Befriending Your Shadow: Learning to Love Your ‘Worst’ Parts

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.

Forget what you’ve heard about the dark side – our talk is all about shining a light on those shadowy corners of your personality and giving them a bear hug. Drawing inspiration from the wisdom of Carl Jung and his shadow theory, we’ll explore how our so-called ‘worst’ traits actually hold the key to our personal growth and evolution.

To explore this fascinating aspect of the human psyche, we are incredibly lucky to be joined by Jasbinder Garnerman: Ireland’s leading Jungian psychologist and Chairwoman of the C.G. Jung Society of Ireland.