you will be in a special space only for and known by you. And in this space live all of your, well, yous.

Allow me to explain. We all have various parts of ourselves that together make up the whole picture of who we are. I, for example, am a wife, a mother, a sister, and daughter. I’m an artist, a therapist, a writer, and amateur hot sauce maker. I have OCD-like personalities and witchy, hippy ones too. I’m productive and lazy, playful and serious. Creative and witty, organized and terribly inpatient. I’m a million plus things, some of which are dominant while others more passive or rarely present at all. Some of my traits I love and admire, and of course there are those that I dislike or even loathe. It's these latter personalities that I’d like to bring focus to. They are known as our shadows.

Too often we shun parts of ourselves because we decide we don’t like how that looks or believe these traits get us into trouble or maybe they just simply stress us out. But we’re not looking deep enough. In walking through this portal I challenge you to see past the surface and really get to know who you are. The good, the bad, the ugly. All of it. Because at the end of it all you’re going to learn to love yourself. Sure, you might always have your favorites, but every part of you, no matter how seemingly unpleasant or minuscule, has a purpose and deserves a seat at the table. And until you come to realize the validity and importance of that, you will never feel whole and you will always wonder why you continue to have the same problems you do. By uncovering these shadows doing the work to understand yourself better, you allow yourself to have a better functioning and more fulfilling life. But first, we need a little awareness…..

           – Ok where were we. Right, so you’ve walked through the portal. Again, I want you to imagine that all of your subpersonalities are here. Just like you experience them in real life, some might be more obvious and eager to be seen, while others could be hiding. Take some time to look around the space and take note of who (or what- our parts do not always come in human form) seems most interesting or for whatever reason you feel drawn to. Try to choose just one or, if it seems this part comes in a pair as they often do, go ahead and choose the duo for this next step. 

           This is where you get to interact with yourself (or selves if you’re working with two). I invite you to communicate with this part as if it were a stranger. Find out what s/he (they) are all about. I don’t want to restrict you too much, but there is one thing you should definitely inquire about at some point during your stay. Find out what this entity wants, but more importantly, try and establish what their underlying need is. They may want, for example, a handsome income and tend to go about getting that by backstabbing their co-workers, but perhaps the need they are trying to scratch is a sense of security. Or maybe it’s the need to feel loved and they faultingly believe that money is the only way to achieve that. You’ll really need to communicate with this shadow to get as much information as possible. Like I said, your goal here is to look past the surface and really try to understand this part of yourself.

           Now it may be helpful here to also invite you to step into this entity, that is, if they let you. (Keep in mind that just because this person or thing is technically a part of you it doesn’t mean that they’ll necessarily be agreeable. In fact, you may have to try several times just to get them to even talk to you). If you can, however, enter into their being and in a sense become them. You'll have a better picture of what it’s like to actually be them– and I’m talking the totality of them; not just the fragment that you generally allow them to be (because again, in real life they’re only a part of you). Really get in there and identify with their experience and feelings. If they couldn’t articulate their needs before, really try and feel them now. This is your chance.

           Ok, when you’re ready, step out of that entity and resume your regular person. Shake it off if you need to because I’m sure that felt weird. If there was another in this pair, I now invite you to go ahead and do all these same steps with it, but when you’re done, it’s time to leave. This is the part where you can express your gratitude and say goodbye. Go back the same way you came and open your eyes.

First of all, congratulations for making it down my weird rabbit hole, which coincidentally may have actually been your portal. The imagination bit is now over, but here comes the analysis. You now need to ask yourself some serious questions while this activity is still fresh in your mind and I highly recommend journaling or writing down your answers: What did you notice? Who did you meet and what was their name? What did they look like? Was there anything you discovered upon speaking with them that you didn’t already know? How do you feel about that personality (or ‘ties’ if there were two)? Any likes or dislikes? Why? Did anything change after you ‘became’ them? And if there were two, how did they interact with or compliment each other? Why do you think they were paired together? And finally, how can you improve your relationship with this part of yourself? 

Your answers to these questions probably shed a lot of light on why parts of ourselves tend to go unvalued and sometimes even disregarded completely. I don’t love my lazy part, for example, and I therefore try to shut her out by being sometimes overly productive to the point of exhaustion, but when I stop to recognize what she needs, I find that it’s probably rest and if I honor that legitimate need from time to time, she becomes satisfied and then doesn’t feel compelled to keep me on the couch watching shitty reality TV for a full Saturday. Helping her, essentially, helps me. 

But simply being aware of and honoring our parts and shadows isn’t the end of the story. We can actually take this further and start to coordinate or even integrate the various parts of ourselves. After we recognize each character and the role they take on, we start to look at the relationships between these parts. The point here is to find a way for them all to exist happily within you. And yes, this part generally requires a bit of professional help so I won’t go in depth here, but it may be that your people need to learn to cooperate, compromise, or even take turns. If fusion is possible, a more dominant personality may absorb a weaker one, but not in a way that it’s lost. Indeed, we as wholes are greater than the sum of our parts.