Shadow work, in its simplest form, is letting what’s hidden to be seen, held, and transformed.
I was four years old, wearing a pretty pink snowsuit.
My mother was crossing the street with all three of us. She held my infant sister in her right arm and my two-year-old brother’s hand in her left. I was on the outside, holding his other hand. Somewhere in the crossing, I fell.
I still remember the fear. Not a small fear. The kind that takes over your whole body. In my mind, I was convinced I was about to be run over. I started screaming and crawling toward the sidewalk as fast as I could.
Everyone laughed.
Because I was never in any real danger. We had already cleared the area where moving cars would have been. But my four-year-old self didn’t know that. She was completely terrified. And the people around her thought it was funny.
Nobody meant any harm. I know that. But that scared little girl in the pink snowsuit stayed with me. And I am still, to this day, doing work on the part of me that rises up when I think someone is laughing at me.
That is shadow work. Not as a concept. Not something you learn from a book.
It’s the parts of you that formed in moments like that. The parts that learned something about the world, about other people, about yourself. And never got updated.
Your shadow is everything about yourself that you’ve tucked away.
The feelings, traits, memories, and desires you decided weren’t acceptable because at some point, someone communicated that those parts of you needed to be hidden.
Maybe you were told you were too loud. Too sensitive. Too angry. Too much. So you learned to be quieter. Softer. More agreeable. And those louder, angrier, more complicated parts of you didn’t disappear. They went underground.
That’s your shadow. And it’s been running things from back there ever since.
Most of what we carry didn’t start with us being “too much” or “too sensitive.”
It started with us being human in a moment when no one slowed down enough to understand what we were feeling. So we learned something. We adapted.
And we carried it forward.
Have you ever reacted to something way harder than the situation called for? Snapped at someone and didn’t fully understand why? Kept attracting the same kind of relationships or the same kind of problems no matter how much you tried to change? That’s often the shadow at work. Not because you’re broken. Because you’re human, and you’ve been carrying things you were never meant to carry alone.
Shadow work is the process of going back and saying,
“Let me take another look at this.” Not to perform some dramatic emotional excavation. Just to look. To understand it. Because when you understand yourself, you stop fighting yourself.
And when you stop fighting yourself, things begin to shift without force. Patterns that have repeated themselves for decades begin to lose their grip. You stop being blindsided by your own emotions because you’re no longer a stranger to yourself.
For me, it looks like noticing that reaction when it comes up. Feeling it. And recognizing where it came from.
I’ve been doing this work for years, in layers. And I want to be honest with you: it’s not quick. It’s not a weekend workshop. Some of what’s in your shadow has been there since childhood, quietly shaping how you see yourself and what you believe you deserve. It takes consistent, compassionate attention over time to start to shift it.
Your shadow loses power when you stop pretending it isn’t there.
Ephesians 5:13 says it plainly: “But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, and everything illuminated becomes a light.”
If there’s something in you that keeps showing up, something that feels bigger than the situation in front of you, then it’s worth asking where it began.
If you want to start, you don’t have to go digging through every moment of your past. Just begin paying attention to your reactions. Pay attention to what sets you off, what makes you defensive, what you find yourself judging harshly in others.
Those are often mirrors. Chances are, there’s a version of you back there who made sense of something the best way she could.
And she’s still waiting to be understood.
Shadow work isn’t about becoming a different person. It’s about finally meeting the whole person you already are, and deciding she’s worth knowing.
Be Blessed!
Photo by Taylor Harding on Unsplash