Holy crud, Geehutch!  You've read my mind.  This is part of the process I'm going through & I was actually wondering if there were any good exercises to do.  THANK YOU!!

*high five*

I have a shadow, I've been aware of it for years and years but haven't been able to give it an official name until now, thank you!  *High five* from me too 

I wonder if another way of looking at our shadows is by listening to everything we think - but don't actually say...
What do you both think, is that about right? 

I'm going to do the exercise at the end of the page, it will be interesting to see what spills out.

Keep the links coming and good luck with this level girls (and guys)!

In response to Linzi, listening to everything we think but do not say, that is what I mean by self-talk if I ever mention that. We tell ourselves all sorts of things to build ourselves up or limit ourselves, or whatever, I'm learning that sometimes that is the voice of our ego, and if it's negative or false it brings us down. An important part of being spiritual, I'm learning, is letting go of our ego. This is started by learning to recognise it when it arises in our mind.  It is the endless monkey chatter for many of us that serves no purpose to enrich us, doens't help us in anyway, these are the voices that try to stop us from focussing our minds during meditation. If the next time you catch yourself saying something in your head that is not good for you, catch it, and notice how it can change with just the acknowledgement that "oh, I am not this thought, it isn't good for me, and I chose you acknowledge this is my ego, not my true self speeking"
Try to be like on the outside looking in if you can. Just something I do and it's changed alot of my internal dialogue in a very positive way. It takes practice. I believe it's a buddist thing, the ego and letting it go. It is to do with being on the path to enlightenment, or self-awareness. Everybodies shadow self and their ego are related somehow, but I don't know enough yet to touch on that.

And in response to Alice, you made some very valid points...I do see what you are saying...
But I didn't mean to come across meaning the shadow self only shows up in abuse victims, I believe everybody has one, men, and women, everybody. I was just examining the connection between people who've been abused and their abilities to use their sixth sense.  Your question do you want to be a bad girl or a good girl, in reference to that... yes you are right we all have a mix of both in us, I heard a saying the other day... a man talking to a woman about her bad side and bad habits..
"If you kill my demons, then you might kill my angels too" I don't know who wrote that but it makes a strong point. THank you for sharing, you are very insightful! Keep it up.

"If I got rid of my demons, I'd lose my angels" is the original quote. It's in a book called "Conversations with Tennessee Williams".
There I found it. I didn't word it quite right before. "Kill off my demons and my angels might die too"there's another way to say it also.

That's an interesting article, exposing things I've never heard of.  Since I'm in a season of "sorting out" and exploring my issues, this looks like a good exercise.  And it's really simple, nothing too complicated.
I like her comment about how depression is caused by repressed emotions.  That is so true.

My shadow self hmmmmmmm...
I would say I had an alright childhood

I gave this some intense thought a came up with the idea that
Everyone has met their shadow self in one way or another even without knowing it ( also without the exercise )
And I would think that this would be most common in their dreams (No joke)
This could be how some nightmares come around

Even though I am a guy I am a complete wimp and can get scared over some small things (No joke)
But I can now face some of thoughs things that scared me in my yonuger years and and laugh
I started with a film called "Gremlins" (Very good film btw)
Now I use horror video games (No joke) now I am not really affected by 99.9% of any horror games that I have played (allthough some still make me jump when i forget things)
I still am working on getting used to horror films though 'shudder'
So I am really at ease with my shadow self

p.s *HIGH FIVE* 

just to keep going on this complete aside, i ADORE horror movies, lol. the gorier (think saw, texas chainsaw, etc) the better. i was raised in a very superstitious catholic home so i'm more afraid of things like the exorcist. however slasher and torture films i find SO entertaining, and also somehow therapeutic. i love seeing people get torn to pieces (ON FILM, where it's fake), and sometimes if i have a really sad/frustrating day, watching a scary movie like that will cool me off. don't know what that has to do with anything, but i'm kindof ok with that. i'm not a violent person at all, nor do i think violence is ok outside of the realm of movie fiction. then it's sooo much fun. in that sense i suppose i relish in my dark side.


