shadow work:
what is it, where does it come from,
how to integrate

Something happens when a colleague succeeds and you feel an unexpected bitterness. Or when someone's confidence irritates you in a way that seems out of proportion. Or when a pattern you promised yourself would not repeat itself, repeats itself again.

Carl Jung called what lives behind these moments the shadow, the parts of ourselves we have denied, repressed, or disowned. And the invitation these moments carry is to look inward rather than outward.

What Is the Shadow
in Jungian Psychology?

The shadow is the part of us that got left behind.


When we are children, our need to belong is greater than our need to be authentic. We learn quickly which parts of ourselves are welcome and which are not. The anger that made the room go quiet. The ambition that was called selfishness. The sensitivity that was told to toughen up. Whatever did not fit the world we grew up in got pushed underground into what Jung called the personal unconscious.




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Jung described the shadow as 'the very thing we would not wish to be'. His collaborator Marie-Louise von Franz offered something more: the shadow, she said, is ninety percent pure gold. Because when we exiled the parts that were unwanted, we also accidentally exiled our vitality, our creativity, our sharpest instincts, and our unlived potential.

The shadow holds what we fear about ourselves. And it holds what we have not yet dared to become.
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Jung placed the confrontation with the shadow at the beginning of the individuation process, the lifelong journey of becoming who you truly are. You cannot move toward wholeness while maintaining a carefully edited version of yourself. Shadow work is how that editing begins to loosen.

For a broader introduction to the individuation process of which shadow work is the first stage, visit our Individuation page.

Where Does the Shadow
Come From?

The shadow is formed early. As children we depend on the people around us for survival, belonging, and love. We learn quickly what is welcome and what is not.

The parts of us that caused tension, disappointment, or rejection get pushed out of sight. Over time, those parts accumulate in the unconscious and form what Jung called the personal shadow.

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Beyond the personal shadow, Jung also identified a collective shadow. This is the darkness shared by families, cultures, and societies. Entire groups of people can project what they cannot face in themselves onto outsiders, enemies, or those who are different. The same mechanism that operates in an individual operates at scale in the world.

Culture and family do most of the early shaping. What was praised in your home, and what was punished? What did your culture celebrate, and what did it shame? The answers to those questions are a map of where your shadow began to form.

How the Shadow Expresses Itself in Daily Life

The shadow does not stay hidden. It finds its way into ordinary life through several recognizable patterns.

Recurring patterns in relationships are another signal. If the same dynamic keeps appearing with different people, the common element is you. The shadow tends to recreate the conditions it needs to be seen.

Projection is the primary mechanism. When we have not faced something in ourselves, we tend to see it vividly in others. The person whose ambition irritates you beyond proportion may be carrying your own unlived drive. The colleague whose neediness exhausts you may be reflecting a need you have never allowed yourself to have. Wherever the emotional reaction is larger than the situation warrants, the shadow is usually involved.
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The body also keeps the shadow's record. A tightening in the throat when you want to say no. A wave of fatigue that arrives before a difficult conversation. The body registers what the conscious mind prefers to overlook. Some concrete examples of shadow at work:
  • Feeling disproportionate anger when someone sets a boundary you wish you could set yourself
  • Judging someone for being loud, then realizing you have spent years making yourself small
  • Falling intensely in love with someone's freedom while you live a tightly controlled life
  • Feeling genuine contempt for someone's laziness while driving yourself into exhaustion

How to begin shadow work: practical steps

Shadow work means becoming aware of these parts. By accepting the shadow, we improve our psychological health.
  • Work with projections. When someone triggers a strong reaction, pause before responding. Ask what the reaction might be telling you about yourself rather than about them. This single practice, applied consistently, opens more shadow material than most formal exercises.
  • Pay attention to your dreams. Dreams speak directly from the unconscious. Recurring figures, especially ones that disturb or pursue you, often carry shadow material the waking mind has not yet faced. Keep a notebook beside your bed and write down what you remember before the day erases it. For a deeper introduction to working with dreams as a Jungian practice, visit our Dreams page.
  • Keep a journal. Not to record events but to dialogue with what is underneath them. Write about a reaction you do not fully understand. Give the hidden part of yourself a voice on the page and ask it what it needs.Consider working with a Jungian coach or therapist. The unconscious reveals itself most clearly in relationship. Having a trained guide who knows how to work with shadow material makes a significant difference, particularly with material that has been buried for a long time. Akke-Jeanne Klerk, Jungian coach,  is available for individual online coaching sessions at akkejeanne@jungplatform.com. Jungian therapist Machiel Klerk is available for therapy sessions live in New York city or online at machiel@jungplatform.com
  • Practice active imagination. This is Jung's own method for engaging with unconscious material directly. You enter a relaxed state, invite an image or figure from the unconscious to appear, and engage with it in dialogue. It requires practice but offers a direct line of communication with the shadow. Jungian analyst Ken James teaches this approach in his course Active Imagination.

