Healing the original pain through the shadow work processes I’m going to teach you was DEEPLY painful. A part of me was still that teenage girl, shut inside, feeling alone and unworthy of friendships.Īfter doing shadow work around this, I found the courage to contact one of my old friends, and the conversation was so healing! I’ve also had problems making female friends, mostly because I’ve turned into a hermit.īut not too long ago I realized that I’m continuing to act out the trauma of my youth by staying home so much. In my adult life, I often veer toward solitude. This opened the door to a very toxic friendship my senior year during which I allowed a woman to isolate me from my other friends. The problems become solvable once we heal the original pain.įor example, in high school I feel very isolated after my dad and sister died. Either way, unhealed pain causes us to spend our lives stuck in trauma responses disguised as seemingly unsolvable problems. I’ve heard it said that we continue re-creating similar experiences in an effort to close the loop, that is to properly process the emotion and release it.

They're constantly guarding themselves against unhealed past pain.) Unfortunately, when pain isn’t processed, it stays in your nervous system. When bad things happened, or we felt painful emotions, our natural response was to blame ourselves. We idolized our parents and saw them as the source of everything. When you were young and felt shame, fear, anger or sadness, you didn’t have the tools to process that pain. Healing requires feeling the original pain Shadow work helps you release past pain so you can feel positive about the future in two main ways:ġ. This is also why shadow work is in my view non-negotiable, not only so you can feel happy, but also so you can achieve your goals. This is how unconscious, unhealed pains affect our decision making, behaviors, attitudes, and ultimately our lives. Science has discovered the our decisions are mostly made by our subconscious minds and rationalized by our logical minds. If a part of you feels unsafe in receiving the thing you most desire, your subconscious will not, under any circumstances, let yourself create it. Of course sometimes people eat to avoid feeling, but I’ve often heard of people who can’t lose weight even if they’re ‘doing everything right.’ A sexual assault survivor may pack on pounds in a subconscious effort to feel unattractive and less targeted. This is one example, but unhealed inner pains and the ways we have adapted in response in order to feel safe affect every area of our lives, including love and romance, work, money, friendships and health.Īnother example, one common reason that people struggle to lose weight is because they are protecting themselves from past painful experiences. These unhealed wounds would ultimately compel this hypothetical woman to continue protecting herself or mothering the man, which results in her never receiving the kind of love she so deeply desires. I’m speaking very specifically to one type of relationship, understanding that not everyone desires that type of relationship.) (I realize there’s a lot of gender descriptions in here that may offend some people, but that’s not my intention. In this example with love, the woman would lead from her masculine energy, therefore repelling masculine men while attracting more feminine men, (or pulling feminine energy out of a man she's already with).Īttraction requires polarity, and a masculine woman will always attract a more feminine male.

Unhealed trauma increases a woman’s masculine energy because she feels she has to protect herself. It also includes the most pained, injured parts of ourselves, the parts most vulnerable, those we wish didn’t exist and that we often pave over with facades of toughness that often end up sabotaging our happiness.Īs a love-related example, think of a woman who longs for a very masculine man to love, but interacts with men from a place of masculine energy because of unhealed trauma. This includes emotions viewed as negative like hatred, anger, jealousy, greed and neediness. Shadow work refers to the process of understanding (and loving) the rejected pieces of ourselves, our darkness. Even considering years of therapy, a much-regretted stint of medication in college, hours upon hours of mindset work in my journal (affirming positive thoughts and beliefs), nothing has healed me more than shadow work.

Into the wild shadow work journal