The Missing Half of Shadow Work

0:00Welcome to Rethink. The podcast that empowers you to challenge your existing beliefs and embrace new, more productive ways of thinking. Here at Rethink we believe that the key to self-fulfillment lies in shattering old thought patterns and adopting new mindsets that support personal growth and empowerment. With expert guests and thought-leaded from a wide range of fields, we explore strategies and insights that can help you achieve success and fulfillment in all areas of your life. From relationships to career, business ownership and health, you are the source of your own success. We're just here to help you tap into your true potential and create a brighter future. So join us on the journey of personal growth and empowerment and let's rethink what's possible for our lives. You don't need to relive your worst memory to do shadow work. You do need to notice what you're already reacting to, however.

1:02In a nutshell, in one sentence, if I had to put a tag on it for today, I would say we're talking about the missing half of shadow work. Shower work is the idea that slowing down the version of the idea that's circulating around now that gets millions of views. It tells you almost the opposite. It talks about excavation, you know, going down, finding the womb, holding it up to the light, and filming that moment where whatever it is cracked open. And understand why that spreads, understand why that's popular. It does look like transformation. It has a before and an after and it is satisfying to watch someone name the thing that they've been avoiding. Potentially finding solution, but what I want to talk about today or the part that I want to talk about today is the version that's left out.

2:04And it's not a small emission. It's the difference between shadow work that actually integrate something and shadow work that just performs an excavation for an audience, including sometimes an audience of one, which of course is you watching yourself. Have that breakthrough that you, you know, you deserve, but you think you're supposed to have. So that's what we're talking about today, guys, on re-think podcasts. My name is Kelly. I welcome you into the podcast. It is always my pleasure to welcome you in. And we're going in a little bit different direction today with shadow work. It is an exciting topic. And I am glad to kind of move in this direction. I hope you guys are having a great week, a great day, a great month. I want to say thank you to our old timers. If you are in the audience today, thank you guys so much for supporting the podcast. I really do appreciate it. Thank you so much for continuing to listen and to share and subscribe. And for our newer folks, as a matter of fact, we had some new folks join our podcast, same membership audience this week.

3:16And I wanted to thank them personally for for doing that. You guys should have gotten your, you know, welcome letters and things like that by this time. But thank you guys so much for continuing to support the podcast. If you'd like to be a member yourself, please go to the show notes in the podcast. And we will make sure that you have access to, to that link. And it's only $25 a month. And you get some pretty handy dandy things in terms of membership benefits exclusive access quite honestly to the podcast and Q&As. It's really worth looking into. Cory Clemson. Cory Clemson, thank you so much. You are our newer, our newest member on the podcast inside. Thank you so much for joining us. And be like, Cory, go into the show notes today and click on the link and it'll take you into our website. And it'll give you all the layout in terms of what you can expect from being a member.

4:16Newcomers, thank you guys for hanging out with us today. Please go ahead and log in, save us wherever you are. Subscribe because we don't want you to forget who we are and where we are. You're going to jump on in to the rest of the podcast. But if you are new, be advised, this is our fifth season. So you got four seasons to binge. Got a little bit of work to do on your hands. Listen to this one. Listen to this one all the way through and then go back and listen to our other podcast. Thank you again, everyone. All right. The missing half of shadow work is what we're talking about today. All right. So let's start with where the term actually comes from. You've heard me a few times on the podcast, refer to people who I consider in this space to be gurus in one of those persons is Carl Young and that is spelled J. J. I am spelling it because I want you to go and look this up. If you're new to this podcast, I have said before and I'll say now, please do not just believe someone because they have a microphone and they have an audience and they have a medium in which to speak.

5:22It is incumbent upon you to study and show yourself approved. So these names as I give them out the information is a send it forth, prove it to yourself. That is true. That's really the only way it's going to work for you. So Carl Young. Let's talk about where this came from. It's an older term quieter, but it's still out there. Carl Young used to term the shadow to describe the parts of a personality that get pushed out of conscious awareness into your subconscious mind. Not because they're evil, but because they were unwelcome at the time. Okay. So there could be trauma that could be a couple different things we're going to get into it. A household that didn't, for example, have room for anger. Okay. They pushed out a family that only had room for an easy child, you know, an easy child. I don't know what that child is, but an easy child. A version of you that got told early and often that a certain feeling or a certain trait was just not acceptable in this family.