Shadow work journal prompts for beginners

Journaling is one of the most accessible ways to begin working with the shadow. These prompts are designed to move past what the ego already knows and into genuinely new territory.

Projection prompts
  • Who irritates you most right now and why? What might that reaction reveal about something unacknowledged in yourself?
  • Who do you judge most harshly in others? Is that quality entirely absent in you, or just unwelcome?
  • When did you last have an emotional reaction that felt larger than the situation warranted? What was underneath it?

Golden shadow prompts
  • Who do you most admire and why? Which of those qualities would you most like to claim as your own?
  • What do you find yourself praising in others but dismissing in yourself?
  • What would you do if you were not afraid of how it would look?

Childhood prompts
  • Which parts of you were consistently unwelcome in your family or school?
  • What did you learn to hide in order to belong?
  • What qualities were praised in your home, and which were punished?

Body prompts
  • Where in your body do you hold tension most consistently?
  • When do you feel physical discomfort that has no obvious physical cause?
  • What does your body do when you are about to say something you end up not saying?

Shadow work, a personal experience 

Personal experience of shadow work by Akke-Jeanne Klerk, Jungian coach

When I first encountered Jung at the age of twenty-one, something resonated deeply inside of me. Here was a psychology that spoke of symbols, dreams, vocation, and the lifelong task of becoming oneself. I felt inspired to live authentically. I wanted to orient my life toward what Jung called the Self.

Looking back, I now see that this aspiration, sincere as it was, contained its own shadow. I unconsciously identified with the ideal of individuation. Authenticity became something for me 'to achieve'. Reflection became something I had to do well.

It reminds me of Jung's remark from The Last Lectures: "Nothing a human being comes up with is completely good, for then it wouldn't be real. Nolens volens, a shadow effect arises." Every attitude, every ideal, every identification I held constellated its opposite.

The outer world affirmed the very qualities I had consciously cultivated: independence, discipline, reliability, competence. Yet it became clear that my adaptation was not the same as wholeness. The neglected aspects, the shadow parts, did not disappear simply because they were inconvenient to me. They waited. And around midlife, they began to show up through my own symptoms, disappointments, and relationships. 

In my own experience, the vulnerable, dependent, uncertain parts of myself did not vanish because I valued independence. They were simply waiting outside my awareness for recognition. This was my shadow: my inability to receive, my reluctance to need others, my subtle belief that maturity meant self-sufficiency.

The paradox is that what once served my development later obstructed it. As a young woman, I needed to develop competence and independence. But what liberated me at twenty-five began to imprison me at fifty. Shadow work is developing a relationship with what I once disowned and denied (without being fully aware of that denial). Shadow work means, paying attention to what I had excluded: my dependency, my tenderness, fear, grief, and receptivity. My personal development seems to be less about acquiring new capacities than about recovering abandoned ones.

Shadow work is developing a relationship with is disowned. It is asking myself what my strengths have protected me from feeling. It is staying curious about myself. To become who I really am asks of me that I tolerate what is uncomfortable as it arises through my body. In the end, individuation is not about perfecting who I am, but about embodied arriving fully in the truth of who I have always been.

Advanced shadow work

Those who have been doing shadow work for years may notice that the territory becomes more specific. A misconception is that advanced shadow work is about moving beyond the personal into collective realms. This is not true. Carl Jung warned against this directly. In his book Psychology and Alchemy he made clear that no one can engage meaningfully with the collective unconscious without first confronting their own personal shadow. To skip over your envy, your pettiness, your unmet needs in pursuit of something more spiritually impressive is the ego's most sophisticated defense. The shadow is the concrete, inferior part of the personality we most want to disown. By fully entering our specific, personal shadow, we paradoxically encounter something universal. We stop expecting life to be perfect and settle into the more difficult honest reality of wholeness.

Advanced shadow work: going deeper

For those familiar with projections and journaling, advanced shadow work moves into an ongoing, relational practice. It is an honest self-examination that never truly ends.

