Owning Your Own Shadow: The Dark Side of the Psyche

Every time we relax into the feared or denied part of ourselves we go through a kind of “death”—of our idealized self-image, or who we thought we were—which leads us to a new, deeper level of inner life. Each such “death” prepares us for the great death, the death of the ego’s separation from God, where we come to the center of our own being, the p

“integration of the shadow” is “a Jungian term that identifies that we all have shadow material (aggression, violence, nonconsensual fantasies, etc.). Disowning these parts of ourselves is not an effective way to deal with them, as what is disowned or ignored tends to grow (and often grow unconsciously).