A thread running through the whole episode: shame from upbringing, religion, and Balkan sexual and gender norms as the material the shadow is made of, and speaking it aloud as the way it dissolves.
Where it comes up 1
Within this theme 15
Concepts 2
- Shadow Self
Jung's term for the suppressed part of the psyche, shaped by fear, shame and social rejection. Nev says it 'desperately wants to be integrated' and keeps showing up as mirrors in the…
- Intergenerational Patterns
Patterns, beliefs and shame passed down a family line. Nev went to the Balkans to understand hers, and says shadow work includes these inherited layers.
Quotes 5
An integrated person is not a person who simply eliminated the sense of guilt or the sense of anxiety from his life. He's a person who feels all these things but has no recrimination against himself for feeling them.
What is repressed and suppressed is the most harmful for us. That which we bring out into the light, and that we actually look at with our two eyes and we consciously acknowledge, is so much less of a big deal. ... Once it gets brought into the light, it just dissolves.
It doesn't matter what you learn. If you're in a state of overwhelm, there's nothing you can do with what you've learned. You're just going to freeze and it's going to turn into shame.
If you're creating structures that cannot be touched, that's where the shadow is going to hide. And it knows you're not going to be able to go in.
There's so much in us that's been shamed, that's been rewarded and punished, not because of any real metric of morality and what's good and bad, but rather just because of someone's distortion or the way that somebody's life ended up. There's no real sense behind it.
Insights 4
- Naming what's repressed dissolves it
What stays repressed does the most harm. Saying it out loud and looking at it directly makes it far lighter, which is why talking openly about sexual shame brings breakthroughs.
- Untouchable rules give the shadow shelter
Moral structures that can't be questioned, such as rigidly held religious law, are exactly where the shadow hides, because it knows you won't go in. Religion, like the shadow, has to be…
- Your roots explain inherited patterns
Immigrants and their children can lose touch with the people who came before them, and with it the source of the patterns and shame they carry. Living in her ancestral culture let Nev…
- Shame often reflects caregivers' dysregulation
Much of what we were punished or praised for as children reflected our caregivers' stress and dysregulated nervous systems, not real morality. The unconscious still treats those rules as…
Practices 1
- Speak your shame out loud
Bring repressed shame, including sexual shame or trauma, into the open by naming and talking about it: 'giving it a name and a face'. Nev says this alone often dissolves it.
Stories 2
- Immigrant child discovering her roots
Nev's parents moved to Toronto in 1996, when she was nine months old, and she grew up Canadian with only brief summer trips to the Balkans. Living there, she came to understand her father's…
- Growing up Serbian Orthodox and strict
Nev grew up in a strict Balkan family in the Serbian Orthodox faith, which gave her a lot of shame. She notes that her clients from strict religious homes now mostly call themselves…
Organizations and movements 1
- Serbian Orthodox Church
The religion Nev was raised in within a strict Balkan family. She says it was a source of shame in her upbringing.