Carl Young's Shadow work is the most powerful transformation tool
this self-help industry does not want you to know about right now.
As you're listening to this, there are millions of people doing affirmations
and doing vision boards and all the positive thinking exercises.
Who will be exactly where they are today, five years from now?
Yeah.
Why I'm glad you asked, because they're avoiding the one thing
that actually starts to create transformation, and that is facing
the part of themselves that they've been running from their entire lives.
Jung called this shadow work, and it's the difference between people who
change their lives and the people who just change their Instagram captions.
What I'm about to share will make you a little bit uncomfortable.
And that's good because that my friends, is where the real work begins.
Your success, DNA podcast, your success.
Is in your DNA.
What is up?
What the hell is up?
My fellow success secrets.
Welcome back to another episode of Your success, DNA, the podcast
designed for my aspiring entrepreneurs and nine to five escapees and
success driven folks out there.
Each episode delivers a little mindset shifts and habit upgrades,
all mixed with a dose of rebellion.
All designed to help you break free of convention, design a life, and maybe
even a business that's aligned with your version of success, not mine, not Joe
Schmoe's, not your bosses, maybe not even your parents, but your version of success.
And if you know someone who's out there dreaming of ditching the norm and still
makes time for little self-help, a little personal development, then go
ahead and forward this episode to them.
Would you.
So we're gonna talk about the shadow work revolution and why generic
self-help is keeping you stuck.
So we're gonna talk about three things in this episode as always.
First, I'm going to expose why 92% of the people who try to
change themselves completely fail.
Big red X up on the screen here.
It has nothing to do with willpower, and it certainly has
nothing to do with motivation.
Many of you are way motivated, just can't get your shit done.
It's all because you're trying to build a new life on top of a crumbling
foundation, on top of a foundation that you've always refused to examine.
And maybe it's not you, maybe some other folks out there.
Maybe it's someone you know very personally.
Second, you're gonna discover Carl Young's revolutionary concept.
Of the shadow, the parts of yourself that you've denied, you've rejected,
you've tucked away over in the corner.
And why integrating these aspects is what Jung called the apprentice
piece of real transformation.
Okay.
And then third, I'm gonna walk you through the three stages of authentic
change that most self-help gurus.
We'll never teach you because it requires that you get a little uncomfortable.
It requires that you face your contradictions and it requires
that you stop pretending that you're someone you're not.
Okay?
And here's the truth, and I think it's gonna shatter a few illusions out there.
The reason that you are not where you want to be is not because you lack strategy.
It's not because you don't have the right habits, and it's not because you
don't have the right mindset techniques.
No, eh, another big red X up on the screen there.
It's because you're trying to transform while you're keeping the
most important parts of yourself locked away down in the basement.
Yeah, it rubs the lotion on.
No, I'm sorry.
Some of you know the movie reference, but let me tell you about two people I know
who both wanted to change their lives.
We're gonna call them Sarah and Mike, right?
The names have been changed to protect the innocent here.
Sarah was obsessed with personal development.
She had a morning routine that would, let's be honest, make
Tony Robbins very jealous.
Meditation.
Journaling journal, affirmations, visualization.
I mean, she had this whole shebang going on every single morning.
She read every book that was out there.
She attended every seminar that came to her town, actually traveled outta
town for quite a few of them and could quote just about every guru that you
and I would recognize the names of.
But after three years of this same routine, she was still stuck in the same
patterns, in the same relationships, and with the same frustrations.
Mike, let's talk about Mike.
Mike on the other hand, he did something a little different.
He started asking uncomfortable questions.
Why did he always choose partners that he found emotionally unavailable?
Why did he sabotage himself every damn time he got close to success?
And why did he present this confident facade?
He still felt like a fraud.
Yeah.
Some of you're feeling me on this one, right?
I, I, I've been there.
Instead of trying to positive think his way outta these patterns, Mike
did what Carl Young would call shadow work, and we've talked about this
on a couple of recent episodes here.
Go back and check those out.
He started examining the parts of himself that he's been trying
to hide his neediness, his anger.
His fear of abandonment, his secret belief that he was not worthy of love.
Here's what happened, Sarah.
Sarah is still doing her morning routine and God love her.
You keep going at it.
Sarah and Sarah's still wondering why nothing is changing.
Well, nothing major is changing.
She feels good about it.
Mike, on the other hand, Mike completely transformed his life by facing
head on what he had been avoiding.
