Don't be all “love and light” (until you’ve welcomed your darkness)
Personal reflections on working with our shadow side
Note: I am not a trained psychologist, and everything in this article comes from my experience helping myself and others, and is a reflection of subjective, personal views, which may or may not be shared by others. This topic is not a light one, and getting very honest about human shadow can trigger some readers. As always, please take what resonates, and leave the rest in the “hmm” bucket. :)
If you’ve spent any time in spiritual circles or studies, you may have been encouraged at one point or another to be all “love and light”, and to avoid interacting with anything negative — energies, people, environments, media — not to allow that negativity into your energetic space.
You may have also been conditioned to judge and avoid feeling within yourself emotions deemed as “negative” or “unspiritual”, such as anger, hatred, envy... We're often told that negative mental/emotional states lower our vibrations and can cause us to attract more negative energies and experiences.
While we all can probably agree that wallowing in negativity is not helpful, the “love and light only” mentality that is often promoted in spiritual circles can actually be quite damaging.
I would go as far as to say that one of the most dangerous things we can do is avoid looking at darkness and negativity, especially within ourselves.
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We are currently born into third-dimensional reality as human beings, and that means the polarity of light vs. dark is an inherent part of our experience, including within our own being.
And as humans, we come equipped with a whole spectrum of emotions, ranging from the lowest-vibrational ones, like depression and hatred, to the most exalted ones, like love and joy. And yet, we're taught to label a whole range of normal human emotions as “negative” and “dark”, and to shun them.
When we ignore, look away from, deny, or suppress the darkness and negativity within ourselves, the consequences can be devastating: it can negatively impact our physical and emotional health, stunt our spiritual growth, and even destroy our relationships.
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Someone I know, let's call him Jake, cannot tolerate anger. He thinks anger is stupid and immature, and seeing it in other people triggers him like nothing else. If anyone expresses anger around him, Jake completely condemns that person and wants nothing to do with them. This has caused conflict in his own family, because whenever his partner or child expresses healthy anger (a very normal human emotion!), Jake immediately attacks them for it, ironic as it is.
When Jake was little, he was traumatized by his father's angry outbursts, and decided to never become like that. Jake's self-image is that of a peaceful person who never allows himself to feel or express anger, or any dramatic emotion for that matter.
However, that self-image is far from the truth of who he is and how he shows up in the world. A big part of Jake's nature is actually aggressive and dominant, and over the years, he has accumulated a lot of suppressed anger by not expressing and releasing it in the moment. Now, anger and aggression are a big part of his “shadow”, and they regularly show up in his interactions with others… which, of course, Jake is oblivious to. He cannot control something he refuses to first acknowledge within himself.
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When we disown our darkness, IT OWNS US. It drives our behavior, instead of us having conscious control over it.
If Jake were to admit to himself that anger is very much part of his daily experience, it would destroy his self-image, so he keeps running away from the truth. In the meantime, the anger and aggression he unconsciously expresses are eroding his relationships, and the accumulation of suppressed negative emotions is keeping him in a constant state of stress.
So much suffering, all due to the denial of something we judge as “negative”!
What would have helped someone like this man?
1. An understanding that no emotion is invalid or sinful. Anger, for example, is a normal human response to injustice, our boundaries being violated, or our needs being chronically unmet. It's not a shameful emotion, but an important indicator which tells us that something needs to be addressed or changed.
2. An understanding that much of our darkness comes from trauma. In Jake’s case, it was the fear and pain he experienced as a child while being subjected to his dad’s anger. Even one of the ugliest human experiences — a dislike or hatred for a group of people (authority figures, a different social class, gender, or ethnicity) — is often, though not always, the result of trauma: of being hurt, harmed, or robbed of something by a member of that group earlier in life, or even in another life.
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So how do we consciously work with the darkness and negativity within us, so that it no longer drives us? There are a few steps I would suggest.
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1. Awareness
We may already know what it is we're running from, but sometimes we're not even conscious of the dark parts of our psyche that we’ve disowned, and we first need to identify them. Some questions to ask yourself to start this discovery process:
- What behaviors, situations, or types of people trigger me the most?
- What emotions, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors do I condemn in others?
- What is it that I absolutely cannot tolerate?
- What did my family, culture, or religion teach me to see as unacceptable?
- What am I afraid to find in myself if I looked very carefully?
