Shadow work doesn't mean beating yourself up for the "bad" parts you discover. It means gently befriending the aspects you've rejected, understanding they were trying to protect you, and consciously choosing how to integrate them. When you stop fighting your shadow and start loving it, you stop perpetuating the self-rejection that's been fracturing you since childhood.
As we do shadow integration work, it's so easy to get stuck when we come upon aspects of self and humanity that can be tough to accept. Sometimes shadow work can be pretty hardcore, but I invite people to take a more gentle approach to the integration of our shadow, one based on self-love and compassion.
What Is Shadow Work (And Why It Matters)?
Your shadow is everything you've learned to hide, reject, or deny about yourself—the parts you were told weren't acceptable, safe, or "good."
Maybe it's your anger. Your selfishness. Your jealousy. Your neediness. Your messiness. Your ambition. Your sexuality. Your rage.
As children, we learned which parts of us got love and which parts got rejection. So we pushed the "unacceptable" parts into the darkness, into what Carl Jung called the shadow.
The problem? Those rejected parts don't disappear. They leak out in unconscious ways—through passive aggression, projection onto others, shame spirals, or sudden explosions that seem to come out of nowhere.
Shadow work is the practice of bringing those rejected parts back into the light—not to indulge them, but to understand them, integrate them, and consciously choose how to work with them.
And here's the key: you can do this work gently, with compassion, without making yourself wrong for being human.
The 5 Pillars of Gentle Shadow Integration
Pillar 1: Self-Compassion
I like to think of it like this—how can I blame myself for what my ego did to protect me?
How can I blame myself for that which was in my unconscious, therefore I literally didn't have the awareness that it was there?
Instead, I smile and feel gratitude. Now I know. Now I see. And because I am now aware, I can do better. I can make better choices.
And I can have more compassion for others and their unconscious ways.
And for all the ways that I will continue to act unconsciously.
I feel grateful that now I know how to make the unconscious conscious.
So, rather than being tough on yourself, give yourself a little credit for bravely doing this work!
Offer yourself grace, space to process, and a lot of self-care.
What are the beliefs you learned as a child? What are the underlying feelings, fears, and needs?
As you accept this within yourself, remind yourself that you're human, humans are messy, and that when we know better, we do better.
Consider the thought: "Look at me, I'm an imperfect human!"
Example: Maybe you discovered you've been passive-aggressive with your partner for years. Instead of spiraling into shame ("I'm a terrible person"), you can recognize: "I learned as a kid that direct anger wasn't safe. Passive aggression was how I protected myself. Now I see it, and I can practice expressing anger directly."
Pillar 2: Take Your Time
Your nervous system needs to acclimate to your expansion in consciousness. Trust yourself and don't move too fast. There is no rush here. This is a journey and it's been said that we will never be able to fully integrate our shadow.
A gentle approach will be less likely to cause your ego to have a counter-response and wreak havoc in your life.
Shadow work isn't a sprint. You don't need to excavate every rejected part of yourself in a weekend workshop and have a breakdown. Slow integration allows your system to adjust, to build capacity for holding more of yourself without overwhelm.
Example: If you're discovering your "selfish" shadow, don't immediately overhaul your entire life and start saying no to everything. Practice small acts of self-prioritization. Notice how it feels. Build tolerance gradually.
Pillar 3: Get Honest With Yourself and Lighten Up
People always say to me "but I WANT to be good. I want to be kind. Why would I ever want to accept meanness, selfishness, jealousy, etc.?"
And yet, the reality is, when we dig deep and get honest, very few people can say that they have never acted in those shadowy ways.
Despite our best intentions to be good and kind, these other shadows sneak out because they exist in our unconscious.
The process of shining a light on them is our only chance to NOT have them show up in these SNEAKY ways.
Our shadows DO exist. So trying to reject that is arguing with reality.
When we explore our shadows and integrate them, we become consciously aware of them, which means we can CHOOSE how we act in the world.
When we turn away and keep them in the darkness, they haunt us and come out in the most surprising ways.
A Mental Exercise: Working With "Drops" of Shadow Traits
So often we look at the shadow in extremes or black/white. It's important to talk it over with someone and contemplate what the real shadow is (which is why I love to work with women in groups because we help each other to see our shadows and we also see that we aren't alone)
And one of the most helpful ways to work with shadow parts is to consider just a "drop" of the behavior or trait that you're grappling with accepting.
Example: Disrespect
If you're exploring "disrespect" as a shadow, most would say that the flip side of disrespectful is respectful. But in order to be radically respectful, you'd have to abandon yourself—choose to respect the other over yourself. And in order to be radically disrespectful, we have to choose to respect ourselves over another.
