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17min chapter
Unlocking Self-Discovery Through Shadow Work Journaling | Keila Shaheen
The Daily Stoic
Exploring Inner Landscapes: Shadow and Child
This chapter examines the interconnected themes of the shadow side and the inner child, distinguishing between their implications for personal growth. It emphasizes the importance of shadow work in understanding suppressed emotions and motivations that shape our behaviors, as well as the nostalgic journey through journaling. By addressing social anxiety and internal dialogues, the speakers highlight the necessity of self-compassion and nurturing one's identity to foster healthier relationships with oneself and others.
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Episode notes
Speaker 2
Yeah, we get lost in the cycles and become robots in a way. So let's, yeah, we need to bring back that expressiveness in whatever way that looks for ourselves.
Speaker 1
Is there a difference between like a shadow side and what they call like the inner child? Are those two ways of saying the same thing or what do you feel like the difference is? They're
Speaker 2
definitely different. The shadow side contains, you know of your inner child, but the shadow contains all of your desires, your fears, your anxieties, your sadness, your doubts, your talents, your passions, all of the things that are living in the unconscious that have not been brought up to the conscious. So the inner child, it's within us all. We were all children at one point. So some aspects of your persona as a child can be contained in the unconscious, can be left and abandoned.
Speaker 1
So the shadow is... I think when people hear the shadow, they think, oh, that's my dark side. Is that what it means?
Speaker 2
It's the unseen, the unknown. And I think that's why it's called the shadow. And there's other connotations with the word shadow that sound more negative and elusive and kind of evil and dangerous. But that's not what it is. It's what we don't immediately see.
Speaker 1
So these are the hidden motivations and urges and desires and feelings.
Speaker 2
That still affect your daily life that can, you know, influence the way you act in social settings, or, you know, if act out for whatever reason, and you come back to yourself and you say, oh, that didn't feel like me, like that didn't come from me. I wasn't acting like- I'd be acting strongly to that. Yeah, like if you're questioning, like I'm not acting like myself right now, then question that, like what are you acting like? And is that part of yourself that you're not seeing? What is there to uncover there? Yeah,
Speaker 1
I think from the inner child work that I've done, what I've tended to find is that when I'm acting that one, I'm doing something that doesn't make sense, I have a really strong reaction. There's some version or logic of it that would make sense to a younger version of myself. You know what I mean? That this is something that I made up when I was 15 or when I was 12 or when I was 9. I made something up that helped me explain or understand the world I was in or what I was experiencing, it was necessary at that time. But it doesn't make sense anymore because I'm not 15. And that how a 15-year would respond in this negotiation or under this stress is not good. You would not put a 15-year in charge of X, and that's effectively what we end up doing.
Speaker 2
Yeah. And then sometimes that 15 year old will show up in your life. When you are in that negotiation, you have to explore that inner teen that is coming up. So it's like different parts of our lives pop up in our adulthood because they're like calling out to us, trying to send us a message tell us what we need.
Speaker 1
Have you read Joan Didion's essay on keeping a notebook?
Speaker 2
It's
Speaker 1
amazing. She has this little essay on keeping a notebook and she's talking about it and she's saying that the reason you keep a notebook, she's like, you probably think that as a writer, I keep this notebook because it's like where all my ideas are. And sometimes it is, you know, you write down a scrap of dialogue or an insider, whatever, and it appears in a book. But she's saying that really what she finds, and she goes back to her journals, is like that she says she's keeping on like nodding terms with the person that she used to be. And that if you don't, that person will come up anyway, just like in a very inopportune moment. And there's something interesting about, I mean, obviously, yeah, so you're working in a journal, you're talking to some young, you're talking to some version of yourself. But there's also something strange when you go back through a journal, and you are seeing, you've captured on the page, a younger version of yourself or a version of yourself in the midst of some crisis that you didn't know how it was going to end up. And then you're like, who is that person? And sometimes it's exactly who you are now. And sometimes you're like, what were they thinking? So strange. It's
Speaker 2
one of my favorite things to do every couple months is to go back through all my and meet that person again.
Speaker 1
What strikes you about that? Like when you look at a younger version of yourself and by young guys, it's nostalgic.