6:28So you learned to stop showing it and you eventually stopped noticing that you had it at all, but it didn't go away went into the shadow. Young's point wasn't that this material is dangerous and it needs to be dragged out into the light and you know some some some way exercise. His point was that whatever you don't look at doesn't go away. It just starts running things from a different position. One that you more than likely don't even notice or don't see. So here's what almost never makes it into a YouTube 90 minute clip or a 90 second clip or you know the shores. Young didn't think the shadow was only the dark material. He did not think the shadow was only just the dark material. There's a piece of this called golden shadow. Golden shadow of the strength, the talents and desires that you disowned for the exact same reasons that you disowned the anger of the grief or the misbehavior.

7:29Maybe ambition wasn't welcome to your house either. Who knows. Maybe wanting attention for example, wanting to be seen wanting more. Got the same sort of treatment in your house as anger did. So what'd you do you bear that to. And now it doesn't look like a wound. It's just bear it you forgot it's even there. It looks like a strange. Disappropriated reaction to other people who have the thing that you quietly gave up on. That you quietly gave up even wanting. That's actually the most reliable signal there is. It's the part that I want you to walk away with today. The shadow rarely announces itself directly. It shows up sideways in reactions that are usually bigger than the situation actually calls for.

8:31Let's see somebody that work gets praised for confidence. You call arrogance in a different mood. And it bothers you more than it should. A friend. Post something ordinary and you fill a flash of irritation that you can't quite explain. Your kid does something completely age appropriate. Loud demanding unwilling to share. And something in your response like it's a crisis. None of these reactions are really about the other person. They're pointers. Something in you. Something in you recognizes a trait. It once had to hide. And the recognition comes out as heat instead of information. If you think about that, your person never certain age, you think about that.

9:33Think about how many times that is likely happened in your life. I can say certainly it's happened in my mind. And I'm getting away from terms like person development and self improvement things like that. And we'll talk at length of why I'm doing it. But if there's work to be done, and I don't really think there is, but recognition, then this is the space in which to do it. You realize that over time, perhaps you've given up on things or you are connected to things. And your strong reaction to what you see in media, social media, public, family, sometimes is a reaction triggered from an internal stimuli. An stimuli is directly related to what you buried years ago.

10:36Years ago that you totally forgot about, but you still connected to. This is where the popular version of shadow work and the actual mechanism start to pull apart. The trend is, as most practiced, it treats this as content to be mined. This excavation, you go deep, you find the oldest womb, and you sit with it for a while, and you post about it, and you focus on it and these sorts of things. A few 2026 pieces looking closely at this have raised the same concern from different angles. Therapists, for example, interviewed about the trend, generally don't dismiss the instinct behind it. They desire to understand yourself in a more healthy way, dismissing it outright, just pushes people further towards doing this without any guidance at all, which is not productive. But more than one source is specific that unsupported solo excavation of old material, expression material type to real pain, not just an inconvenient personality trait.

11:46It can destabilize someone faster than it can heal them. You go dig back the old stuff, and you're not capable of dealing with it when it comes back up, and you're not under someone's care. It has the potential of destabilizing you faster than actually healing you. So one piece, you just defraise psychological flooding for what happens when someone opens something old and large without any structure around it to hold it. You open something old, something large, it's liable to just fall on you. And that's not a reason to avoid looking at yourself. Don't get me wrong. It's a reason to be honest about what you're looking for, what you're looking actually requires, which is usually smaller, slower, and less dramatic than some sort of viral prompt that makes it seem so. So here's the actual practice. Here's the practice. So let's focus in. Here's the practice. It's the missing half of the trend. You don't need to go looking for your deepest wound on a Tuesday afternoon by yourself.

12:53You need to notice the next this appropriate reaction that you have. Today, this week, whenever it shows up, and instead of acting on it or defending it, ask one simple and honest question. What does the size of this reaction tell me about myself? Not about them, not about the other person. It is always about you. I know that you think that everything is external. But in truth, everything is internal. You are awareness. Looking through these eyes, having this experience. Let's take a quick break. There's a version of you that you keep returning to in your mind, not a fantasy version, a real one.