Rarely are any of us in the extremes—more often it depends on the situation and we're acting on a continuum.
If you think of yourself as a respectful person, ask yourself: Do you show respect for people at the expense of your true feelings? Do you abandon yourself in order to show respect for authority or others?
What if you were to bring in just one DROP of disrespect—might you feel like you have more of a balanced way of being? One where you can respect another without having to disrespect yourself?
If we can loosen our attachment to the extremes of shadows, we can often find a little more room to lighten up and see the shades of grey that are available. And perhaps to consider that there are times when there may be some value in expressing a so-called "negative behavior."
It's fun to contemplate the energy behind the actual behavior or trait. And to question the belief systems that uphold the cultural ideas of right and wrong. And to open up to the possibility that a shadow may not be all bad.
More examples:
- Selfishness: Can you bring in one drop of healthy selfishness to balance your over-giving?
- Laziness: Can you bring in one drop of rest/non-productivity to balance your relentless doing?
- Controlling: Can you bring in one drop of boundaries/standards to balance your over-accommodation?
Pillar 4: Think of Your Shadow Parts as Inner Children
There are so many parts within us that our ego disowned in order to keep us safe (to earn love and protect ourselves from being hurt or rejected).
As children, most of us didn't have anyone there to help us to make sense of the impulses we had, the behaviors that others deemed unacceptable, and the feelings that we didn't know how to process or express.
Instead, we were given the message that some parts of us are okay and others are not. So, we exiled and disowned those parts.
Each of those parts represents a young part of us. It sometimes feels scary to meet these shadow parts. But if we can think of them as young parts that just want to be seen, felt, and understood, perhaps we could feel less afraid. They have a purpose and would like for you to listen to them.
When you come into relationship with each of these parts—like a parent to a child—you can love them and still have boundaries around their behaviors.
Let's use an example of the "Needy" shadow part. Your "needy" shadow might be a young part who got shamed for wanting too much, for asking, for expressing needs. Maybe you heard "stop whining," "you're so demanding," or "I can't give you everything you want." So you learned to shut down your needs, to become self-sufficient, to never be a burden.
But the truth is that everyone has needs. And having needs does not make you a burden.
When you meet this shadow part with compassion, you can thank her for trying to keep you safe from rejection. You can reassure her that adult-you can express needs without being "too much," and that you're allowed to ask for what you want. You can consciously choose when and how to express your needs instead of swinging between total self-sufficiency and resentful collapse.
Pillar 5: Be Curious
Here's where shadow work gets really interesting—and potentially uncomfortable.
Most of us are absolutely convinced that certain shadows are NOT us.
"I'm not selfish. I'm not cruel. I'm not manipulative. Those things? Not me."
But clinging tightly to "I'm NOT that" is what keeps the shadow in the darkness.
And here's what makes it even stickier....we're also convinced these things are objectively, universally, always wrong. Not just "I don't do that"—but "that is BAD. Period. End of story."
But what if they're not?
What if selfishness sometimes protects your energy?
What if cruelty is sometimes necessary truth-telling?
What if manipulation is sometimes strategic influence?
I'm not saying you should become these things or act them out indiscriminately. I'm saying that maybe we can get off our high horse about them being purely, absolutely, universally wrong.
Because when we're standing on that high horse judging others (and ourselves) for these traits, we're guaranteeing they'll stay in our shadow—leaking out in unconscious, uncontrolled ways.
And we're staying stuck in self-rejection. We're calling ourselves bad and wrong.
The invitation here is to push your edges a bit....
...to loosen your grip on the certainty that you could never, would never be capable of these things.
...to question whether these shadows might actually serve a purpose in certain contexts.
Because when you can admit "yes, under certain circumstances, I could see myself doing that," something magical happens:
- You stop needing to reject yourself and project that shadow onto others.
- You develop genuine compassion for yourself and people who DO express these traits.
- And you gain conscious choice over whether and when these energies might actually serve you.
When you can hold that truth with curiosity instead of resistance, you integrate. You become whole. And you stop being so darn judgmental—of yourself AND others.
So as you inquire into these shadows and grapple with integrating them into the wholeness that is you, get genuinely curious from these angles:
- Think about a situation where you could see yourself doing this or being this way—perhaps to protect your child, to protect yourself in a dangerous situation, or if you were in other extreme conditions.
- Think of someone you know who does exhibit this behavior or trait—if you grew up with their life, their circumstances, their parents, their belief systems, their wounding—might you act the same? Is it possible that you were lucky that you didn't need to defend yourself in this way?