Speaker 2
And I think, I mean, if you think about looking at a scrapbook from when you were a kid, it's like that, but you're not capturing those pictures, you're capturing a picture of your inner world, not your physical world. And so going and looking back at that just reminds you so much also why the whys, like, oh, this is why this happened. And this led me here. And I had these contemplations and doubts, but that inspired me to take this action. So it's all like going back, looking at the dots that have been connected.
Speaker 1
Do you find yourself when you look at your own journals, that you're just dealing with the same thing over and over again? Like, do you, like, what strikes me is that I'm still struggling with the same things. Yeah,
Speaker 2
I see some of the same themes and sometimes new ones come up, you know, because we're constantly evolving in life and taking different shapes. So yeah, evolution is also something that I see.
Speaker 1
Well, you've talked about anxiety before, like when I look at my journals, or I think back to things I used to think, a lot of what strikes me is how worried I was about stuff. And how little that worry did about that thing.
Speaker 2
And
Speaker 1
how perpetual that worry is. Like it's just always, it just finds. There's
Speaker 2
always that one thing that picks at us. For me, that thing is social anxiety. Like I love this one-on conversations, but if there's more than four or five people in a room, I'm just like, how should I act right now? So that comes up for me a lot. But I also notice the personal growth, even with the same struggles, now I can manage those moments better. Now I have that internal toolkit to go about those situations when I face them. So it's beautiful to see that aspect as well. What
Speaker 1
has your shadow work told you about your social anxiety? Like how is your understanding of your shadow informed how you feel or think about those moments of social anxiety?
Speaker 2
I mean, I definitely had to explore my inner child when I was exploring my social anxiety. I started moving around a lot when I was in fifth grade, I moved schools and then I moved to middle schools, and then I went to boarding school and high school. And I think that movement isolated me and kept me in my own world. So I always had trouble joining friend groups and sticking with a friend group and being accepted in the social settings of a school environment. So a lot of it came from that. So
Speaker 1
it throw, like being in a room of 20 strangers, throws you back in a way to being a little kid in a classroom and not knowing where you fit. And probably the exhaustion and the work of like, I have to figure this out. Yeah. I have to make it happen. Yeah,
Speaker 2
the pressures of building connections with people who already had their people that can isolate you a lot as a child and as a teen especially. But yeah, that was something I explored. And that's the other aspect of shadow work is learning how to build a relationship with yourself and with all parts of yourself. So it's really a commitment. It's the same commitment as if you were to go on a date with someone or to, you know, choose to be in a relationship with someone. You have to choose to be there for yourself, to show yourself love and, you know, self evaluate and see if you are strong enough to contain all of who you are. It's deep work.
Speaker 1
I reread one of my favorite novels a couple months ago. This is his book, Bright Lights, Big City. And he has this scene and he's talking to his mother, I think is dying. And he's saying, he's telling her like, on his first day of school or something that he'd been late, he shows up, everyone's already in the classroom. And the lectures going on, he shows up, and everyone sort of looks at him, and he said he felt, in this moment, that he was behind, and that it struck him right then that he would never catch up. And I think that, to me, is such a quintessential, that's like inner child, slash shadow, that you just have this idea that you're behind and that everyone else is feeling this other way, and that you're sort of constantly, like you have this anxiety, all the feelings that being behind would bring up in a person. And then the interesting thing was he's sort of telling his mom this. And she, of course, has no idea that he was late for the first day of school, and she couldn't have helped. Like there's the vulnerability of your sharing, and then she's like, like, everyone feels that way. And she wasn't being dismissive in the way that we do, but like, oh, we all get this normalizing.
Speaker 2
The yet
Speaker 1
you have this feeling and you think you're the only one carrying it around. Of course, like everyone feels the exact same way.
Speaker 2
Everyone shares these emotions and these. I mean, we're humans. And I think that's another really special outcome of this journal is that the network effect online. One person started sharing their feelings and creating that vulnerable space for others to connect with that and then start sharing what they're going through. So when you start to see someone else open up, that creates a safe space for other people to open up.