13:56Clear, focused, free from and quietly running your life in the background. You know the person is possible. You felt glimpses of them. The distance between where you are and where you want to be isn't as far as it feels. But it does require a structure path, not motivation, not willpower. A day-by process that actually moves you through the work. 31 days to new beginnings is that process. Each day of the course walks you through a guided lesson, a reflective journaling prompt and a practical exercise you can apply to your life immediately. Over 31 days you'll work through rewiring your mindset, releasing the limiting beliefs that have been shaped in your thought, your permission, and building the habits and clarity that make last and change possible. Real people who have taken this course have called it a total life-free set. Not because it's loud or dramatic, but because it's structured, it's honest, and it works. You give one to four to $99. The path is there when you're ready. But everything is you. So everything is always about you. It's about fixing your perception of what it is that you see.

15:02Understanding why you have the reactions that you do have. And where it is coming from. But I can assure you it is not coming from out there. It is coming from in here. So no excavation. This is the whole practice. What does the size of that reaction tell you about yourself? Observation. Witnessing. Noticing. Aimed in the right direction with the reaction itself as the map. Because without those triggers, everything points back to you. Why am I having this reaction? Think back about someone I used to work with. I'll leave out obviously any identifiers, but this person kept getting quietly,

16:04just appropriately irritated by a colleague who spoke up in every meeting. Absolutely no hesitation. No apology either for taking up the space, taking up the room, taking up the time. She described it to me as a care to fly this person. Too much too much. She said too much. It doesn't read the room. You know, we talked it through and what came up slowly wasn't a verdict on him at all. It was that she'd been the loud one as a kid. And she hadn't been told many times by people of course loved her to make herself smaller, to take it down, to be quiet. So somewhere along the line, she did that. She did it. So what she was reacting to, you know, in the meeting and the behavior by this particular colleague wasn't about the colleague. She was about the fact that when she did this, she got shut down.

17:04And she looked at this as inappropriate behavior. It was a version of herself quite honestly that she put away a long time ago, a long time ago, doing in front of her exactly the thing that she learned not to do. So when this colleague was doing, she been told long time ago, this is unacceptable. So nothing about the realization required her to realize a specific trauma on command or stage a breakthrough. It required her to sit with this honest question about one recurring irritation. A few minutes at a time over a few weeks and slowly the irritation lost most of his eggs, most of his charge. Because she resolved anything, not because she solved anything dramatic, but because she stopped needing him to be wrong in order to fill okay about herself. How many people, how many times have you? We could do a whole podcast of maybe we will.

18:06When you live so deeply in your ego, you need people to be wrong. You need people to be wrong about society. And listen carefully and differently the next time you are scrolling on social media and in the news. People, I don't care if it's religion or politics or they need adversaries, they need other people to be wrong. It inflates their ego. It feels better about themselves. It makes, I don't necessarily know if it makes them feel superior. I think in some instances it does, but on a common front, I think when you see other people fall, you feel more normal. Because you don't feel great about yourself. And in this case, this coworker, she no longer needed this guy to be wrong in order for her to feel good about herself.

19:07And that's where we need to be. You did operate in a space and in a state that you are your highest self at all times. And that what happens is necessary. Let go of the idea and the ideology of right and wrong. And just know things are necessary. If they're happening, they're obviously necessary. Otherwise, they wouldn't be happening. They live freer. Not easier setting them down. I get it. But that's what interrogation actually looks like. Most of the time, quieter than the trend itself promises to out there, this excavation slower. Then TikTok series that you can see. And different from digging up your worst memory all alone by yourself on the Tuesday and hoping that it resolves itself just because you brought it back up. If something that services this way feels bigger than a recurrent irritation.

20:07If it's closer to real actual pain. And all won't rather than an old habit. That's exactly the point where doing this with a therapist. A trusted guy. Is no longer an option. You need to get professional help. And that's okay. And that's okay. The noticing safe. That's safe to do alone. The deep material underneath it though, particularly if it's trauma or abuse and things like that. Most of the time, isn't meant to be carried alone. And there's no version, I think, of this work that's going to suggest we're doing it solo is some sort of badge of honor. And so don't feel like you have to do this work alone because many of us have had trauma as young people as kids. And we carry it into our adulthood, undiagnosed, unidentified, unnoticed. And we have problems in relationship with other people and we don't know why.

21:12If you've been part of this podcast, I've said early on that I am someone whose father, for example, was murdered when I was five years old. When I was five years old, just four miles from my house. Still today, my mom still lives in the same home. Obviously, that had an effect on me. Now, what effect? Who really knows unless I do the digging and I do the therapy and I, you know, I get engaged on the level that uncovers where those traumas, where that trauma spread. Imagine if you cracked your windshield. Imagine if you cracked a glass. Imagine if you cracked a windshield. Imagine if you cracked a glass or a vase. You'll crack something and you think you can see all the cracks in it, but unbeknownst to you, there's something that went way, way down somewhere or way, way up somewhere.

