Shadow Integration: The Complete Shadow Work Process in Four Steps

Shadows and Shadow Work Recap

Shadows are those contents of the mind that feel uncomfortable, painful, terrifying, infuriating, anxiety-inducing, or otherwise disturbing to us. We know them when they arise because they hurt, anger, disturb, or make us feel limited in some way. Most of the time, shadows are thought-patterns that bring up these disturbing feelings. ’Shadow work‘ is the process of actively acknowledging, facing, exploring, working through, reowning, and allowing our shadows to arise, be present, and subside. Shadow work involves a willingness to be open to our real experience–not our experience as we think it ‘should be,’ but our experience as it is–and explore it fully. The fruits of shadow work carried out over time can be a great sense of freedom from parts of our minds that previously limited us and a greater sense of overall peace with the state of our lives.

Two-Way Attention, Interrogating the Shadow, and Shadow Integration

In a previous article, I described the method of ‘two-way attention,’ a way of working with a shadow in which you hold your attention in two directions at once: some attention on the shadow itself, some attention on the awareness in which the shadow is appearing.

In the article that followed, I introduced yet another tool for shadow work: interrogating the shadow. Interrogating the shadow is a process of asking progressively more precise and detailed questions about a shadow and its various aspects– underlying motivations, repressed reasons, connections to idealized self-images, effects on patterns of feeling/thinking/behaving, roots in particular memories or experiences, etc.–in order to gain insight into it.  The interrogation process effectively makes previously unconscious aspects of our experience conscious through a process of question-based discovery. Part 2 of the Interrogating the Shadow introduced a practical example of the interrogation process drawn from a real conversation.

This article will focus on how we bring all of these tools and techniques together to comprehensively work through and reown or integrate a shadow.  I call this the shadow integration process.

Background: How I got into Shadow Work

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of shadow integration, I’d like to say a words about how I got into shadow work because this will provide a sense of why I think shadow work is important and worthwhile and how I developed the shadow integration process.  For most of my life, I struggled with some difficult shadow patterns that severely limited my life in important ways.  Among these were deep anxiety about being around other people out of fear that they would judge me, fears of drowning, heights, and large animals, and feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. For years, these shadows came up int me again and again and constellated painful feelings and depressing thought patterns around themselves.  Because I felt anxious, insecure, and afraid, I would often chicken out of social opportunities and prefer to be alone.

I felt deeply unsatisfied even after I went through a variety of spiritual experiences in which I came to realize the interdependence of all things in the universe and the ultimate freedom of awareness.  These realizations brought great peace and joy, but the shadows remained in the background.  When the light from the ‘enlightenments’ faded out, the shadows took over once again.  The feelings of anxiety, fear, helplessness and hopelessness overshadowed my life.

Eventually, I began to have the sense that these persistent ‘problems’ in my inner life had to have solutions.  There had to be something I could do to work through them or some way of seeing them that could allow me to see through them.   The dots were there already; it was only a matter of connecting them.

In May of 2011, I was added to a Facebook group led by Scott Kiloby, which he called “No Holds Barred.” The premise of the group was that it would be a forum with no rules; members would be free to verbally attack and call each other out with as much ferocity as they wished.  It was like psychological Fight Club.  No one was safe from the attacks, not even the group’s own administrators or Scott himself.  My whole life, I had been taught to be kind and caring to others.

NHB was a shock.  This was a therapy that seemed like the opposite of a therapy, a process of overcoming pain by hurting. In NHB, all of my insecurities were attacked.  My worries about looking too young for my age or being thin, my fears, even personal aspects from my life were used to attack me brutally.  At some points, the attacks got so deeply personal that I had to leave the group for a few days to work through all of the material that had been stirred up within me.  The attacks pointed to the shadows; where it hurt was where I was stuck in a shadow.

The funny thing that happened, though, was that I began to get more and more immune to the attacks.  I thought, “what can they possibly attack me for? Looking too young, feeling insecure, being afraid? But I already know I feel these ways.  They are not telling me anything new.” Over time, I even started to laugh at the attacks! This was something totally new for me: laughing at my fear, laughing at my insecurity.  I attacked and was attacked and we had a good time for a while and made some major progress working through shadows through this aggressive Fight Club approach.

In time, however, Scott left the group, the administrators were thrown out and people seized power.  Others came into the group without understanding its philosophical foundation in trying to work through shadows through confrontation.  They turned the group into a place of bullying for bullying’s sake, attacking for attacking’s sake.  It ceased to be a productive place and so many of the old members started to leave. I hung in there for a while, but eventually had to leave as well.  I left with a firm conviction, however, and that was that the only way to work through these ‘problems’ that had hounded me for so long was to boldly face them head on, dive into them, and reown them.  Only this, and not retreating into some spiritual belief system, would take me through the shadows and not just temporarily away from them.

Background: Ken Wilber’s 3-2-1 Process 

While I was at NHB, Scott Kiloby introduced me to a way of working with shadows, specifically, shadows associated with particular people and their particular qualities.  Ken Wilber and some of his associates at the Integral Life Institute had developed the 3-2-1 process.  Kelly Sosan Bearer describes the process with great clarity in her article, “Practice: The 3-2-1 Process.” She writes that the 3-2-1 process involves the following steps:

“1. Choose an experience in your life that you want to work with. It’s often easier to begin with a person with whom you have difficulty (e.g., lover, relative, boss). This person may irritate, disturb, annoy, or upset you. Or maybe you feel attracted to, obsessedwith, infatuated with, or possessive about this person. In any case, choose someone with whom you have a strong emotional charge,whether positive or negative.

2. Face It : Now, imagine this person. Describe those qualities that most upset you, or the characteristics that you are most attracted to using 3rd-person language (he, she, it). Talk about them out loud or write it down in a journal. Take this opportunity to “let it out.” Don’t try to be skillful or say the right thing. There is no need to sugar-coat your description. The person you are describing will never see this.