The difference.
Sarah was trying to build a new identity on top of a crumbling
or unexamined foundation.
Mike.
Mike was willing to dig around down in the darkness in the basement
and see what it was that was really holding up his emotional house.
So.
Lemme walk you through what shadow work actually means and how you can do it.
Because it's not just psychological theory here.
It's the missing piece that makes all other personal development tactics work.
Okay?
So you've, if you've tried all the things out there and you're still stumbling
and bumbling and falling and trying to figure out, why is it not working
for me, this might be the missing link to your personal development chain.
First, let's understand what we're dealing with here.
Carl Young, one of the most influential psychologists in history,
discovered something profound during his own personal crisis.
In his middle ages.
In his groundbreaking work, Aon Young revealed that every
single person has what he called.
A shadow, right?
He says With air quotes, and this is all the parts of your personality that have
been rejected, have been denied and have been, like I said earlier, hidden away.
'cause they don't quite fit with your idealized self-image with who you feel
you want to be or are your shadow.
Now, let's not get this confused.
It's not evil.
It's not your dark side.
It's not like, you know, Luke, you are my son.
No, it's none of that dramatic stuff.
It's simply a collection of traits of emotions, and perhaps even
impulses that you have learned that are unacceptable either to yourself.
To your family, to your loved ones, to your children, to your
spouse or society as a whole.
Maybe for example, you learned that anger is bad, so you buried your
capacity for righteous in indignation.
Maybe you learned that being vulnerable.
Was a weakness.
So you hid your need for human connection.
Maybe you learned that ambition is selfish, so you suppressed your
drive to achieve amazing things.
Here's a crucial insight.
These rejected parts of you who you are, they don't disappear
just because you rejected them.
No, they go underground and they start to steer your life from the shadows, right?
They show up as things like self-sabotage or relationship patterns.
Why do I always pick this kind of person?
And all those mysterious ways that you keep getting in your own way.
Young identified three stages.
Of what he called individuation.
Now this is the process of becoming who you really are, so
let's go through those stages.
Stage one is confronting the shadow Seems pretty obvious young
called this the apprentice piece because it is the foundational
work that makes everything else.
Possible this means honestly examining your traits that you've pro quite probably
disowned, disavowed, or just shoved off On the side we're talking about things like
the anger you suppressed, the neediness that you've hidden, the selfishness
that you've, that you have denied the weaknesses, that you are covering
up with strengths and the strengths that you're hiding behind weaknesses.
And here's how to start.
First, you're gonna wanna pay attention to what it is that triggers you in
other people, because Jung said that quite, quite often what we can't
stand in others is quite often what we can't stand about ourselves.
The people who are too aggressive.
Well, they might have disowned their own assertiveness.
All those people that are too needy, they might have rejected
their own need for connection.
Stage two.
Stage two involves integrating what young called the enema and the animus.
This is the unconscious feminine and the unconscious masculine
aspects of your personality.
This isn't about gender.
Don't get me wrong here.
This is about psychological wholeness, both sides, ladies and gentlemen.
Especially you gentlemen.
For many men out there, this means developing a capacity for your intuition,
your emotion, and your receptivity.
For many women, this means embracing your assertiveness,
your logic, and your independence.
Honest, assertiveness, logic, and independence.
Not that not.
Not some of the ugly stuff we've seen out there.
Okay.
You know what I'm talking about, but it's different for everyone because we all
have unique aspects that we've suppressed.
Now.
Stage three is integration of the self, not the ego self that you've been
presenting all out there to the world.
But we're talking about that deeper self that encompasses all of who you are.
Every single little aspect, every page of the book that is you.
This is what Abraham Maslow called self-actualization, becoming Fully
who you were meant to be Fort, and all this isn't about perfect.
This is about authenticity.
Uh, there's a word we've all heard, banty it around online with
all the gurus out there, right?
Okay, so now here's how you actually do all this work.
Start with what young called active imagination.
When you notice a strong emotional reaction.
Anger, jealousy, fear, shame, whatever it might be.
Instead of pushing it away or repelling from it or acting it out, sit with it.
Ask, what is it trying to tell you?
What need is it really expressing?
And what, or, here's another one.
What part of you.
Is it really protecting practice, what I call shadow journaling?
And I talked about this a couple episodes ago as well, so we'll go
into it a little bit more here.
