People often tell me that they don’t feel capable of doing shadow work because it would hurt too much and their pain is too deep. Believe me, I understand. I avoided my own shadow work and healing for years. I brushed trauma and pain under the carpet just like so many others. The ironic part is that avoiding looking at the trauma and wounds doesn’t actually keep you from feeling the pain, you just feel it differently.
During shadow work, you look at yourself. You look at your behaviors, your wounds, and your traumas. You get to the root cause of them and look at how they are impacting your life. You expose the truth so that you can feel the emotions and heal the wounds. It is painful. I would love to tell you that it isn’t, but the reality is that it will be.
The other reality is that if you have these wounds and trauma and you are avoiding feeling them, resulting in avoiding healing them, then you are already feeling the pain associated with them. We often think that by avoiding the shadow work we avoid the pain. When you stop and think about it, you know that this can not be true. Failure to acknowledge and address something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist….. If that were the case, life would be pretty simple, right?
So, you get to pick. How do you like your pain? Do you want to feel prolonged yet lower level pain that controls and drives your life, or do you want to feel intense pain for a short period of time until you have healed your wound and gain control again? You can even get the choice to kick your pain down the road for a bit until you have support in place to hold space for you while you do shadow work.
Whatever you pick is the right choice for you. There is no wrong decision. We all get to make it. The beautiful news is that we can even change our mind.