3. Talk to It: Begin an imaginary dialogue with this person. Speak in 2nd person to this person (using “you” language). Talk directly to this person as if he or she were actually there in the room with you. Tell them what bothers you about them. Ask them questions such as “Why are you doing this to me?” “What do you want from me?” “What are you trying to show me?” “What do you have to teach me?” Imagine their response to these questions. Speak that imaginary response out loud. Record the conversation in your journal if you like.

4. Be It: Become this person. Take on the qualities that either annoy or fascinate you. Embody the traits you described in “Face It.” Use 1st-person language ( I, me, mine). This may feel awkward, and it should. The traits you are taking on are the exact traits that you have been denying in yourself. Use statements such as “I am angry,” ”I am jealous,” “I am radiant.” Fill in the blank with whatever qualities you are working with: “I am__________.”

5. To complete the process, notice these disowned qualities in yourself. Experience the part of you that is this very trait. Avoid making the process abstract or conceptual: just BE it. Now you can re-own this trait in yourself.”

There were some things about this process, which was based on working from the 3rd to the 2nd and finally, the 1st person perspective (3-2-1), that I really liked.  I liked the focus on facing and reowning parts of ourselves.  I liked the idea of trying to draw out insights from the shadows.

However, at the same time, I had trouble connecting with the idea of focusing every shadow in a person.  Many of my own shadows were related to the feelings I felt about myself and the ways I thought about myself.  Personifying myself and then asking questions like “why are you doing this to me?” just didn’t feel right for me.  The shadows were still there and I didn’t feel like I was fully working through them as best I could. This led me to wonder if I could preserve the really positive and powerful aspects of Ken Wilber’s process and yet modify the rest to include things that worked for me.  The methods of ‘two-way attention’ and ‘interrogating the shadow’ could be useful here, I thought.  And so, I decided to tie all of this together in a single, simple process.  I call this process shadow integration.

Shadow Integration

Shadow integration is like the 3-2-1 process in that it involves work with shadows and reowning and integrating these. What makes it distinctive is that it applies some different techniques and does not require connecting a given shadow to a particular person.  I’ll explain this more clearly as I outline the steps.  The shadow integration process works in the following way:

1. Choose a shadow that you want to work with:  I usually go with whichever shadow is coming up most strongly in my mind at the time, but you can also choose ones you notice recurring in your life. The shadow you choose can be any thought-pattern or feeling-pattern at all. Thoughts connected to fear, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness, insecurity, clinging, aversion, hatred, anger, sadness, depression, apathy, and other such strong emotions work particularly well.

2. Face it with the method of two-way attention:  Focus and direct your attention to both the shadow and the clear, awake space of awareness in which it is arising.  Really go into the shadow; don’t resist it or distance yourself from it.  Dive into it. Feel it out. Feel it fully. Try to taste its unique flavour. Be present with it and aware of it and how it is affecting you.

3. Interrogate the shadow:  Begin the shadow interrogation process. Begin by asking simple, general questions and move on to more precise, detailed questions about  the shadow and its various aspects. For example, you can ask any of the following questions: What is this thought/feeling pattern? How does it make me feel? Why does it make me feel that way? Is it based on any assumptions? Why do I think this thought-pattern is true? Why do I hold on to it? Do I have any underlying motivations here that I’m not facing? Am I repressing anything? Why do I resist this shadow? Is it related to an idealized self-image, a way I would like to be or people have told me I should be? How does this thought-pattern affect how I behave, think, feel? Does it limit me in some way? What would life be like if I didn’t hold on to this thought pattern? How did I develop this shadow? Does it have any roots in any of my past experiences or things people have told me? Did I learn this pattern? How? You can ask as many questions as you wish.  The answers that come up in your mind can lead to further questions.  Approach the questioning organically; let the shadow dictate the questions. Ask as many or as few as you wish in this state in order to attain your objective which is to gain as much and as deep insight into the shadow as you can. When you are doing the shadow interrogation, it may be helpful to write out your questions and answers or to communicate them to another person if you are doing group shadow work.

4. Own it: We tend to deny and project and push our shadows away.  But at the end of the shadow work process, what we need to do is the precise opposite of that, namely, own the shadow. Accept it fully as being the truth of your present experience, the reality of what you are living now. As Kelly Sosan Bearer puts it, “Embody the traits … Use 1st-person language ( I, me, mine). This may feel awkward, and it should. The traits you are taking on are the exact traits that you have been denying in yourself. Use statements such as “I am angry,” ”I am jealous,” “I am radiant.” Whatever you are repressing; take it on, accept it and embody it. Fill in the blank with whatever qualities you are working with: “I am__________.” This is truly the integration stage of the shadow integration process. Here, you resolve the gap that the resistance created; you see through the apparent duality.

This is the shadow integration process in a nutshell: (1) choose the shadow, (2) face it with two-way attention, (3) interrogate it, and (4) own it and embody it.  The beauty of this process is its power; it works for any shadow, no matter how weak or powerful, how insignificant or important.  Shadows are cast by our feelings, thoughts and experiences.  They shape our experience.  When we resist them, deny them, repress them, and ignore them, we do not escape them; they continue to limit and drive us and make us suffer.  Shadow integration is a way of mending the tears in our mental fabric that these repressions and resistances create.  It is a way of recovering our fundamental wholeness.  It is a way of working through inner conflict into the peace beyond it.  It is a way of working through our suffering to a greater sense of joy for our lives.  It is, in short, a movement from the painful fragmentation of our inner lives to the wholeness of real, authentic integration.

Read More from Adam Pearson at http://philosophadam.wordpress.com/

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