Do you have this one specific skill that will make you stronger and more self-accepting?

This is how to bravely face your formidable shadow self

Nov 13, 2024

There is one skill that you need to work on if you want to experience things like personal strength, self-acceptance, growth and success. And let's be honest… who doesn't? The problem is that this skill isn't all that easy to use because it requires going head to head with your shadow self. The question is, are you up to the challenge?

The lesson of Dorian Gray

Once upon a time, in a land of opulence and intrigue, there lived a strikingly handsome yet terribly vain young man named Dorian Gray. After seeing a particularly beautiful painting of himself one day, he was struck by the urgent desire to remain youthful and perfect forever. So, he made a pact with the devil – that this portrait would bear the marks of time and sin, rather than his own face. And, from that point on, as Dorian indulged his every vice and pleasure, his real-life appearance remained untouched by age or guilt while, hidden away in the attic, his portrait transformed, growing more twisted and grotesque with each act of cruelty and deceit.

Every one of us is like Dorian Gray. We strive to present and maintain a facade of acceptability, desirability and innocence, and we proudly paint our own external portraits with the colours of youthfulness, vibrancy, health and, of course, success. But in order to do this, we unknowingly – yet inevitably – push away the qualities that don’t fit our chosen image: feelings that make us uneasy, such as fear, shame, hatred, jealousy, greed and lust, or behaviours that have been relegated to the cultural shadow, such as addiction, aggression, promiscuity, manipulativeness and attention-seeking.

Without even realising we're doing it, we force these unwanted parts of ourselves (because those are all parts of all of us) into the unconscious, effectively forming a shadow version of self, which is just as real as the rest of us, but unless we do the work, that self will seem as alien as someone we've never met. Maybe that would be okay if the shadow stayed in the attic, but of course it doesn't. Instead, your shadow appears, as if out of nowhere, whenever you think, feel or do the things you wouldn't consciously choose, or don't understand. Anything from an off-colour joke or off-hand insult to outright abuse and catastrophic acts of self-sabotage – these are the marks left by the shadow on real life.

If we dare to do so, we'll also be able to see our shadows projected onto others. Whatever it is that you hate the most about your brother, sister, best friend, or parents, those are traits that live in your shadow, along with everything connected to any moment when you've said something along the lines of "I just don't know what came over me."

In the end, Dorian Gray is driven to desperation by guilt and horror at the life he has led, and so, in an attempt to free himself of the curse, he takes a knife to the canvas of his hideous shadow painting. But rather than being destroyed, his painted self reverts to its original youthful form, and Dorian's actual body begins to age rapidly, becoming as hideous and decayed as the portrait had been. His servants (remember, this was set in the late 19th century), hearing the commotion, burst into the locked room and find the portrait restored to its youthful beauty, and on the floor an unrecognisable old man with a knife in his heart. It is only by the expensive rings on his fingers that they're able to identify the corpse as Dorian Gray.

Facing your shadow

So, how do we avoid this fate? Carl Jung – who, of course, coined the term "shadow" – taught that unconsciousness is the greatest evil. And that to remain unconscious when given the opportunity to open our eyes is the truest sin.

"The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no one inside and no one outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is a world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me."
– G.G. Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

But to face the shadow is no mean feat. It requires patience, commitment and, above all, courage. In particular, it requires psychological courage, which is distinct from physical courage – i.e. bravery of the swash-buckling or base-jumping kind. It’s also different from moral courage, which is what we need in order to stand for what we know to be right, regardless of the consequences.

Psychological courage is an altogether quieter thing, which may well make it harder to muster. It is the strength required to look inwards with absolute openness and honesty – to face the truth about ourselves, flaws, vulnerabilities and all other shadowy bits included.

It is, according to Jung, a deeply disorienting process, akin to diving into dark, dark water, where there is "no above and no below, no here and no there."

Taking steps into those dark waters

Great. How do we start? Well, if you're up for this challenge, the very first step, which requires a dose of psychological courage in itself, is to acknowledge that we don't see ourselves clearly. This is true, by the way, regardless of whether you think you're god's gift or a walking disaster zone. Once you can fully accept the possibility that you are wrong about who you are, then the door is open.

"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

After that, you will have – if you care to notice them – multiple opportunities every day to witness your shadow, hiding in plain sight. Every emotion you feel, every fleeting look of shock or disappointment on someone else's face, every time you're surprised, every time you fail, every time you succeed is a chance for you to meet your shadow. Our denial, though, is very entrenched. And this means that we need to, as Connie Zweig and Steve Wolf put it in Romancing the Shadow:

"...learn how to catch a glimpse of it when it appears. We need to sharpen our senses to be awake enough when it erupts. Then we can learn to romance it, to coax it out, to seduce it into awareness. Like a coy lover, it will recede once more behind the curtain. And again, with patience, we can invite it out to dance. This slow process of bringing the shadow to consciousness, forgetting, and then recognising it again is the nature of shadow-work."

If that sounds daunting or tedious to you, it probably is, but it's also the most liberating thing you can ever do. Because it's only by making the unconscious conscious that we can hope to control it; creating a relationship with your shadow is how you can reduce its power to sabotage you. And to know your shadow (in part, at least) is the only way to achieve self-acceptance.

So, I invite you to keep your eyes open – really open – and to just notice what you can notice.

Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.