Shadow work

Keep a Shadow Journal. Dedicate some time each day or almost each day to it. I found that once I got started material just poured out (usually after a somewhat rough start) and it was all I could do to keep up with it.

Journalling works by allowing you to focus very strongly on the things you're thinking about. It's only language that really allows us to do that. If you don't express your thoughts in language they're pretty vague and diffuse and have somewhat the nature of soap bubbles—they shimmer briefly, drift away, and burst very quickly without your being able to hold onto them or examine them in any depth. Much like dreams in fact.

There are two ways of using language to examine your thoughts. One is through dialogue or inner monologue. The problem with dialogue is that it tends to go off track frequently. The other person probably isn't interested in talking about exactly what you want to, and even if they are, discussion tends to take random turns. Inner monologue isn't bad, but it can also be pretty shallow and go off-track and you can easily forget it pretty soon afterward.

By far I find writing to be the most powerful way to delve deep into your ideas, poke and pry at them, and crack them open to examine them much deeper. It also allows for far greater organization. If a bunch of ideas hit rapidly one after the other (as tends to happen—remember Freud's association-chains of memories? One emotionally-charged thought or memory tends to call up a cascade of similar ones.) you can quickly make a list of single words or brief phrases to remind you of all of them, and then go to work developing each one in greater detail at your leisure, knowing you won't forget any of them. In fact as you do this other memories or thoughts will usually come to the surface that deserve exploration, and you can add them to the list rapidly too for future looking-into.

The Procedure
I found when possible the best time to do this is first thing in the morning, before having breakfast or doing anything. Your mind hasn't yet been contaminated by a bunch of thoughts, you're still very close to the unconscious (that was generating dreams so recently), plus as you get deeper into your Shadow work you'll start having dreams relating to it. You want to remember those as well as you can because they're an important part of the process. When you deliberately think about this kind of material—emotionally-charged memories—it sets off powerful reactions in your psyche. And that gets the machinery churning deep inside. Whatever is going on in your psyche will show itself in your dreams. It's quite literally a dialogue between your conscious mind and your unconscious, a sort of interview where you're consciously asking questions and making suggestions—"Maybe when I got all pissed off at my friend that one time it 's because I was projecting onto him, maybe the things he was saying are things I have inside as well but are repressed?" This is you sort of interviewing your unconscious, and the clearest and most direct way it has to respond is through dreams.

Therefore it's necessary to start paying attention to your dreams. This is why I did a little write-up about it in the previous entry. Most people don't remember their dreams very often if at all, or if they do they just wave them off as fanciful but ultimately useless randomness. This is a way of turning a blind eye to your unconscious. It's aware of everything you do, it's sort of like another intelligence that lives inside of you, that shares residence with your conscious mind. For most of us they sort of work in shifts—the conscious mind gets to be in charge while you're awake (with little breakthroughs and disturbances from the unconscious now and then in the form of Freudian slips, momentary fantasies, fragmentary memories of dreams, spontaneous fantasies, and lapses of concentration), and when the conscious mind is asleep the unconscious gets to come out and live its life. What you want to start to do is allow them to mingle more frequently, bring them into dialogue with each other. Dreams are an effort by the unconscious to do that. But these days we tend to ignore them and just go about our lives as if the unconscious isn't real.

But if you really do start paying attention to your dreams and learn a little about how to interpret them (which is a whole can of worms in itself—I'll cover it to some extent and probably drop in some links), you'll find that it really does react to how you're living your life, and in particular it tries to tell you when you're going off on a bad path. Jung came to the conclusion that the unconscious, and therefore dreams, are always compensating or more properly complementing your conscious attitudes toward life. Meaning that if you examine your dreams and other unconscious elements, they're often giving you advice on how to be a more complete person. How to integrate those Shadow elements you've repressed and stop projecting them out onto other people. The goal of the unconscious, its main job in fact, seems to be precisely to coax you toward wholeness, toward integration. Or what Jung called Individuation—becoming who you really are (or are supposed to be).

So with all that in mind, what I would do is sit down, try not to think about anything except for the dreams I could remember, write them up in my dream journal first, and if they suggested something relevant or powerful (they often do when you set off on the path of Shadow work), then maybe that's all I could do that day. Examine the dream(s). Often they relate directly to shadow work, and in fact frequently they'll include shadow figures. I suppose I should do a writeup on what shadow figures are, how they tend to show up in dreams. A big part of shadow work is to learn to recognize them when they show up. You'll realize you've been seeing them in your dreams a lot, going way back, and just never realized what they were. In fact this is largely a process of coming to understand how to dialogue with your unconscious by examining your dreams and gradually learning how to analyze them. This is the ongoing dialogue with your unconscious. It's exactly what Shadow work and then Anima or Animus work are designed to facilitate.

But some days you don't recall any dreams, or nothing especially powerful seems to have happened in them, or in the beginning maybe you haven't begun to remember any dreams yet. On those days you write about memories.