back to shadow selves. i'm not sure if i agree with you geehutch. or maybe we're just going at the same thing with different vocabularies. i've always been of the idea that anger is an emotion that comes out of an obstacle. for example, if i decide to have cereal for breakfast, and i look in the fridge and see that my roommate forgot to buy milk again, i'm going to get angry for no other reason than because my WANT of cereal, my OBJECTIVE to get cereal was blocked. (i'm sortof speaking in acting terms, but i know that many psychologists, paul eckman the one i can think of off the top of my head, agree.) in other words, we are angry when something prevents us from GETTING WHAT WE WANT. which is excellent, if you think about it in evolutionary terms, because anger promotes ACTION, which is what we need to do to get change. this action, fortunately or unfortunately, often comes in the form of aggression, although it is not the only effective way of getting change.

i suppose that back in caveman days, aggression and violence were useful in allowing us to overcome our obstacles. if we faced an animal that was annoying us or interfering with our goals, then by being aggressive we could scare it out of the way. think of how a dog will bare it's fangs to scare another dog out of it's territory. we sortof still do the same thing: think of the way a mother reacts if she sees a stranger approaching her child at a playground - the first impulse is to fight/threaten. these aggressive actions promote change, and cause the thing in our way or the thing threatening our safety to back off. there's nothing wrong with that.

consistent violence as a way to solve problems that DON'T affect our personal safety is not ok, mostly because we're no longer cavemen and our societies are more cohesive - the good of the society is placed over the good of the individual. however, anger, the emotion, is still acceptable - or at the very least understandable. if i'm waiting in a very long line to buy an expensive product that's about to go out of stock (think iphone, wii, etc), and someone cuts in front of me, i will most likely get angry. i have a RIGHT to be angry (few people would disagree here, i think), there's nothing wrong in feeling that emotion, the danger is what do i do with it. once again, anger motivates action to propel change. so if i am angry, and the way i handle it is to gently remind the person that we've all been waiting in line and point her towards the back of it, then great -- obstacle removed. if however i call her a bitch, slap her, and push her to the ground, then yes, obstacle removed, but at the expense of my social standing. human societies (the group) don't like aggression in the same way they don't like moochers. we also don't like anger as an emotion BECAUSE it promotes aggression. but human beings are also aversive to sadness, and will get all awkward when people cry, so i think humans would just as much rather "avoid" negative emotions altogether.

that doesn't mean they don't exist, or that we should try to eliminate them from our lives. which brings me back to my disagreement with geehutch. anger is just another NORMAL part of the human emotion spectrum, and like sadness, we should let ourselves experience it once in a while. if, to pick a US politics example, PROP 8 makes you REALLY angry, then that's excellent - it may motivate you to start a petition or join the cause against it - a great step into eliminating PROP 8 as an "obstacle". anger has been a great motivator for a great many good causes. it has also, unfortunately, been a great motivator for a great many bad actions. it's HOW you deal with anger that should be the concern, not eliminating the emotion altogether.

an old friend of mine, who's an acting teacher, always says that "frustration is anger turned inward". i bring that up because it highlights the fact that anger doesn't really disappear when you turn it into yourself. in fact i think doing so can be quite self-defeating. to use the children example (and i TOTALLY don't want to step on your toes on this geehutch. i have no kids so, clearly, i am about to speak out of my ass on this one, lol): if your kid covers a wall with crayon, you are bound to get angry. presumably, you are angry either because your kid thwarted your plans for the rest of the day, since now you have to clean the wall, for example. or you can make it even bigger, and say that your kid's action is an obstacle to your desire to be a good mother and raise well-behaved children (ie. they make you feel like a bad mother, when you're objective is to be a good one).  but the anger is at the child's ACTION, which is the obstacle. (note how i say the child's action, and not the child himself. i think remembering that we are angry at what people do and not the people THEMSELVES is a great way to deal with anger -- this may be a buddhist teaching, i'm not sure).