Speaker 1
When we have an emotion, because I think some people think stoicism is like you have the emotion and you shove it down, right? Or you don't indulge it. Do you think there's something about that? Like when we have feelings or thoughts or fears or whatever and we suppress them, do they go into the shadow? Is that kind of what happens? If you have thoughts and feelings and you suppress them, do they go into the shadow? Yeah, like is there something kind of inherently suppressed about the shadow? Like that's why it's in the shadow as opposed to in you. It's because you are denying it or not exploring. Yeah,
Speaker 2
anything that you're suppressing that you want to ignore, like turn your face away from, that is residing in the shadow. And so we need to learn how to sit with ourselves and sit with those aspects and engage in a dialogue with those aspects of ourselves. Even if you have real conversations out loud in the mirror, that is an aspect of shadow work where it's like you go face to face and you meet that side of you and you start to ask it questions, see where it's coming from and approach it as if it was a part of you that needs help, that needs that care and attention. We often dismiss it and even bully those aspects of ourselves and we feel guilt and shame around them, but we need to embrace and build the courage to help those aspects of ourselves.
Speaker 1
Have you done chair work, where you talk to the younger version of yourself in a chair? It's crazy how, like it seems, like if you describe it to someone, it seems like, for some it seems silly.
Speaker 2
It does. And it
Speaker 1
seems like-
Speaker 2
A lot of these things seem silly, but they're so powerful.
Speaker 1
You're like, what, I can't just talk to you. And how quickly you can slip into actually having a conversation with a younger version of yourself. And how, I mean, all the emotions that can go, it's crazy.
Speaker 2
It is, it's amazing.
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah. You don't think you have this duality or this multiple parts of yourself until at someone's instruction, you can like easily find, you can find yourself literally having a conversation with that version of yourself. Yes. And you're like, oh, okay, that's it, this is there. Exactly. Maybe that's journaling is just a slightly less awkward version of that.
Speaker 2
That's a great way to put it, yeah. Because
Speaker 1
you are, there's a distance, like they're in your head, but now they're here. so your thoughts are go from here the one foot that it's traveling is actually an enormous distance and then you're allowed to To yeah, look at it from the outside and
Speaker 2
there's kind of like a bridge between that journaling and Then real dialogues like chair work where you can in the middle I guess there's just the talking to yourself aspect if you're going on a walk and, you're kind of thinking out loud and letting things out and just talking to yourself, I think is also one of those similar to journaling experiences. One
Speaker 1
of my favorite stories in stoicism, there's this stoat named Cleanthes and he's walking through Athens and he hears this guy talking to himself. And it's like a nice conversation. He's like, you piece of sh- you know, he's just doing what we do. He's beating up on himself and Cleanthes is walking by and he just stops him and he says, hey, I just want to remind you, you're not talking to a bad person. And then he walks away. And the idea the con like how how naturally and unthinkingly the conversations we have with ourselves are fucking brutal. Like you would never allow some if you would never allow someone to talk to you or a younger version of yourself the way you're doing. Oh yeah, it can be so harsh. And if you just saw two people like if you were walking by and a man was talking to a woman or a woman was talking to a man and they were talking, you'd be like, come on guys, this is terrible, you can't do this. And we do that to ourselves.
Speaker 2
Right, and that's where self-compassion comes in. Yeah.
Speaker 1
I
Speaker 2
catch myself sometimes being hard on myself, but that's when I remind me to say sorry, like literally apologize out loud, like I'm so sorry. You don't deserve that. You are so loved and appreciated. I love you. And it sounds silly, but you feel that inside of your your body and you start to feel more accepted by you.
Speaker 1
Yeah, if you could read a transcript of your thoughts, which is kind of what that journal is, you'd be like, who is this abusive person? And you would put a stop to it, but we just kind of just let it operate in the background. Yeah, I wonder like what percentage of people, like the voice in their head is
Speaker 2
a nice voice. I think that's one of the prompts in the journal. What does the voice in your head sound like?
Speaker 1
I got to imagine the vast majority of, I mean millions of people have done it, that they're not like, it's the sweetest person. They're so nice, so forgiving, so tolerant, they're always encouraging me. It's never that.
Speaker 2
Yeah, that's the goal. Of course. The goal is to get to a place where we can incorporate some of that. I think the common answers would be critical, being critical on myself, worrying, anxiety, it's anxious, or some people just think negatively, they have a negative self-concept. And so then they have negative thoughts about their lives.
Speaker 1
That was a really hard thing to hear as a parent. And it keeps you up at night, but it keeps you honest, is realizing you're creating the voice in their head with the way that you treat them or the things that you say. And how similar I think many of our, if we're being honest, how close is the voice in your head the voice of mom or dad. For a lot of us, it's like one to one. Yeah.
Speaker 2
It's generational. Yes.
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