Your Healing Journey

The Inner Healing Work
Almost everyone could benefit from embracing an inner healing work journey. This is the kind of journey that requires you to consciously go within to see if there's any shadows lurking that are causing you to experience negative thoughts, emotions, or behaviors.

The more trauma you've experienced throughout life, the more likely you’ll benefit from doing such an inner-healing journey.

That being said, if you have experienced quite a bit of trauma throughout your life, you may want to do shadow work alongside a professional therapist.

Not everyone can do their healing work as a self-directed process. And that's alright. Give yourself permission to reach out for support if you need.
If you’ve ever been to therapy, you may have heard the therapist talk about the “inner child."

Essentially, the inner child is a metaphor for the emotional aspect of ourselves.

A “wounded” inner child refers to the unhealed emotional fragments that we, as children, just couldn’t process and heal for one reason or another.

Childhood Experiences You May Not Have Been Able to Process
When I was in elementary school, I witnessed a traumatic event dealing with a family member. It was a life-or-death situation, and I was paralyzed by fear.

My brain and nervous system were still developing and not quite strong enough to know how to process and integrate the flood of negative emotions I was feeling. So, it did what it’s designed to do, it put me in “survival mode."

My particular survival response was the “freeze” part of the fight, flight, or freeze responses. However, I don’t mean “freeze” in the way of just being still to gather my senses to make a rational decision as to what to do next.

I mean “freeze” as in emotional shut down.

A full disconnect of my mind and bodily sensations or emotions.

My mind went blank just after that incident and to this day, I still cannot recall what happened immediately after the terrifying event.

The emotions and bodily sensations became “fragments” that were banished to the dark side of my psyche – or what some call the shadow.

What Is The Shadow?
According to Jungian psychology, the shadow is the unconscious or dark side of the psyche.

It’s not dark in that it’s bad. Rather, it’s dark because you aren’t aware that it’s there.

And, you’re not aware of what’s hiding in there; things that may be tripping you up in your everyday life.

The "shadow" is a term coined by psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Shadow work is simply taking the light of your consciousness and shining it into the shadow side to see those wounded inner child parts that are wanting to be processed and healed.

Closer examination of the dark characteristics – that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow – reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive or, better, possessive quality. - Carl Jung

I like to think of the shadow side of myself as those parts that I’ve repressed, rejected, shunned, disowned, or forgotten about over the years. They could be emotions and/or memories.

Why should we be concerned about our shadow side?

Because when the psyche gets lopsided and the darker side (shadows) outweighs the lighter side (ego consciousness), those shadows can have a negative influence on your current life, including your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

The Role of the Ego
You see, when you’re born, the mind develops what is called the ego.

Now, the function of the ego is to process information and store it away in the brain. However, when you experience little and big “T” trauma, the ego doesn’t always know how to fully process such.

As a result, it will relegate the negative emotions associated with the trauma to your shadow side.

But the thing is, those strong emotions don’t just disappear. They’re sort of frozen in time. That is, until later on down the road when those emotions come knocking on your door to be seen, heard, and processed.

The Inner Healing Work
Almost everyone could benefit from embracing an inner healing work journey. This is the kind of journey that requires you to consciously go within to see if there's any shadows lurking that are causing you to experience negative thoughts, emotions, or behaviors.

The more trauma you've experienced throughout life, the more likely you’ll benefit from doing such an inner-healing journey.

That being said, if you have experienced quite a bit of trauma throughout your life, you may want to do shadow work alongside a professional therapist.

Not everyone can do their healing work as a self-directed process. And that's alright. Give yourself permission to reach out for support if you need.

Deep, emotional work like this can bring up very powerful feelings, especially if you have been repressing them for years. Know when you need to ask for professional support and don't do it all on your own.

Want to know more about your hidden side?
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