EP 007: Shadow Work: Meeting the Parts of You That You've Hidden

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There is a part of you that you have never fully accepted. 

It lives in the darker spaces of your subconscious mind. It shows up in your strongest reactions. It is in the patterns you keep repeating even when you swore this time would be different. It is in the things that other people do that make you furious in a way that feels almost… too personal.

You did not create this part of yourself on purpose or overnight. No one does. You created it the way every human being creates it. By surviving. By adapting. Somewhere early in life, you learned that certain parts of who you are … were not safe to show. So you hid them. You pushed them down. You put them in a box and locked it and tried very hard to pretend the box was not there.

But here is the thing about that box.

It does not stay closed.

Today we are going to talk about shadow work. What it is, where the idea comes from, what the science says about it, and most importantly, what you can actually do with it. Because this is not just a concept. It is one of the most practical and powerful tools for becoming the person you actually want to be.

And it starts with a simple willingness to look at what you have been looking away from.

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[ WELCOME — SHOW OVERVIEW ]

⏱ Target: 90 seconds

Welcome to Beyond Horizyns. I am CJ Sugita-Jackson, and this is the show where we explore holistic wellness, spiritual philosophy, ancient wisdom, and modern science all in the same conversation.

I believe that the most important questions in life deserve more than a single lens. They deserve the full picture.

And Today is one of those conversations that I think has the potential to genuinely change something for you in an honest way. Because the work we are talking about today is shadow work, It is some of the most transformative inner work a human being can do.

We are going to look at where this concept comes from. We are going to look at what brain science and psychology have discovered about why we hide parts of ourselves. And we are going to walk through practical tools you can start using this week.

No judgment. Just honest exploration.

🎵  MUSIC TRANSITION — Brief and smooth

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Quick note before we dive in. Horizyns is a holistic wellness marketplace and community platform launching in 2026. If you are a seeker, a creator, or a practitioner in this space, this is being built for you. Learn more or schedule a demo at www.horizonsinc.com. Link is in the show notes.

🎵  MUSIC TRANSITION — Shifts deeper and more interior

[ MAIN CORE DISCUSSION — SHADOW WORK: MEETING THE PARTS OF YOU THAT YOU'VE HIDDEN ]

PART ONE: Ancient and Traditional Wisdom

⏱ Target: 4 to 5 minutes

The idea that human beings carry hidden parts of themselves is not new. Not even close. Cultures across the world and across thousands of years have been working with this understanding in their own language and through their own traditions.

The concept that most people associate with shadow work today comes from the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who used the word shadow to describe the parts of our personality that the conscious mind rejects or ignores. But the wisdom underneath that idea is far older than Jung.

In ancient Hindu philosophy, the concept of maya describes the way human beings construct a partial and often distorted version of reality based on what they are willing to see about themselves. The Vedantic tradition teaches that genuine liberation, what they called moksha, requires seeing through the illusion. That includes the illusion of the self we perform for the world.

In Taoism, the philosophy that emerged in ancient China around the 4th century BCE, the concept of yin and yang describes opposing forces that only become whole when they are in relationship with each other. The dark side, the yin, is not the enemy of the light. It is its necessary partner. A life that suppresses its darkness does not become more light. It becomes less whole. Those constantly sitting in “positivity”, staying busy to ignore their internal darkness are a good example of this. 

In many Indigenous traditions across the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific, vision quests, initiation ceremonies, and healing rituals specifically required the individual to journey into their own darkness. To sit with fear. To meet the parts of the self that had been avoided. Elders understood that a person who had never faced their own shadow could not fully show up for their community. Integration was not optional. It was a requirement for a mature humanity.

In West African Dagara tradition, the work of becoming a whole person involves acknowledging both what serves the community and what, left unexamined, could harm it. The elder Malidoma Patrice Some, in his landmark work Of Water and the Spirit, describes how village healing rituals were specifically designed to bring the hidden into the open so it could be transformed rather than projected.

Even in early Christian mystical traditions, figures like Meister Eckhart and later Thomas Merton wrote about the false self, the constructed persona we present to the world, and the true self, the deeper, more complete identity that waits beneath it. The spiritual journey, in this framework, is not about becoming better at performing goodness. It is about dismantling the performance and finding what is real underneath.

Across all of these traditions, the message is the same. Wholeness requires looking at what you have hidden. Wisdom requires facing what you have feared. And healing always asks you to go toward the darkness rather than away from it.

Every tradition that has produced genuine wisdom has also produced a path for meeting the parts of yourself you would rather not see.

