Shadow Work Series - Part 3

HEAL YOURSELF

Not deserving love is the consequence of our child’s “logical” mind.
But what caused it was being forbidden to ask for love.

According with the cognitive-behavioral psychology (Carl Jung), we need to forget us for rejecting a part of us, and for thinking that part of us was wrong. We also have to integrate that part on us again for good.

How can we do that? Reliving the memory and altering it by seeing your grown up you in the memory as well, comforting and loving the child you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3V_Gtfr_YA&t=5s

* This is only a guidance from my experience, for you to understand the process, you must do the steps your own way*

So, go to that moment when your mom forbade you to ask for love:

- Take a sit in front of a mirror (close enough to see yourself up close).
- Relax, take a deep breath.
- Look at yourself in the mirror, through the eyes.
- Look for your child in your reflection, in your eyes.  Look at yourself, observe you. With no judgement. Do not look at your face, look inside of you.

- Close your eyes and meditate.
- Go to the moment when your mom forbade you to ask for love, the memory you recovered on meditation.
- See your grownup-self inside the memory, you are near to your child-self.
- Recognize your child-self feelings: fear of not deserve love, fear of mom not loving you, fear of disappear.
- It is only a little child who needs love.
- Feel the compassion, feel the unconditional love towards your child-self.
- Hug you, tell you you are worthy, you deserve love.
- Ask you for forgiveness.
- Forgiveness for mistreat yourself, for banned yourself, for deny yourself.
- Tell you how much you love you.

- Open your eyes
- Look at your integrated you in the mirror.
- Say “hi”
- Observe you.
- Embrace you.
- Celebrate you and allow your child to come out and play a bit.

* I played a song from my childhood and danced it like I was 3 years old, letting go everything, every pain, every doubt, every fear. *

Shadow Work Series - Part 2

LET’S START WORK!

A) KNOW YOURSELF

https://youtu.be/vGsrQ_Dx5Mc

1. Observe your triggers: Triggers will appear in your relationships.
2. Triggers will put you in front of the mirror: The things we hate the most in other people are actually inside us, at least in a symbolic way. To put it in another way, what we dislike in others is also what we dislike about ourselves.
Mirror theory can act in a direct or inverse way. Let’s take an example. Say you can’t stand how selfish your friend is. In a direct way, you may be projecting the selfish part of you that you refuse to see. On the other hand, in an inverse way, they might be reflecting how selfless you are. Maybe you’re always caring for others and forgetting yourself. Either way it is valuable information if you want to get to know yourself and grow.
https://exploringyourmind.com/mirror-theory-wounds-relationships/
Same happens with the things you LOVE most in other people. That parts you admire, are in you, but you suppressed them.
3. Mirror will give you a hint: Maybe you feel not being loved and you are triggered when you see something that points to a lack of love towards you in someone close to you. What you feel is what you fear. You are afraid of not being loved.
4. Realize how that fear (not being loved) interferes with your life. Maybe you are deliberately choosing people that mistreat you and are not loving at you as you wish, or keeping you stuck in toxic relationships, lowering your self-esteem, etc.
5. Meditate about that feeling:
        a. Why this part of your shadow exists?
        b. When you use to have that same feeling? In which situations?
        c. When was the first time you experienced that feeling? Allow your unconscious to give you the answer, the memory, maybe it will come in your dreams, maybe during meditation, maybe something came up in your mind suddenly.
6. Observe your memory: Maybe you were not properly nurtured as a child, maybe your mother had postpartum depression and rejected you many times when you tried to hug her, reacting with anger towards you.
7. Understand what happened in your mind at that time:
A child’s mind does not work as a grown up’s mind. Those situations, in a child’s mind make the child thinks her mother will be anger if he/she continues asking for love, so mom will not provide. If mom will not provide, the child will die.
Yes, that is how our mind works when we are a child, we are absolutely dependable on our parents, our mind is set up for survival. We survive if mom and dad provide. Maybe they do not love us, but if we have food, we can survive.

The logical consequence for a child is thinking: "If I do ask for love, I will die."

