Thank you for such an informative and interesting post! I keep wanting to start shadow work but I stop myself before I properly get into it! Would you be willing to share how you got started and any resources that helped at the very beginning of your journey?
I'm also constantly starting inner child work and backing out too - I really do want to heal, but I'm also fearful because I don't know who I am underneath all of the trauma you know?
This thread is so helpful - thank you everyone
Thank you
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Thank you for such an informative and interesting post! I keep wanting to start shadow work but I stop myself before I properly get into it! Would you be willing to share how you got started and any resources that helped at the very beginning of your journey?
I'm also constantly starting inner child work and backing out too - I really do want to heal, but I'm also fearful because I don't know who I am underneath all of the trauma you know?
This thread is so helpful - thank you everyone
Thank you
@Elizaaaaa that's very kind of you.
I think what really inspired me to be involved in my own shadow work is a book by the Jungian psychoanalyst Clarissa pinkola Estes.... Women who run with the wolves.
It's all about the wild woman archetype and basically how to integrate it for healing and to find your own voice and power?
I read that book when I had gone through a particularly troubling time as a young mother and I had felt real pain at feeling like a fraud and disappointment and also worst of all a bad mother (the one who's example I had internalised)
That's what terrifed me history repeating itself!
When we are little a bad parent feels omnipresent I was still holding on to that?
Having played out that relationship with my own mother and she is not maternal or loving I vowed to be the opposite!
Except that life and it's challenges kept sabotaging me or more accurately I was sabotaging me and any chance at a happy family?
I was alternatively depressed highly strung nervous around children my nerves screamed fight or flight and I knew I had to face this I had to deal with my own ambivalences....
My mother (or lack of) took up residence in my head I was not free I was not being myself I was haunted by a sense of deprivation? Just like she had been because she also had a strained and ambivalent relationship with her mother and so the family drama continued?
Now I felt grief I also was lost I didn't know how to be a parent and I was scared my children would feel resentment towards me as I felt towards her?
My point is i think shadow work is painful it was like opening the door (or locked closet) to the past and dealing with things that haunted me (and others) but they hadn't dealt with it?
I felt like I had to it was the only thing that gave me courage if I didn't who would?
So I think in my case I had to start somewhere and that was the most pressing concern I didn't want to repeat maternal alienation?
I guess everyone has their own wound and issue that calls out to them that needs to be heard?
Giving birth is symbolic you can give birth to yourself in that way maybe I was lucky it was obvious where the pain was coming from?
If your intuition speaks it's trying to tell you something? In the shadows are old ghosts and trauma that get passed down like family heirlooms imo?
To me it became a situation where your dammed if you do but damned if you don't?
Either way it would still be painful but I would rather have the pain of release and letting go and in a way surrendering to it because if not it just becomes the fight that happens anyway?
I felt a prisoner of my past and if it was like a jail then I might as well figure out how I ended up like that in the first place?
So if you've ever dragged yourself through life feeling guilty then you have my sympathy because that's how I was on a chronic level.
It occasionally still rears its ugly head but I ask myself now am I overreacting? Am I really guilty as charged? Or am I just re living yet again maternal ambivalence I was an accident how did I get here why am I alive? (and then do I deserve to be) had troubled me all my life occasionally still do but it passes quickly now it's losing its hold.
That's my start my finish my circle it's gone round and round but each time it gets a little easier?
So that pain was telling me this hurts and I blamed it when all it was doing was communicating with me?
The inner child is hard to pacify but then when it cries do we listen? Or were we listened to as children?
Or are we just fed up with pain that gets normalised and desensitized and numbness comes to bring relief except that just blocks things further?
Opening to feelings when in my case you were never allowed to express them or have them validated is painful?
Yes it's put me off as well and triggered depression or fits of crying (grief) but I always come back to it to try to resolve it? In the past especially when I have been triggered or had a meltdown its not easy to cope with being flooded with what can feel like an avalanche?
That's because I kept it all inside and pushed it down but my body hurt I have frozen shoulders and stiff hips and problems with bad posture and you know you can only hide from it for so long before it becomes obvious this way of dealing with life is not working!
So if the urge for healing or exploration of painful things happens I would listen and explore it?
Denial never works and in the beginning I would go from elation (yes finally freedom!) to despair oh no it's not working I am still getting sucked in feeling triggered.....but for me I accepted that because I felt so rubbish anyway that what the heck I might as well get on with it!
I tried some therapy along the way cognitive behavioural therapy helped a bit to not always feel overwhelmed and create a helpful distance.... Also going to Albania helped me seeing a different way of life one that offered an alternative? It doesn't need to be like this?
I got into spirituality I opened up to meditation and yoga and read voraciously and honestly I think not being melodramatic but I don't think I would still be here if I hadn't?
I don't think I would have committed suicide but I think my mind would have broken down maybe irretrievably?
Maybe that's why I am so mind oriented the original signal to heal was received by my mind and maybe that's where the problem originated as well? I was maybe too receptive to the (hostile) environment I found myself born into? The unspoken signals?
I was hurt psychologically first that's the origin and then hidden pain all the memories all the regrets all the slights stored within.....but I believe there is healing potential in a lot of us especially in the ones who doubt or question things?
That is the first thing sometimes not to be content with how things are because they don't feel right is intuition speaking?
There is always a reason for that communication so trust it we have instincts for a reason?
I really do think that for some of us life can feel like hard work but then being born to a depressed and ambivalent mother I internalised that message I was hard work! I have been following that path ever since and just admitting that is freeing?
Revelations come when we open ourselves just you asking me about this subject helps me to remember that when I get lost I can find my way again?
On that note I think keeping a journal helps a process of self discovery and sometimes that is needed?
It's where we pay attention to ourselves and what's troubling us or helping us and why and a reminder that it's not trivial to examine your life it's not needless introspection or self indulgence if it matters to us that's because we matter as well and maybe we just need to acknowledge that?
Thank you all for sharing your experiences of shadow and inner child work - I've made lots of notes of things to look at 
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