PART TWO: What the Science Says

⏱ Target: 4 to 5 minutes

Now let's look at what modern psychology and neuroscience have discovered and it validates what the traditions have always known in ways that should make us all pay closer attention… to ourselves.

Carl Jung formally introduced the concept of the shadow in the early 20th century. He defined it as the parts of the personality that the conscious ego disowns because they feel threatening, shameful, or socially unacceptable. But here is what Jung understood that is so important. He said the shadow is not just the parts of us that are dark or destructive. It also contains parts that are positive. Creativity, passion, assertiveness, even joy can be shadow material if the environment we grew up in taught us that those qualities were not safe to express.

Think about that for a moment. Your gifts can be hidden in the shadow just as surely as your wounds.

Contemporary psychology has built substantial research on top of Jung's foundation. Psychologist Roy Baumeister at Florida State University has studied what he calls ego depletion and self concept threat. His research shows that when people encounter information about themselves that conflicts with their self image, the brain treats it as a genuine threat. The same stress response that fires when you are physically in danger also fires when you are confronted with something true about yourself that you do not want to see.

This is why shadow work can feel so uncomfortable. It is not weakness. It is your biology. Your brain is designed to protect your sense of self. And it will work very hard to keep the hidden things hidden.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, whose work on how emotions are constructed has reshaped the field, explains that the brain is fundamentally a prediction machine. It does not experience reality directly. It builds a model of reality based on past experience and filters everything through that model. When parts of our experience have been consistently suppressed or denied, the brain literally learns not to process them fully. They become what researchers call unintegrated emotional memories. And unintegrated emotional memories do not disappear. They come out sideways.

Here is what that looks like in real life. It looks like an overreaction to something small. A colleague makes a minor criticism and you feel rage that is wildly out of proportion to what just happened. Or someone close to you succeeds at something and you feel a flash of resentment that you immediately feel ashamed of. Or you keep ending up in the same painful relationship dynamic no matter who the other person is.

That disproportionate charge, that automatic pattern, that is the shadow knocking.

Research by psychologist Bessel van der Kolk, documented in his foundational work The Body Keeps the Score, shows that suppressed emotional material is not just stored in the mind. It is stored in the body. In muscle tension, in nervous system dysregulation, in patterns of shallow breathing and chronic stress. The body becomes the archive of everything the conscious mind has refused to process.

Developmental psychologist John Bowlby's attachment theory, refined through decades of subsequent research, shows that the shadow begins forming in early childhood. Children learn very quickly what emotions and behaviors are safe to express in their specific family and cultural environment. The qualities that are met with rejection, punishment, or withdrawal of love get pushed into the shadow. Not because the child is weak. Because the child is smart. Adaptation is survival.

The problem is that what serves a child in a limiting environment does not always serve an adult in an open one. And the adaptations we made at five or eight or twelve years old can run our lives at thirty five or fifty if we never examine them.

The good news, is that the brain retains the capacity to integrate and heal throughout life. Neuroplasticity research has shown that new neural pathways can form at any age when the right conditions are present. The right conditions for shadow integration turn out to be exactly what the wisdom traditions prescribed. Honest self reflection. Safe relationships. And the willingness to feel what has been unfelt.

PART TWO B: The Pandemic Mirror — What COVID Revealed About the Shadow

timing — Target: 3 to 4 minutes

Something happened in 2020 that no psychologist could have designed as a research study and no wisdom tradition could have scripted more precisely.

The world stopped.

Governments around the globe shut down. People were sent home. The noise stopped. The commute stopped. The social calendar emptied. The constant motion that most of us had been using, whether we knew it or not, to stay one step ahead of our own inner life came to a complete halt.

And what happened next was one of the most revealing psychological experiments in modern history. Not because scientists designed it, though some believed that, Because life did.

Two groups emerged. And the difference between them tells us something profound about the shadow and about what human beings will do when they are forced to sit with themselves.

The first group turned inward. Sales of journals and personal development books surged dramatically in the first months of the pandemic. The New York Times reported that book sales in the self help and psychology categories increased by over 20 percent in 2020. Shadow work journals specifically became one of the most searched and purchased items in the personal development space. Mental health apps reported record downloads. Therapists reported waiting lists they had never seen before. Online meditation and mindfulness platforms saw subscription increases of hundreds of percent. People who had never sat quietly with themselves before were suddenly doing it. And many of them discovered that the stillness, however uncomfortable at first, had something to offer.