Memory Journaling
We're looking for emotionally-charged memories. And we're looking for times when you projected your own worst traits, ones you refuse to accept as your own, out onto other people and got all worked up and angry at them, or repulsed, or upset. When you reacted irrationally to things someone did or said and it got you all riled. Once you start thinking about incidents like this they should start pouring forth. In fact you'll need to use the method I described above, make a list of single words or very brief phrases as reminders, then go back and start writing more extensively about each one. As you do this more memories will pour forth. Add them to the list. You might generate enough memories this way to write about for the next week, and each day you'll probably come up with more. It can really be exhausting, just the sheer amount of writing you end up doing. And you'll find that once you really get into the spirit of this it's all you can do to keep up. You'll get finger cramps and all kinds of typos because you're writing as fast as you can to try to keep up with the ideas as they pour forth or develop. Then you'll have some crazy dreams that at first don't seem to mean anything at all or are completely random, until you write them down and start to think about what the symbols actually mean, and Bam! You're off and running again. Meaning starts to show up, it comes into focus and clicks into place, and you see there's actually a great wealth of meaning in what at first seemed to be pointless and bizarre.

What you're looking for, in particular you want those memories like, for instance, that time when your friend was making a bunch of racist jokes and you suddenly got all pissed off at him. You want to dig into why it affected you that way. Is it possible you suddenly realized you might have some buried racist tendencies yourself, and it made you see it for a moment? And then you quickly repressed it again and tried to deny you have any such tendencies? It's no good to keep on denying. If you do have those tendencies (and they're quite common) it's best to acknowledge it rather than keep repressing and pretend like you're perfect. It's this pretending to be perfect and ignoring your faults that causes the problems. When you do that your'e splitting off a part of yourself, of your personality structure, and shoving it down into the unconscious where you don't have to accept it as a part of yourself. Sweeping it under the rug as it were, pretending like it doesn't exist. As you keep sweeping more and more stuff under there you make a big pile that other people can clearly see, that you in some way are aware of as well, but you steadfastly pretend like it isn't there (suppression), or you manage to make yourself believe it isn't there (full-on repression).

Each time you suppress or repress some aspect of yourself like this you seal away a little bit of the energy available to your psyche with it. It's sort of like putting Sleeping Beauty into a glass coffin and putting a spell on her to make her sleep for centuries. Incidentally, the fairy tales with female protagonists aren't really fairy tales for girls—they're about the feminine aspect of your psyche. Men quite frequently push those parts down into the unconscious so as not to seem wimpy or feminine. And in fact the unconscious is the feminine part of your psyche, and the conscious the masculine active part. So by denying the importance of the unconscious as most of us do in the modern West, we're forcing it into a glass coffin from very early in life. You need to send your Prince Charming on his Hero's Quest to hack his way through the thorn barrier and free her, which will also free the dark sinister things that grew up around her (Maleficent in Wicked Dragon form—the harshly negative aspect of the repressed feminine), and then you'll have to battle her. But don't fret, the three little Good Fairies are your helpers—the feminine in its helpful aspect. As long as you're brave (brave enough to go in and face these memories and what they reveal about you) you can defeat maleficent and free your slumbering princess. Yeah, I went full Peterson there, didn't I?

I guess this is a good breaking point. I'll elaborate in the comments below for the next few days probably and then write up the next section. And I can see I'm going to have to do a few major posts with elaboration about dream analysis. There are a lot of misunderstandings about it, or rather it needs to be done in the Jungian way as opposed to all the other ways people have come up with. Always trust Jung for understanding how to deal with the inner mind. He was uniquely suited to it.

Addendum
I forgot to say (and this is important!) the idea isn't to start living out your shadow side. You don't want to let Mister Hyde take over. You just want to acknowledge that yes, these tendencies do exist in you. You want to accept that fact, while knowing some of these tendencies are socially or personally unacceptable and you don't act them out or live them. There's a big difference between repressing something (thinking of yourself as Someone who Never Does Such Terrible Things) while harboring the tendency inside yourself, and accepting that it's a tendency you have but you refuse to let it take you over. The first option is known as hypocrisy.

The most balanced attitude to have on an issue like for instance racism is to understand that we evolved as tribal groups, with a very natural distrust of other tribes, especially those from far away or with very different ways, and that this still exists inside us today. People and groups who repress this can end up becoming extremely tribal and even violently so when that grows out of all proportion in the unconscious and becomes a split off sub-personality capable of possessing them. So really the best way to think of things like this is "There but for the grace of God go I." (Keeping in mind that the Jungian conception of God is the Self, the archetype of Wholeness). In other words, when you see someone being racist, understand it's a very human impulse that at one time served a valuable purpose, and we haven't outgrown it entirely yet. Evolution works on the scale of millennia, not decades or even centuries. And in fact it may not be possible to ever completely purge racism from our DNA. We just need to try to overcome it inside ourselves and rely on our human fellowship to be able to see everyone as the same under the skin. I mean, I'm not saying to just allow people to be racist and do nothing about it. What I am saying is be understanding and maybe nudge them rather than accusing them of being the worst kind of monster. Pointing fingers and screaming accusations is not a balanced reaction.

That kind of thinking creates a split in your psyche. What you want to do is heal those splits, bring back the cast-off parts of your personality that you condemned long ago to the Negative Zone of unconscious repression. It's in there, in isolation and persecution, that they brood and slowly turn evil and begin to plot against you. What you remain unaware of inside yourself grows to the point that it can burst forth at times and take you over, a classic possession by Shadow elements. In fact this is probably what demonic possessions always were, and why shamans or healers were able to cast the evil spirits out. They were quite literally the psychotherapists of their day.