Inner Child & Shadow Work

Inner Child was a complete breakthrough for me.

I've never heard of this. It resonates with me. Best wishes OP. I'll start my research on this for myself.

What is shadow work? Hand animals on the wall?

I did this for years before I realised decades had gone by and I was still the exact same person I was when I first started. Just older and more weary, but still triggered in the same way by the same situations, repeating the same patterns. Ego loves these little projects and "healing journeys", postponing your wholeness into some indeterminate future when you're finally fully healed and you can start living. Meanwhile, actual life passes you by.

Your inner child doesn't need healing, it needs killing, i.e. kill all the nostalgia you have for your childhood and youth, it's all necessary baggage. Then embrace your shadow as your actual self and the source of power. And then live in the moment until it's time for the crematorium.

But, seeing is believing. You need to discover the ultimate futility of all this on your own.

[quote]it's all necessary baggage.

R4 ???

“I’ve started false repressed memory therapy. A wood, a hood, it’s all coming back!”

Seriously. Are you like those people who used to turn up on talk shows with teddy bears on your laps?

R4 this is, I think, the single worst comment I've ever read on DL

Love you R6!

If you are not willing to visit real and intense emotional pain on gut-wrenching levels do not start shadow work. Because ultimately that’s what shadow work is…getting to that part of you so that you can debride the infection and leave only clean (but raw) tissue to heal. (This appears to be what r4 was unable or unwilling to do. So they mock.)

1. Don’t start Shadow work until you’re at least 45. 2. Don’t start Shadow work if you are or have been within the last 18 months suicidal.

Best to you.

Oh, sorry, R10 here again. One other crucial thing…

Shadow work has a lot of charlatans cashing in on the terminology right now. But it’s a foundational Jungian concept. So I’d recommend that you watch some free YouTube videos, journal in any notebook and stay in touch with your spiritual counselor if you have one. Seriously consider GETTING one if you don’t already have one because Shadow work will leave you thirsty for spiritual comfort. I recommend Friends Assemblies (Quakers) or Unitarian Universalist Ministers if you don’t already have a gay-affirming spiritual counselor available.

What in the name of Marianne Williamson is this nonsense?

Would Jung be more a Sally or a Phyllis?

Closure is fake. This is all just navel gazing.

I always stop reading or listening when I see or hear the following phrase....

"I’ve done a lot of other work on myself".

Always a red flag