Research published in Frontiers in Psychology during the pandemic period documented a phenomenon that researchers called post traumatic growth in certain populations. Post traumatic growth is the well established psychological finding, documented extensively by researchers Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun at the University of North Carolina, that some individuals emerge from profoundly difficult experiences with measurably increased psychological strength, deeper relationships, greater appreciation for life, and expanded personal wisdom. The shutdown, for this group, functioned as an involuntary but ultimately transformative encounter with the self.

The Jungian framework explains this group clearly. When the external world goes quiet, the unconscious gets louder. The material that had been buried under busyness, social performance, and the constant stimulation of ordinary modern life began to surface. And the people who had enough psychological safety, enough support, and enough basic security to tolerate that surfacing used it. They did the shadow work that ordinary life had been allowing them to avoid.

Then there was the second group.

And this group deserves our compassion and our honesty in equal measure.

For many people, the shutdown did not feel like an invitation. It felt like an attack. The outrage was real. The resistance was fierce. And while some of that outrage was legitimately rooted in genuine economic hardship, real fear about health, and valid disagreement with specific policy decisions, there was another layer underneath it that is worth examining carefully.

Research by psychologist Arie Kruglanski at the University of Maryland… on what he calls the need for cognitive closure …documents a well established personality dimension in which some individuals have a significantly higher drive toward certainty, structure, and resolution of ambiguity than others. For people high in need for closure, unstructured time is not restful. It is threatening. The absence of external structure forces a confrontation with internal states that feel genuinely dangerous rather than merely uncomfortable.

The clinical term for what many in this second group were experiencing is experiential avoidance. Defined formally in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, developed by psychologist Steven Hayes at the University of Nevada, experiential avoidance is the chronic and rigid attempt to avoid contact with unwanted internal experiences including thoughts, feelings, memories, and bodily sensations. Research shows it is one of the strongest predictors of psychological suffering across diagnostic categories. And it is almost always maintained by exactly the kind of constant activity, social stimulation, and external focus that the shutdown suddenly and forcibly removed.

The busyness was not just a lifestyle preference. For many people, it was a coping mechanism. An unconsciously constructed defense against the silence where the shadow lives.

The wisdom traditions understood this dynamic long before psychology had the vocabulary for it.

In the Christian contemplative tradition, the medieval monk John of the Cross wrote about what he called acedia, a spiritual state of restlessness and resistance to interior stillness that he understood as the soul’s avoidance of genuine encounter with itself and with the divine. It was not laziness. It was flight. The desperate filling of space and time to avoid the confrontation that stillness demands.

In Buddhist teaching, the concept of dukkha includes not just the obvious suffering of pain and loss but the subtler suffering of constant seeking, the restless movement from one object of attention to another that the mind performs to avoid settling into the present moment where reality, including the difficult parts of reality, actually lives.

In Jungian terms, the second group was doing what the shadow always drives people to do when it is left unexamined. It was projecting outward. The fury that had nowhere internal to land because the internal was too threatening became fury at the government, at neighbors who complied, at the situation itself. The external world became the screen onto which the unexamined inner world was projected at enormous volume.

This is not a judgment. It is a diagnosis. And it is a compassionate one. Because the people who were most rageful during the shutdown were often the people carrying the heaviest and most unprocessed inner loads. People who had built entire lives around motion, productivity, and social engagement as a way of never having to be alone with what they carried. And when that system of avoidance was suddenly dismantled, the pain that surfaced as outrage was genuine pain. It had nowhere else to go.

The distinction between the two groups is not about intelligence, moral character, or spiritual advancement. Research by psychologist Kristin Neff at the University of Texas on self compassion shows that the capacity to turn toward difficult inner material rather than away from it is primarily a function of felt safety. People who experienced early environments of sufficient emotional safety, adequate attachment security, and the basic message that their inner life was survivable, those people were more likely to be able to use the shutdown’s enforced stillness productively. People who did not receive those conditions in their formative years were more likely to experience that same stillness as unbearable.

This means that the shadow work itself requires, as its foundation, a degree of safety. Not perfect safety. Not the absence of all difficulty. But enough of a sense that looking inward will not destroy you. And for many people, building that sense of safety is the prerequisite work before the shadow work itself can begin. This is why cultish propaganda was so easy to use as a manipulative tool.  Because it felt safe, and blame would be put on anyone but themselves. 

What the pandemic gave us, among its many losses and griefs, was a collective, unignorable demonstration of this dynamic at civilizational scale. It showed us exactly how many people were relying on the external world to manage what the internal world had never been given the conditions to process.

And it showed us, in the surge of journals sold and therapy sessions booked and meditation apps downloaded, that the desire to do that processing, to finally sit with what has been avoided, is not rare. It is universal.

