Ever feel like you're stuck in the same cycles—whether in relationships, your career, or emotions—without fully understanding why?
You might be doing all the right things on the outside, but something inside keeps pulling you back.
The answer could lie in the shadow self—the unconscious part of your psyche that holds the emotions, traits, and memories you’ve hidden away.
Your shadow self includes the thoughts, beliefs, desires, and traits you’ve rejected or suppressed throughout your life. Some parts were hidden for survival. Others were simply never acknowledged.
Often, these shadows are formed in childhood—right alongside the development of your inner child. When you were told certain feelings or traits were "bad," you pushed them away to feel loved or accepted. But those hidden parts didn’t disappear. They simply went underground, shaping your behaviour from behind the scenes.
Read: 5 Signs Your Inner Child Is Wounded
We often assume the shadow self only contains the "dark" or negative. But it’s more nuanced than that. There are two sides to the shadow:
This includes traits you admire in yourself—like kindness, empathy, or strength—but which may become imbalanced or overextended.
Example:
You see yourself as a compassionate person, and that’s beautiful. But sometimes, you give too much. You constantly prioritize others’ needs over your own, struggle to say no, and feel guilty for expressing anger.
Your light shadow here is your compassion—positive on the surface, but masking hidden patterns like people-pleasing, lack of boundaries, and emotional suppression.
These traits, while “good,” can become toxic when unbalanced.
This includes emotions and traits you consider unacceptable—like anger, fear, jealousy, or neediness.
Example:
Maybe you were taught as a child that crying is weakness, or that being afraid makes you a failure. So, you learned to bury fear and vulnerability.
As an adult, this dark shadow might show up as emotional disconnection, avoidance of intimacy, or chronic anxiety—because you’ve never made peace with those “unwanted” parts.
Ignoring your dark shadow doesn’t erase it. It just drives it deeper, where it subtly influences your decisions and relationships.
Your inner child is the emotional, sensitive part of you formed in early years. The shadow self is often built to protect that child—from pain, judgment, or abandonment.
When your inner child is wounded (not seen, heard, or accepted), the shadow self forms layers of armor around it. This can look like perfectionism, detachment, or even aggressive self-protection.
Healing the two goes hand in hand.
Read: Inner Child Therapy: A Deeper Look into Healing from the Root
To live fully, you must recognize and integrate your shadow self—both the light and the dark.
Here’s what happens when you do:
Healing isn’t about becoming “better.” It’s about becoming whole.
Healing the shadow self often starts with awareness. Ask yourself:
Once awareness sets in, healing tools like Inner Child Work, Shadow Work therapy, Family Constellation, or energy healing can help you gently integrate these hidden parts.
Your shadow self is not your enemy. It’s your unacknowledged truth.
And your inner child is not broken—they’re just waiting to be seen.
When you begin to heal both, you reclaim your power, your peace, and your full potential.
Want to explore this journey more deeply?
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Some of the energy healing therapies which we offer are reiki, pranic healing, past life regression, theta healing, redikal healing, family constellation, akashic records reading, astrological healing, inner child healing, hypnotherapy, tarot reading, numerology, astrology and many more. The basic tenet of all these therapies is that the human body is self healing and a person needs to be treated and not the disease.
They work on the cause of an ailment rather than the symptom and are more holistic in nature. It uses body’s own power to heal. These theraies are execllent ways to become aware of why you are facing a particular challenge and start healing from the root cause
