Acknowledging your shadow

Consciousness expresses itself through multiple interconnected layers. These are the ego and personality we know, the subconscious patterns that direct us, and the unconscious (both personal and collective) that shapes us from beneath our awareness.

Your ego is your conscious identity, the narrator of your life, it’s what you think of as your personality. But the ego has its limitations, in that it can only hold so much awareness at once, so it organises reality around what feels safe and secure. Your ego functions primarily through protection and continuity, it filters your experience to maintain a stable sense of self.

The shadow is everything that doesn’t fit neatly into your ego identity. It contains traits you were discouraged from showing, emotions you were taught not to express, and instincts that were judged or misunderstood. In short, anything about you that became unsafe to display. Your shadow tends to form early, it’s shaped by family dynamics, caretaker influence, culture, and society all teaching you that certain parts of you aren’t welcome. This is because as children, we assemble a sense of self by tracking what keeps us connected, safe, secure, and oriented in our environment. We learn who we are by noticing what’s mirrored back to us, and we adapt accordingly.

However, our disowned aspects don’t disappear. Instead they operate out of sight, influencing our behaviour indirectly. Thus, the shadow is ‘dark’ because it’s unacknowledged. It sits in the unconscious mind alongside pre-verbal and forgotten memories, emotional imprints, inherited patterns, and deeply ingrained assumptions about how life works. The unconscious operates beneath language and logic. It’s symbolic and non-linear, revealing itself through bodily sensations, emotional reactions and feelings, attraction, aversion, repetition, and in other ways like through our dreams. This is why shadow content often feels more felt than thought, more sensed than understood. The shadow also has roots extending into the collective unconscious, which explains why it connects to universal human tendencies and archetypes that transcend individual experience.

The process of projection is the reflection of the shadow. We unknowingly project our denied traits onto others, seeing in them the very qualities we refuse to recognise in ourselves. If you have an unusually strong emotional reaction to someone that’s your shadow speaking. An intense response, what we call a ‘trigger’, reveals what you’re disowning in yourself. And by contemplating what triggers us in others, we can work backward to discover our own hidden shadow.

The shadow commonly contains vitality, creativity, sexuality, grief, anger, and power. But because these parts conflict with our ego, our personality, we continue to keep them hidden, even at this great cost.

This brings us to the subconscious mind, which serves as the operational arm of the unconscious, running in the background of your life. The subconscious doesn’t evaluate truth the way the conscious mind does. Instead, it prioritises what’s perceived as safe, familiar, and tellingly what gives us an emotional charge. If something feels known, even if it’s painful, the subconscious often treats it as preferable to the unknown. This is why we recreate our earliest patterns, even destructive our ones.

Lasting change doesn’t come from the death of the ego or by forcing intellectual insight onto our behaviours. It comes from building a relationship with what was once unconscious in us.