It was simply waiting for a moment quiet enough to be heard.

The shutdown did not create the shadow. It simply removed everything we had been using to pretend it was not there.

PART THREE: Practical Tools for Shadow Work

⏱ Target: 5 to 6 minutes

Now let's get into the work itself. This is where the conversation has to become practical. Shadow work is not just a concept to understand. It is a practice you MUST do.

And I want to say this clearly upfront. Shadow work is not about tearing yourself apart. It is not about wallowing in what is painful or spending hours in self criticism. It is about getting curious. It is about treating the hidden parts of yourself the way you would treat a frightened child. With gentleness. With patience. With the understanding that they hid for a reason.

Here are five tools that are grounded in both psychological research and wisdom tradition practice.

Tool One. The Trigger Journal.

Your emotional triggers are the most reliable map to your shadow. When something provokes a reaction in you that feels bigger than the situation warrants, that is information. Instead of moving past it quickly, slow down and write about it. Not what the other person did. What you felt. Where you felt it in your body. What the feeling reminds you of. What it might say about a belief you hold about yourself or the world.

Psychologist James Pennebaker at the University of Texas has conducted decades of research on expressive writing. His studies, published in journals including the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, consistently show that structured reflective writing about emotional experiences produces measurable improvements in psychological and physical health. Writing is not just processing. It is integration. And integration is the goal.

Tool Two. The Mirror of Projection.

Jung observed that we tend to see in other people the qualities we cannot see in ourselves. This is called projection. When you find yourself intensely irritated by someone else's arrogance, laziness, neediness, or dishonesty, ask yourself honestly, where does that quality live in me? Not where it is most obvious. Where it might be hiding.

This is not about excusing other people's behavior. It is about recognizing that our strongest judgments of others are often the clearest windows into our own unexamined interior. The qualities that provoke us most fiercely in others are often the qualities we have most thoroughly suppressed in ourselves.

Tool Three. The Dialogue Method.

This one comes directly from Jungian practice and has been validated in contemporary therapeutic approaches including Internal Family Systems therapy, developed by psychologist Richard Schwartz. The idea is simple. Instead of trying to eliminate or suppress the uncomfortable parts of yourself, you have a conversation with them.

Write a dialogue in your journal. Let the part of you that feels jealous, or rageful, or ashamed, or terrified actually speak. Ask it what it needs. Ask it what it is afraid of. Ask it what it has been trying to protect you from. You may be surprised at what comes up. Shadow parts are not enemies. They are usually frightened and exhausted protectors who learned their role a long time ago and never got the memo that things have changed.

Tool Four. Somatic Awareness.

Because the body holds the shadow as much as the mind does, body based practices are often the most direct access point. When you notice a strong emotional reaction, instead of analyzing it immediately, drop your attention into your body first. Where do you feel it? Is it a tightness in the chest? A clench in the jaw? A hollowness in the stomach? Simply naming the physical sensation without rushing to explain it can begin to release the charge it carries.

This approach is central to somatic experiencing, developed by trauma specialist Peter Levine, and is supported by extensive research on the relationship between body awareness, emotional regulation, and nervous system healing.

Tool Five. Shadow Work With a Witness.

Some shadow material is too heavy and too entrenched to work with alone. And there is no shame in that. In fact, the wisdom traditions understood this intuitively. Healing was almost always a communal or relational act. A trusted therapist, a shadow work coach, or a carefully chosen therapeutic group can provide the witnessed vulnerability that accelerates integration in ways that solitary practice cannot always reach.

If you are noticing patterns in your life that keep repeating despite your best efforts to change them, that is usually a sign that the shadow work required is deeper than journaling alone can address. Please consider reaching out to a qualified professional.

PART FOUR: Putting It All Together

⏱ Target: 3 to 4 minutes

So what does shadow work actually look like when you put all of this together in real life?

It looks like pausing before you react and asking what this situation is activating in you rather than just what the other person did wrong. This is not easy and will take time to process. So, give yourself some grace. 

It looks like noticing the qualities you most judge in other people and getting genuinely curious about whether those qualities live somewhere in you.

It looks like sitting with discomfort long enough to hear what it is trying to say instead of immediately reaching for something to make it stop.

It looks like keeping a journal that is honest in a way your daily conversation never gets to be.

It looks like treating the parts of yourself you are most ashamed of with the same compassion you would offer a good friend going through a hard time.

And here is the promise that every tradition and every credible body of research in this space makes. When you do this work, something changes. Not all at once. Not without much difficulty. But genuinely and permanently.

