What Is Shadow Work? What Carl Jung Actually Meant (and What TikTok Gets Wrong)
Somewhere in the last few years, shadow work became a product. There are shadow work journals, shadow work challenges, 30-day shadow work programmes, and endless videos promising that if you just answer the right prompts, you'll finally "heal your shadow self." Most of it borrows a word from Carl Jung. Very little of it sounds like anything Jung actually said. I wrote about my own shadow last November , about the person who turned out to be a mirror for everything I didn't want to see in myself. That was the personal version. This is the other half: what the shadow actually is, where the idea comes from, and why the way it's being sold right now misses the point. It's the first part of a short series on shadow work, and it starts with the basics. What is shadow work? Shadow work is the practice of noticing and integrating the parts of yourself you've disowned. In Carl Jung's psychology, the "shadow" is everything about you that doesn't...