- Consider that you may not exhibit this in an extreme way. Rather, you do it in subtle ways. Or toward yourself. Or only with one person. Or in the privacy of your home. Or you used to do it but no longer do it.
- Think of this as more of an impulse rather than a trait or behavior. Can you see where you feel the impulse to do this even if you never act on the impulse?
- Is it possible that in another culture or time in the past that this behavior or trait would be considered acceptable?
- Since you're part of the Universe, a microcosm of the macrocosm, then you would have to be part of "everything" and therefore have everything in you.
- If you believe in previous lifetimes, consider that perhaps you exhibited these behaviors at some point in a prior life.
Curiosity removes judgment and invites compassion.
When you're genuinely curious about why this shadow exists, what it's protecting, where it came from, you can't simultaneously be in shame about it.
And when you can look at your own shadows with compassion, you'll find yourself extending that same compassion to others—recognizing that we're all just humans doing our best with what we know, carrying shadows we didn't ask for, trying to find our way home to wholeness.
Why Gentle Shadow Work Matters (And What Makes It Different)
Shadow work—when done without self-compassion—can feel punishing. You excavate all your "bad" parts and, without the gentleness, it's easy to spiral into "look how messed up I am."
Gentle shadow work is different because you remember:
- Your shadows were survival strategies
- They were trying to protect you
- They aren't evidence of your brokenness—they're evidence of your adaptability
- Your judgments aren't a character flaw, they're signposts pointing to parts ready to be seen, healed, and understaood
- Integration doesn't mean indulging every shadow impulse—it means you gain conscious choice
Self-compassion isn't optional—it's essential
When you approach shadow work with compassion instead of judgment, you create the safety needed for true integration.
The Work Doesn't End Here (And You Don't Have to Do It Alone)
If you're reading this and thinking, "Okay, I get it conceptually, but HOW do I actually do this? How do I dialogue with these parts? How do I know which shadow to work on first? How do I integrate without just intellectually understanding?"
You're asking the right questions.
Shadow work isn't a one-time revelation––it's an ongoing practice. And it doesn't exist in isolation. To truly reclaim yourself and stop the cycle of self-rejection, you need a complete framework that addresses:
- Inner child reparenting - healing the original wounds that created the need to reject these parts in the first place
- Nervous system regulation - building the capacity to hold more of yourself without overwhelm or shutdown
- Shadow integration - befriending what you've rejected and bringing it into conscious awareness
- Authentic expression - actually showing up as your whole self in relationships and life, not just understanding yourself privately
Most people try to do shadow work in isolation and wonder why it doesn't stick. Or they understand their shadows intellectually but can't seem to integrate them. Or they do beautiful inner work but still show up as fragmented in their actual relationships.
That's because wholeness requires all the pieces working together.
I created The Whole Soul Way™ specifically to address this—to give you the complete framework for coming home to your whole self, shadows and all.
The foundational course (available free on my ELATE podcast on YouTube and podcast channels) teaches you:
- The exact process for dialoguing with shadow parts (not just understanding them, but actually relating to them)
- How to reparent the inner children carrying rejected aspects (so you're not just integrating intellectually, you're healing at the root)
- How to build capacity to hold more of yourself (so shadow work doesn't overwhelm your nervous system)
- How to bring your integrated self into the world (because the goal isn't private wholeness—it's showing up fully in your life)
This isn't just shadow work. It's the complete path from fragmented to whole. To reclaim your full power. And create the mutually fulfilling relationships that you desire!
Watch on YouTube
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Evolution Monthly Membership
In Evolution, we create a safe container for doing this work together. You'll have access to all of the lessons in the entire "The Whole Soul Way™ Program). And monthly calls where we explore shadow patterns, a community of women integrating their darkness alongside you, and ongoing support as you practice showing up as your whole self—light and shadow integrated.
Continue Your Shadow Work Journey
READ:
- Your Childhood Wounds are Running Your Life (A Beginners Guide to Shadow Work)
- Shadow Work in Action: How Your Judgments Reveal What You've Been Hiding from Yourself
DOWNLOAD:
- Download my free "Shadow Work Starter Kit" with the golden shadow exercise where you'll reveal new things about yourself and a guide and worksheets to explore what the shadow is and why shadow work is integral to your journey to be more authentic and love yourself
WATCH:
- Watch my TikTok video about how the Golden Shadow gets formed
- Watch my TikTok video about "disrespect" and how to work with this shadow
What would you add? What has your experience been in gently integrating your shadows? Share below in the comments—your insights might be exactly what someone else needs to hear.
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