The energy that was being used to keep the shadow hidden becomes available for living. The emotional charge behind your triggers gradually reduces. Your relationships improve because you stop unconsciously projecting your unexamined material onto the people you love. Your creativity opens up because some of your most powerful gifts were hiding in the shadow alongside your wounds.

You become more of yourself. Not a better performance of yourself. More of the actual, complex, whole human being you already are.

The goal of shadow work is not to become perfect. It is to become whole. And wholeness is always worth the work.

Jung said it most simply. He said that one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

That is the work. Making the darkness conscious. Not to live in it. But to stop being run by it.

🎵  MUSIC TRANSITION — Warm, grounding, settling energy

[ SPONSOR SPOTLIGHT — TEA4PEACE TRANQUILITEA LOUNGE — QUICK TIP ]

⏱ Target: 60 seconds

Here is today's Tea4Peace quick tip that connects directly to what we just discussed. Shadow work requires getting quiet enough to hear yourself. And one of the most effective and accessible ways to create that quality of internal stillness is a consistent tea, coffee or cacao ritual.

Research published in the journal Psychopharmacology found that L theanine, an amino acid found naturally in green tea and white tea, measurably increases alpha brain wave activity. Alpha waves are associated with the relaxed, alert, receptive state of mind that is optimal for reflective inner work. Not drowsy. Not wired. Calm and present.

Before your next journaling session or quiet reflection, brew a cup with intention. Sit with it before you pick up a pen. Let the ritual signal to your nervous system that it is safe to go inward.

Find Tea4Peace through the link in the show notes.

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[ FINAL REFLECTION — SUMMARY AND SYNTHESIS ]

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And finally, Every tradition we looked at today, from Hindu philosophy and Taoism to Indigenous initiation practices and Christian mysticism, understood that genuine growth requires facing what you have hidden. Not as punishment. As liberation.

The science confirms it. From Jung's original framework to Bessel van der Kolk's body based trauma research to Lisa Feldman Barrett's work on emotional construction and James Pennebaker's expressive writing studies, the research points in the same direction. What we suppress does not disappear. It runs us from the background until we bring it into the light.

The five practical tools we walked through today are your starting point. The trigger journal. The mirror of projection. The dialogue method. Somatic awareness. And working with a witness when the material calls for it.

You do not have to do this all at once. You do not have to excavate everything immediately. You just have to be willing to start. To look a little more honestly. To stay with the discomfort a little longer than you normally would.

Because every moment of genuine self awareness is a step toward a life that is not being quietly controlled by what you have not yet looked at.

The shadow is not your enemy. It is the part of you that is still waiting to come home.

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[ CALL TO ACTION AND CLOSING ]

⏱ Target: 60 seconds

If this episode gave you something to think about, please follow the Beyond Horizyns podcast wherever you are listening so you never miss a future conversation.

And come join our Horizyns community at www.horizyns.com where you can meet like minded individuals, find amazing products, and take workshops from our many curated vendors.

Each week we explore new ideas, traditions, and perspectives that help us live more balanced and meaningful lives.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for doing the kind of work that takes courage.

And until next time, keep exploring what lies beyond the horizon.

SHOW NOTES AND RESEARCH REFERENCES

Ancient and Traditional Sources:

Vedantic philosophy and the concept of maya, Hindu philosophical tradition

Tao Te Ching, attributed to Laozi, approximately 4th century BCE

Malidoma Patrice Some, Of Water and the Spirit (1994), Dagara healing tradition

Meister Eckhart, Christian mystical tradition, 13th to 14th century

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (1962), false self and true self framework

Indigenous initiation and vision quest traditions, various Nations

Psychological and Clinical Research:

Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959)

Carl Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951)

Roy Baumeister, ego depletion and self concept threat research, Florida State University

Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made (2017), Northeastern University

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (2014)

John Bowlby, attachment theory and developmental psychology

Richard Schwartz, Internal Family Systems therapy model

Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger (1997), somatic experiencing

James Pennebaker, expressive writing and emotional health research, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, University of Texas

Neuroscience Research:

Neuroplasticity and emotional integration research, peer reviewed literature

L theanine and alpha brain wave activity, Psychopharmacology journal

Nervous system regulation and somatic awareness research

Links:

Horizyns platform preview: www.horizynsinc.com

Tea4Peace TranquiliTea Lounge: www.Tea4Peace.org

Horizyns community: www.horizyns.com

Recommended reading: Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Recommended reading: Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

Recommended reading: Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow (1991)

DISCLAIMER: This episode is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before making changes to your mental health care, especially if you are managing trauma, depression, anxiety, or any other health condition.