22:19But we see the entry or we see the impact area, but we don't see all the areas that have been impacted. That's what the shadow work is about. That's what it's about. And I can tell you personally that therapy does help having a confinote or people like minded that support you does help. This podcast is here to help you in a way. This is not therapy. I am not a therapist. I'm not a doctor, but this is a way of uncovering and just providing you an idea. Just an idea for you then to act on. Just to supply to you. I think to some degree, you may not, your father maybe wasn't murdered like mine, but you may have something, right? You may have something. Maybe it wasn't as deep or as broad as what happened to me, but perhaps you had something.

23:24Maybe you were bullied. Maybe there a question about your sexuality. Maybe your parents didn't raise you. I know so many people who were adopted. I shouldn't say so many. I know several people who are adopted. And I would think there's always an underlying question about why and who and these sorts of things. So that can get buried. For a little kid, I'll just tell you this and we're going to close out. But as a little kid and really just as an individual, as a person, as a human, our quick tendency to deal with pain is to like get it away, like cover it up, ignore it or pretend like it didn't happen. That's what I did when I was a kid with my father being killed. I just didn't want to deal with it. Now did it, did it go away? Nope.

24:24It did. It did not. And so I had to deal with it at some point in my life and whatever it is that you are dealing with, you will have to deal with as well. All right. So here's what I'd actually like to ask you to do with today's episode, a smaller than anything that maybe you at label that shadow work. Don't go looking for anything. Just notice the next time that you act out to someone. Notice the next time you have a reaction to someone. You have a reaction to a person in the jealousy contempt, even as an odd flash of admiration that feels bigger than it should. Before you decide what the reaction means about them, ask yourself this. Ask yourself what it might mean about you. Ask yourself what it may mean about you. Is there someone that your office suggests you really? You know, it just really irritates you.

25:25You got to ask yourself why am I having such a strong reaction to this person? When you're dating, oh my God. When you are dating, please be smart enough to know if you're having these types of strong reactions to your potential mate that you need to deal with it before you go into a long-term situation because it will not get better. Will not get better. Write the one on the sentence down that you can. This is your reaction. Write it down if you can. That's the whole practice. This is gentle, this is calm, this is noticing. If it comes up any deeper, you don't really get a breakthrough. If it feels more horrific or more overbearing than you can bear, then I suggest you reach out to a trained professional therapist. A trained professional therapist, which I am not. So, this is just an honest look, a pointed look within yourself

26:27and the deeper parts of what make you tick. If you do want to connect, I think one way to do it is through the community here on this podcast. We have an awareness reset and it walks you through exactly what I'm talking about today. It's free. I just signed up on the website, the links in the bio. The awareness reset walks you through this kind of noticing in a more deep pace. I'm sorry, in a greater depth, but at your pace. At a greater depth, but at your pace. And of course, the links in the bio. That's really all I had to share with you today. I will definitely be back tomorrow. I know I've kind of skipped here and there, but I'm trying to get, not I'm trying. I am getting back, I ain't getting us back on track. So, you will see way more podcasts, more consistently.

27:27And there's a method to the madness and you're going to like it when you see it. If you haven't been out to our website, I'm going to ask you to go. It's been cleaned up. Some great things are out there. If you've not been to our Amazon store. If you've not been to our YouTube, please go to YouTube. I check us out there and find this there as well. If you listen all the way to the end, thank you so much. I would ask for you to go back and listen to the podcast again. As I always do, you're going to hear more the second time around. This has been impactful. This has been helpful. It will only work if you work it. Knowledge is not applied so. Thank you guys so much. I'll talk to you soon. That's all for today's episode of Rethink. I hope that you've enjoyed this exploration of new ideas and perspectives. And found valuable insights and strategies that you can apply to your life. Remember, you are the source of your own success and fulfillment. And by embracing new ways of thinking, you can unlock your true potential and yet create the life that you truly desire.

28:27Now, you've enjoyed this episode. We encourage you to support the podcast by sharing it with your friends, your family members, your loved ones, and associates. And even your followers on social media. Also, leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Lastly, don't forget to check out our show notes for free downloads and empowering e-books that can help you on your journey of personal growth and empowerment. Thanks guys for tuning in. We look forward to explore more ideas and insights with you in the next episode of Rethink. Thanks for watching.