So, to survive, we reject the clingy-needy part of us.
There is a split in our consciousness, in our ego:
So now, I am me, and my clingy-needy part of me is not me anymore. At least that is what we thought.
That part never disappears, it is hidden from us in our subconscious mind, our shadow, and it will take control over us when a trigger occurs, without us realizing about why we are behaving like that.

We have fragmented our ego.
That fragmentation happens on each one of us, human beings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeUlPO2iXb4

8. Analyze how those facts affect your conception of yourself: And why the child cannot ask for love? Because he is not worthy of it, he does not deserve it. That is how a child’s mind works.

So, you develop this intense BELIEVE (paradigm) of not being worthy of love.
The natural behave, if you do not deserve being loved, is nothing but surrounding yourself by people that do not love you, or being in a toxic relationship, or…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGQudacvgsA



Now, you have the point, you know where the root cause is. You know why you are triggered by certain situations. ANd you know when it did start.
But, how to heal that for good?
You must “reprogram” yourself on actually being worthy of love
How?

Shadow Work Series - Part 1

WHAT SHADOW WORK IS AND HOW CAN IT HELP YOU
Shadow work is the integration of your subconscious mind (Carl Jung) into your conscious mind. To accept your personality traits that you have disowned during your childhood in order to being loved.

You rejected a part of yourself that was not allowed, or was perceived as "wrong". You can perceive it as a behavior "not screaming out loud", "not get your clothes dirty". But to get along again with your mom, to not repeat that behavior again, you had to banish a full part of your personality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s8I3yq-Kmo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHPI6LucOo0&t=89s


WHY SHADOW WORK? You just have to be positive!!
Many people think shadow work will only focus you in the “bad” parts of your life and that will call more “bad” things to your life. That is a wrong misconception of the Law of Attraction:

If you have a physical wound, being positive about it won’t heal it.
This is the same, you have to heal yourself first.

Positive focus works on everything, except for the things that you are trying to use positive focus to avoid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUfEA4yVMMk

RECOGNIZE YOURSELF: How Your Childhood Affects Your Adult Relationships
Some examples that can help you recognizing your triggers and the origin of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZdRpEKYE9M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk-pRQSxGSs

Shadow Work Series

So, realizing how many lost people there are, thinking the reason of all of their problems is because they are HSP, or empaths, not because childhood leaves a mark in everyone of us, I decided to prepare a shadow work series:

First of all:

I am not a psychologist, I am only sharing my healing path with you, because I know it helped me SO MUCH and I feel some of you can resonate with this kind of situations.

What we are calling “shadow work” is based in Carl Jung’s work (the father of the modern psychology) about the integration of the subconscious mind.

SHADOW WORK

“Shadow work is the path of the Heart Warrior” – Carl Jung

You know when something triggers some dark part of you, and you over-react, so no one understands you, or everyone says you are being dramatic? When you cannot stand yourself and you only want to go sleep.

That is what happens when your shadows take the lead:

Shadows are the parts of your personality that you rejected during your life (mostly your childhood) and banished to your subconscious. Those parts emerge out of control when something triggers them and take the lead of your behavior.

Like when you are an adult, constantly seeking for love, having toxic relationships, or wining to someone because you need him/her to be more affectionate or love-expressing.

That comes, most probably, from a childhood where your parents didn't give you the love you needed (or not enough love as you demanded).

Those shadows, those traits of your personality that you banned from you, are the hidden parts of you that don't allow you to be happy. To be complete. To feel you are not alone. Why? Because you are rejecting a part of you, you are not loving yourself, but the idea of yourself.

So, before going super mystic it is a necessity doing your own shadow work.

It will be tough, cannot fool you. You must look at your true self at the mirror without any filters. You must acknowledge, accept and integrate into you something that you have suppressed into your subconscious mind, because you have rejected it, or disowned it, or denied, mostly, due to being loved, or survive.

I am sharing some YouTube links and some knowledge with you that helped me to start my shadow work. At this point I almost healed one of my traumas. It is a constant work, but you will see results quite quickly, and, gosh, only healing one of your wounds, you will see a huge difference, promised.

Part 1 - Understand shadow work
Part 2 - Awareness (know yourself)
Part 3 - Heal yourself