Our Shadow Self

Sigmund Freud is the father of psychotherapy. Freud was a medical doctor living in Vienna at the end of the 19th century who noticed symptoms in his patients that his medical training had not prepared him to treat. These symptoms were more emotional in nature and fell under the general category of ‘hysteria’ at that time. Freud was confused by what he saw and got curious about what he could do about it. He developed a treatment for these new symptoms known as psychoanalysis and along with this new treatment technique he developed a theory as to why this was happening to people. Freud was the instigator of this novel approach to emotional healing, but there were two other important players working closely with him during the birth of psychoanalysis. Carl Jung and Alfred Adler were colleagues of Freud. In time, as each developed their own unique theories and techniques, the three colleagues parted ways and formed different schools of psychotherapy built on the principles that each believed about human nature. 

After Carl Jung separated from Freud, he introduced a way to think about human personality that differed from psychoanalysis. His work provided the foundation of what we know today as the Myers-Briggs personality assessment (MBTI) which has been a helpful tool for many people over the years. The Myers-Briggs helps people understand their own innate tendencies and also offers the opportunity to appreciate other people’s differences. It can be a helpful  foundational tool for people to begin to understand themselves better. 

There really is two purposes to using the Myers-Briggs. The first is to gain a deeper  understanding and appreciation for who we are. The Myers-Briggs measures our innate  preferences and our instinctive response to life and relationships. The hope is that this  understanding of who we are, and what we need to be at our best, might allow us to be more intentional about how we approach relationships, career and self-care so as to maximize our strengths and abilities. But if we stop here, we are only accessing half of the picture. The second purpose of the Myers-Briggs is to understand and integrate the parts of ourselves that are unnatural and not preferred. All of us have capacities within us that are uncomfortable, confusing and even upsetting. Because we do not know what to do with these parts of ourselves we work really hard to keep them unconscious. We prefer to ignore them. When we are rested and healthy and feeling in charge of life it is easy to do this. However, when we  become tired, stressed or overwhelmed, our ability to keep the uncomfortable parts of ourselves hidden becomes more difficult. We may begin to feel and act in ways that is surprising and even disturbing to us. This part of ourself is called the shadow and when a client walks into my office and says something like, “I cannot believe what I just did. This is not me” then it is almost always evidence of their shadow self coming to the conscious surface. 

One of the benefits of therapy is working with someone to understand these uncomfortable  parts of ourselves. We call it ‘shadow work’ and instead of being ashamed of our darker sides, therapy can offer the space to take an honest look at the parts of ourselves we understand the  least. When we face this work and open ourself to a deeper and fuller awareness of who we are then we actually gain more control of our behavior and our impulses which allows us to  become a more complete person. Our instinctual reaction to the shadow is to push it away, but  therapy can allow us to integrate the undesirable parts of who we are and in doing so gain more control of our life and move toward wholeness.