the whole point of this is there is a psychological danger in placing the anger on yourself, since that is not REALLY what you're angry at. you're angry at the thing that's in your way. usually that thing is an object (door that is stuck, TV that's stuck on noise, etc), an event (PROP 8 going through, a rainstorm when you were just about to go out for a walk, the bus being late) or a person's ACTION (someone CUTS in line, your roommate DIDN'T BUY milk, your husband CHEATED on you, your mother DIED -- i capitalized the actions here). i'm no professional, but being angry at yourself for what other people DO doesn't sound healthy to me. i'm not saying that's what geehutch is doing (or saying - like i said, we may be the saying the same thing in different languages, is all), i just thought i'd throw in my two cents about that, just to clarify.


sorry. that's a lot. i hope it makes sense. i still find the idea of shadow selves really interesting, and i don't think it's in conflict with the ideas mentioned above (most of which i stole from paul eckman and maybe the dalai lama.)

i really believe that feeling the full gamut of emotions is healthy and human, and that we shouldn't deprive ourselves of the experience, even if the emotions are anger/sadness/fear, which we consider negative. I do agree with geehutch that it is perhaps better to build an AWARENESS of the emotions (ie. KNOW that you are angry), mostly because it allows us to manage our actions around these emotions more succesfully. like geehutch said, "Be the observer of your thoughts, don't let them run you."...i would add the words "too far" to this. but that's because i'm an artist and i secretly enjoy melodramatic anger/sadness fits.

one more thought:

Geehutch said "When you overidentify with negative emotions you distance yourself from truly being yourself." I completely agree, and I'd like to say that this is true for any emotion, but especially the negative ones. here's a secret i learned from my shrink a few many years ago: WHAT WE THINK AND FEEL IS NOT TRUTH. what i mean by this is that our thoughts and feelings are coming from US, therefore they're biased and they are NOT the full picture, they are not OBJECTIVE truth. this is most clearly observable when someone suffers from depression - it's like you've got sadness goggles on and EVERYTHING you see is a reason to be sad. i remember when i was depressed, and someone apologized to me about something, i would think that they were rubbing their indiscretions in my face, rather than ACTUALLY feeling genuinely sorry for their actions. if someone bumped into me, i would think it was on purpose. if i missed the train, it was because the gods didn't want me to get to my destination (i clearly remember shaking my fist at the heavens a few too many times, lol). on the other hand, overidentifying with anger makes everything a provocation, everything an insult. even overidentifying with happiness is no good - you think you're invincible, every idea is a brilliant idea, so you put yourself and others in danger - this is the real danger of people with manic disorder. in fact, all emotional disorders could be considered "overidentifying" with an emotion. staying too long in any particular emotion (or feeling it in too much of an extreme) will COLOR our perspective, distancing us not only from our true selves but the truth in general.  ALSO know that EVERY time we experience an emotion (even if we are pissed off at out little sister for x reason), we put on that emotion's goggles - which is why especially for anger it is EXTREMELY important to be AWARE that you're angry and try to make rational decisions, since anger tends to lean towards violence more than the other emotions.

so i guess to sum up: balance in your emotional life, and awareness of your emotional life. learn to develop a healthy curiosity for it. i think that's kind of what the shadow self thing is approaching too, only from a different angle.

here's a question - i had sortof interpreted the shadow self thing in the following: "everything that i am critical about to to other people, it is because i criticize it in myself". dunno where i came up with that. am i wrong? i sortof mean to imply that if i'm super angry when others are late, it's because i'm really seeing my own lateness in them. that's a lame example...maybe this one: a father gives his son a hard time because he considers his son to be a failure (or is afraid he'll become one), when really the father is most afraid of becoming a failure himself, or considers himself a failure and thinks nobody's caught on yet. would that be correct?

that's a lot. sorry. clearly it's friday and i have nothing to do. xoxo!

Wow this is interesting
I will keep following this thread

My dark self can be very violent but I enjoy it on the games i play (Do not say i play games far too much LOL)
I rarely get angery due to my high tolerance level as well