Befriending Your Shadow: Learning to Love Your ‘Worst’ Parts with Owen O’Kane
About the event
Greedy. Cowardly. Selfish. Promiscuous. Angry.
The ‘shadow’ is a concept first coined by Carl Jung that describes the parts of our personalities that we choose to reject and repress. For one reason or another, we all have parts of ourselves that we don’t like – or that we think society won’t like – so we push those parts down into our unconscious psyches. It is this collection of repressed aspects of our identity that Jung referred to as our shadow self.
The first step in redeeming the shadow is to own up to it. Instead of laying the blame elsewhere we need to gaze into our own abyss. This abyss contains our lost personal history – of humiliations, rage, frustrations, despair and shame, the bits that we buried at different stages of our lives in order to become more bearable to ourselves and others. The very act of undertaking this painful process leads to the birth of compassion, both for our own mistakes and others’, as it dawns on us that we are all in this together.
To explore this fascinating aspect of the human psyche, we are incredibly lucky to be joined by Owen O’Kane. Owen is one of the UK’s most trusted psychotherapists. A former NHS mental health clinical lead he is also a Sunday Times Best Selling author of How to Be Your Own Therapist and Ten Times Happier: How to Let Go Of What’s Holding You Back. He is also the resident therapist on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Gordon Smart show, helping people manage their Sunday Night ‘Fear’ ahead of the working week.