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2. Brutal honesty and acceptance
Now that we're aware of the darkness in us (anger, hatred, envy, dishonesty, ability to wish harm upon another, or whatever it is), we have to exercise non-judgment and equanimity to accept that this darkness, no matter how ugly it is, is currently a part of our experience. And we need to know that this does not have to destroy our self-image as a decent or spiritual person. Acceptance needs to happen in those moments when we’re triggered, when the darkness comes up to the surface and we can directly experience it.
A few mindset tips that can help with this:
- There is no such thing as a sinful emotion. Human beings are equipped with a wide range of emotions, each has its purpose, and we're allowed to feel every one of them. (Feel doesn’t mean act on it; I’m not saying that it’s okay to do harm! More on this later.)
- Feeling a “bad emotion” such as hatred or desire for revenge doesn't make one a “bad person”. Some of us are so afraid to admit to ourselves that we’re feeling or thinking something horrific, because if we’re capable of it, then we must be a “monster”. Actually, an emotion or thought doesn't define our identity, just like the passing storm clouds don’t define the essence of the sky.
- Remember that much of our darkness comes from trauma. When we follow the thread to where the pattern of anger/hatred/dishonesty etc. started, whether in this or another life, in most cases we will find that there was pain, loss, trauma, or extreme fear involved. Then we can start healing that pattern starting from the source point of it.
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3. Choice
Even when passions run high and we're seething with anger, we still have control over our response. A powerful way to start transmuting and integrating our darkness is to: 1) watch it come up in the moment, 2) acknowledge it, and 3) make a Free Will choice not to act on it.
“At this moment, I'm feeling extreme anger and desire to hurt someone whom I perceive as a perpetrator. I acknowledge what I’m feeling and do not judge or condemn myself for it. I choose not to act on this feeling, and to do no harm to the other person, nor to myself. I’m allowing myself to fully feel this so that I can release this energy, transform this shadow into light, and become whole.”
When we make that Free Will choice every time, regardless of how much darkness comes up, our confidence and self-trust grows, as we learn that we have control over ourselves, and therefore don't have to be afraid of our darkness — it doesn't have power over us. We can safely look at it, allow it to be there, and even explore it with curiosity.
We are much more dangerous and can do greater harm to others when our darkness remains unacknowledged by us. That’s why at times you’ll see harmful, passive-aggressive, or even openly aggressive behaviors from people who are considered very spiritually advanced.
This is also a good time to investigate: try to follow that negative feeling/urge and see if you can find the root of it — is there, perhaps, fear underneath it, or old pain?
And rather than acting in destructive ways, it helps to focus on making ourselves feel safe and taking care of our needs in those difficult moments. So often when our darkness comes up, it’s actually a trauma response and it causes us much suffering.
Feeling, accepting, and making a choice not to act from the darkness becomes an alchemical process of lessening the intensity of that darkness, integrating the disowned part of oneself back into one’s Being, and then naturally transmuting that shadow into light.
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4. Healing the root cause
If the negative pattern doesn't dissipate by itself as we observe it without judgment (steps 2 and 3), and we’re disturbed by it, there's more we can do.
- We can work with a therapist or a regressionist, or on our own, to find the source point of the pattern in order to heal and release the original trauma or fear, and to integrate the split-off or disowned parts of our being. (Traditional psychotherapy, parts therapy, inner child work, Past Life Regression, Quantum Healing are some of the methods worth looking into.)
- If our darkness is tied to a belief (such as, “this group of people is evil”, or “expressing anger always leads to conflict”), we can focus on finding evidence to the contrary, in order to start transforming that belief. Often, when we get more exposure to the thing we demonize or fear, when we come face to face with it and see its true essence, the fear or dislike start to look silly, and we're able to let go of the belief.
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It can be difficult and may require a lot of self-compassion to openly look at the ugly and dark parts of our psyche. But it is necessary if we want to be healed, be whole, and have harmonious relationships.
What we may find in the process is that we don’t have to be all light and no darkness... We just need to be whole. After all, we are Source experiencing itself through a multitude of expressions available to a human being, and that includes the positive and the negative.
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The biggest treasure I’ve found by honestly looking at the darkness within me and transmuting it using the process above is the ability to understand and relate to pretty much any human being, and any human experience. When someone does something horrific, we may not approve, excuse, justify, or forgive it, but we will have a deep understanding of why someone would do it. This makes it almost impossible to judge others — whatever negativity they hold, we’ve seen a version of it in ourselves, and that doesn’t change the fact that we are beautiful beings of light. This is how we experience our shared humanity, and how we heal, personally and collectively.
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If this was helpful to you, please let me know in the comments. And if you’ve successfully worked with your shadow before, what methods have helped you in this process?
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