Write about the traits that you most dislike in other people, not what you
love, what you most dislike, and then honestly, ask yourself this question,
how might this trait exist within me?
You have to be honest.
It's not always, not always gonna be pretty.
When have I acted in this way?
What would it look like if I completely owned this aspect of myself instead
of projecting it out onto others?
Yeah.
And then answer the questions, write it down.
It's just you and your journal so you can go ahead and be completely honest.
Here's another thing.
I want you to pay attention to your dreams.
Young believed that dreams were messages from your unconscious, showing us
parts of ourselves that we just were not seeing during our conscious time.
Keep a dream journal and look for recurring themes or characters
that might represent those disowned aspects of your personality.
I started doing this way back, oh gosh, it would've been the nineties,
and I used to keep a journal and it's really hard to sit there and write.
When you're groggy, you know that moment when you first wake up and you're like,
oh my God, I know if I don't write this down now, I'll never remember it later on.
So here's what I did, and you can do this differently.
Back then, we didn't have iPhones, so I had a little mini one of those
miniature, uh, tape recorders.
So if I would wake up in the middle of the night, I would just hit record and
just kind of googly speak into the mic.
It.
And then write it a conscious aspect, enlightening thing.
Usually probably at the ready every single moment, you could just press
record right there on the voice recorder and speak into it, and then
come back and journal it later on.
Okay, so what you're gonna wanna do here though, is you're gonna wanna notice.
Your patterns.
Where are you repeatedly getting stuck?
Not just in your dreams, but everything else?
What situations trigger the same reactions in you over and over and over again?
These patterns are often your shadow.
Trying to get your attention.
Go, Hey.
You might wanna pay attention right here.
Okay.
So as the poet, who is it?
Robert Bly.
He described it in a little book on the human shadow.
This work isn't about eliminating the aspects that you're trying
to tuck away into the shadows.
It's about reclaiming the energy that they contain.
It's a part of you and you're, you're taking energy to push it away, and
it has energy in and of itself.
Let's go ahead and reclaim all that energy.
You don't have to, you can stop pushing it away.
So you're gonna reclaim that energy and then you're gonna reclaim the
energy that the actual aspect has.
Modern approaches like internal family Systems therapy have validated
Young's insights into this, and we can, that we all contain.
These multiple parts and the healing of it happens through
integration, not elimination.
Now, not as many of you know, I am not a licensed psychotherapist
or any of that noise.
I'm just a guy who's lived 60 plus years on this big blue spinning globe, and
I'm just sharing my whisked wisdom here.
The goal here overall.
Isn't to become your shadow.
You don't want to go from living in your home, your mental and physical
and spiritual home to living down in your mental and spiritual and physical.
Basements right in the shadows.
But what you can do is use it as fuel for positives change instead of
just letting it leak out as passive aggression, as failed relationships,
as failed business opportunities.
When you acknowledge your neediness.
You can ask for what you want directly instead of having to manipulate others
into giving it to you indirectly.
I was married to one of those, oh my God.
This is the very kind of deep transformation ma transformational work,
uh, that we explore every week in the Unleash Your Success DNA newsletter.
It's for people who are tired of that surface level self-help scratching
the surface that really want that.
Real work and they're ready for it so they can become actually who they are.
Each issue delivers mindset shifts and more habit upgrades and still
mixed with my usual dose of rebellion.
All designed to help you break free from convention so that you
can build a life aligned with.
Who you are, your authentic self, no fluff, no toxic positivity,
just uncomfortable truths that could actually set you free.
Go ahead and sign up over at your success DNA and we'll, we'll get into
that inside the, the newsletter there.
Here's why I think this matters for you and for many of my
listeners at a deeper level.
We are living in a culture that seems completely terrified
of psychological complexity.
We want answers to be simple.
We want fixes to be quick, and we want truths to be calming and comfortable.
Well, I'm sorry.
Answers aren't always simple.
Fixes aren't always quick, and sometimes real truth is very uncomfortable
because humans aren't simple.
We're literally walking contradictions.
We contain multitudes.
We have the capacity for creation and destruction.
We hate and we love.
We have courage and we have fear.
We are selfish.
We are generous all at the same time, and all in various varying degrees
at different times in our life.
Unlike Martin Seligman's positive psychological movement, which focuses
on amplifying strengths and positive emotions, Young's approach recognizes that
the self-help industry has convinced us that the goal is to eliminate the negative
parts and to amplify the positive ones.