  • Engage active imagination: Dialogue directly with shadow figures rather than just analyzing them. In a relaxed state, invite a figure to appear and listen to what it has to say (explored deeply in Ken James’s course, Active Imagination).

  • Include the body: The shadow lives in physical tension and somatic responses, bypassing cognitive defenses. Bringing awareness to bodily sensations reveals material that pure thought misses (see Tina Stromsted’s work on embodied Jungian practice in her course Coming Home to the Body).

  • Take the work into relationship: Doing shadow work alone eventually hits a ceiling. The unconscious and the transference surfaces most fully in relationship. Learn about this in James Hollis's course Shadow of relationships. 

Shadow Courses for Beginners

Learn about the shadow and the parts of ourselves that we deny, repress, or disown. Shadow work supports psychological maturity and vitality.

Shadow Courses for Advanced Learners

Advanced shadow work is the ongoing practice of developing an honest and embodied relationship with the parts of ourselves we have spent a lifetime disowning.

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BENEFITS OF shadow work 

Reclaim  talents

Hidden talents may be accepted in by the ego.

Inner freedom

You will act more consciously, than reacting blindly.

More vitality

When energy 'used' for repression, no longer is used, it frees up vitality.

Intimacy

Your relationships become cleaner, less projections , less 'drama' and more real.

Creativity

You are able to be in the moment, and follow the creative impulse from within. 

Self-acceptance

Feeling more at ease with oneself. Accepting one's authenticity.

Explore more topics

Dreams

Divination

ARCHETYPES

DEEP insights

WHY CHOOSE JUNG PLATFORM?

Shadow work is not easy to do alone. At a certain point, the unconscious reveals what it needs to reveal most clearly in relationship — with a guide who has done their own work and knows how to sit with what emerges without rushing to fix it.

Jung Platform offers shadow work through two paths. Our courses bring together some of the most experienced Jungian analysts and depth psychologists teaching today, including James Hollis, Craig Chalquist, and Ken James, each approaching shadow work from a different angle and with decades of clinical experience behind them.

And for those ready for one-on-one work, Akke-Jeanne Klerk is available for individual Jungian coaching online, and Machiel Klerk offers therapy sessions in New York City and online.

Whether you are beginning this work or have been living with these questions for years, Jung Platform exists to offer genuine companionship on the path
EXPERT-LED COURSES AND TALKS
ON-DEMAND AND LIVE CLASSES
CERTIFICATE PROGRAMS

Shadow work & Jungian psychology

Carl Jung wrote:  "The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is." He observed how confined our inner lives feel when we lock away our dark places.

Jung recognized that the human psyche harbors an inherent archetype of forgotten truths. We might run away from our personal shadow, which holds the traits that our conscious ego rejects. When entire cultures deny their dark instincts, they fuel the dangerous collective shadow.

If we resist our hidden places, we remain exhausted and divided. If we manage to welcome them, we take the first real step toward individuation, which is the lifelong journey to becoming whole. The small ego gradually yields to the vast guidance of the Self, the inner compass of our total soul.

Shadow work & the individuation process

Many of us move through life attempting to present a version of who we think we should be. We cultivate a smooth exterior for our families, our workplaces, and our communities. Yet beneath that surface, an invisible realm holds everything we felt forced to disown. Carl Jung called this hidden space the personal shadow, filled with our quiet rage, unexpressed grief, and forgotten passions. When we lock these pieces in the dark, they do not simply vanish. They exert a subtle, persistent pull on our choices. 

This is precisely where the journey of individuation begins. Individuation is the natural process of unfolding, of a drive toward psychological wholeness, the process of becoming the unique person we were always intended to be. We cannot step into that fullness while leaving half of our inner world behind.

Meeting the shadow requires us to slow down. To feel in our bodies what is happening. It asks us to look at the sudden overreactions that catch us off guard, or the persistent patterns in our relationships that leave us wondering why we ended up in the same place again. By gently bringing these hidden traits into conscious awareness, we cease spending energy running from ourselves.

If we resist the dark places, we risk remaining trapped in old patterns. If we manage to welcome them with patience, we reclaim our vitality. Through integration, shadow work 'converts' raw, unexamined pain into a profound capacity for being, for compassion and creative living.

We also have a dedicated page on Jung's individuation.

I you want to learn about your own individuation process, this is the right course for you. Your Individuation