By Heather Caldwell, LPCC
Earlier this month I spent four days surrounded by folks who dedicate their lives supporting people in their healing process. This eclectic group, from a variety of backgrounds, generations, and locations across the world, is drawn together annually by their common thread - their work in supporting others. The gathering’s theme started as exploring our journey into our unique practice. The conversation, however, quickly turned towards big shifts that we’ve been going through over the past two years and the fact that the things in our shadow suddenly had nowhere to hide (more on shadows below). As we deepened into the conversation and continued to shine a light on our shadows, the theme became one of reconciliation.
Reconciliation = the restoration of friendly relations.
Often when we speak of reconciliation, it’s in the context of others. For example, after a fight, we (hopefully) repair and reconcile with the other person. We make up. We forgive. We move on.
Sitting around the Zoom table this past week, what struck me was the other ways in which reconciliation showed up.
Reconciliation with what is global: global warming, fires that impact wildlife & small communities, racism that impacts individuals and communities, ongoing pain and isolation living during a pandemic.
Reconciliation with change: downsizing and moving, selling homes where folks have lived for decades, changes in careers and finances.
Reconciliation with ourselves, with our shadow parts, the parts of ourselves that we exile, or ignore, or hide.
This blog series will address reconciliation, starting with reconciling with our shadow self.
The Shadows
As we grow up, we learn through explicit and implicit messages that there are parts of ourselves that are loved, embraced, and accepted by others. For example, the people-pleasing part that wants to help and make others happy earns praise and positive rewards. The good child may earn privileges, an extra helping of dessert, signs of affection and love, or even a few moments of peace in an otherwise turbulent household. These parts can live in the “light” or are welcome in our public lives. We can show the world these parts of ourselves without shame or fear of negative reactions.
We also learn that there are parts of ourselves that need to be or should be hidden, are broken, are bad, or need to be discarded. For example, maybe your tears caused a parent to lash out calling you names. If so, you may learn that crying is bad and therefore shut down that part of yourself. Maybe your desire to do certain activities caused a negative reaction in your parents, where they put you down or called you names. This might have led to you swinging in the exact opposite direction. Or maybe as your body shifted and changed through childhood and adolescence, you were shamed, ridiculed, teased, harassed, or assaulted leading you to detach from your sexual self. Or maybe there are things in your life or beliefs you might hold that you don’t want to see in yourself or believe you hold. Maybe something happened that challenges your self-view as open and accepting, such as having fat-shaming thoughts, seeing ways in which you might participate in microaggressions towards a global majority group, or traits/reactions you might have that have been passed down generationally and are harmful or undesirable.
These parts of ourselves live in the “shadows”. We don’t want to shine a light on these parts as they are shameful, hurtful, wrong, broken, bad, and/or unacceptable. In our efforts to hide these parts of ourselves, we try to cast them away, sending them to the shadows. The hope is that these parts can hide in the shadows where we can ignore them or pretend they don’t exist.
However, these parts don’t go away. And oftentimes, the more we want to exile these parts the stronger their grip on us becomes. This can show up in a variety of ways, including ruminating thoughts, shame spirals, and paranoia (everyone must know what I’m thinking or doing this “terrible” thing …). As a result, we alter our behaviors and actions to “cover-up” what we don’t want seen.
This cycle of hiding and/or covering up can be exhausting.
Reconciliation: Healing the Shadow
What does this have to do with reconciliation?
Many clients come to therapy in hopes to “fix” something or to get support “stopping” a behavior or pattern. This framework, however, posits the client as broken or wrong. The implicit messages range from “I need to get rid of this thing because it’s shameful” to “This thing I do is bad and I need to make it stop, or I am bad” to “I hate this thing I do or the way I think, and therefore I hate (a part of) myself.”
Reconciliation is the energy it takes for change/transformation.
One of the only ways to release the grip of the shadow parts is to shine a light on them. This is hard and scary work as it means facing into the darkness, facing into the life experiences that helped create these shadow parts, and facing into accepting and loving parts of ourselves that were taught to dislike, criticize, shun, or even hate.
But these parts were created for a reason! And most of them were created to protect us in some way. For example, when we are young we do everything we can to have our basic needs met. If when we cry, and our caregivers yell at us, we learn that our tears are bad and to not cry. If “the good student” or “good child” gets praised, but the “ bad student” or “bad child” gets verbally assaulted and punished, we try hard to be “the good student” or we people please in order to be the “good child.”
In fear of being seen as the “bad student”, for example, you might start to fall into a shame spiral for any perceived failure or anticipation of failure. This fear of failure spins anxiety around every corner waiting for the opportunity to find supporting evidence that indeed, you are the bad student. Not wanting to accept this part of you - or any failure that might “prove this” - you shun the anxiety as evidence of your failure and BAM! This part is shame-filled and gets cast to the shadows.
But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if you could change the relationships you have with these parts? Maybe assign them a new role? Or learn how to be friendly with these parts, listening to the information they have to give you, without letting them take the driver’s seat?
The good news is that there is another way, and the therapists at Evolve in Nature are here to help you bring these parts into the light with compassion and tenderness. For a consultation, contact us at info@evolveinnature.com