But I think this creates what young called the one-sided personality.
Unfortunately, just one-sided personality is brittle.
It's very inauthentic, and it's ultimately unsustainable over time,
and many of you have experienced that.
I know I did a couple of times in my life.
Real transformation is not about being perfect.
It's about becoming whole.
Being who you are, it's about integrating all the aspects of who you are into
a coherent, authentic identity.
Okay?
Now we're not talking about all that dark, ugly stuff that is socially
just completely wrong for your.
For humankind and yourself, we're talking about the good stuff, but you sometimes
you've have to rustle around in what some folks might call the bad stuff to pull
it out and turn it into a good thing.
I like I talk about all the time, losing my daughter was a
terrible thing to have happen.
She was only 18 months old.
However, I have found blessings tucked inside of that if I would've not addressed
that part, that shadow part of me.
I wouldn't be as happy as I am today.
This connects with a much larger paradigm shift that I think is
happening in psychology itself.
We're moving away from the medical model that sees psychological distress
as a pathology to be eliminated.
I think we're moving towards, at least in the circles I travel in, we're moving
towards a more holistic understanding that sees our struggles as information
and it's information about what needs attention in our lives, in our minds, in
our hearts, in our souls, in our bodies.
Okay.
Your anxiety might be telling you that you are not living according
to your own deeply held values.
Your anger could be showing you that you have boundaries that people
keep violating, and you need to stand up for yourself and stop that.
Your depression might be signaling that you've lost connection to what
seems to give your life meaning.
I don't know if you need a pill or not.
I can't make that determination, but I can say it might be that you need to
find that connection and bring it back.
The goal isn't to eliminate your shadow.
It's not to dope it up and dumb it down.
It's to dance with it and to dance with it consciously instead of
letting it control you unconsciously.
When you do this kind of work, something truly remarkable happens.
It doesn't always happen instantly, but it does happen.
You stop being at war with yourself.
You stop exhausting yourself trying to maintain that perfect image.
You develop what young called psychological resilience, and
that is the ability to handle whatever life throws at you.
We all know it's gonna throw shit at you.
You'll be able to handle whatever life throws at you because you are no
longer afraid of your own reactions.
When you're less afraid of your own reactions, you are far less
afraid of everyone else's reactions.
So all that said, here's your Whiskered wisdom for this week.
You, my friend, cannot heal what you refuse to feel.
You can't integrate what you won't take the damn time to acknowledge.
The research is clear.
People who do shadow work, who honestly examine and integrate their
disowned aspects, they report higher levels of life satisfaction, higher
levels of better relationships, and a greater resilience than any of those
folks that are out there focused only on positive psychology techniques.
And I've got books of those over here.
I'm not saying they don't work.
I'm not saying they don't have a place.
I'm saying you can't have one without the other to integrate yourself fully.
So here's your specific action for this week.
Choose one person who really seems to irritate you, right?
Just like sandpaper that I just kind of gRED you the wrong way
and instead of judging them.
I want you to ask yourself this question, what quality in this
person am I rejecting in myself?
Then spend a little time journaling about how that quality might actually
serve you if you owned it consciously and let it flow through you.
This isn't about becoming someone you're not.
It's about reclaiming the parts of yourself you've been too damn afraid to
even acknowledge, and that my friends is where real transformation truly.
Begins, listen, the world doesn't need another version of you
that you think you should be.
No.
It needs the full, complex, contradictory, beautiful shit.
Time mess of who you really are, who you actually are.
Warts and all shadow work is not comfortable.
Sometimes it's fun, often not so much, but it's not comfortable.
It's not Instagram worthy.
God, I hope not.
It won't fit on a motivational poster, which is probably why
you can't go out and buy one.
But it's the difference between people who change their lives and
people who just rearranged the furniture in their mental house.
You have everything you need inside of you.
Right now, including the parts that you've been trying to hide, dust them off.
Stop running around.
Stop running away from yourself and start running toward the fullness of who
you are capable of being and becoming.
Your shadow is not your enemy.
It's not the dark side that you're trying to hide.
It's your ally awaiting to be acknowledged.
It's half of your power that you've been hiding away, and when you finally
turn toward it, instead of away from it, that my friends, is when
some real magic can start to happen.
In the meantime, I'm gonna leave you as I always do, think
successfully and take action.