Emotional Shadow Work
To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light.111
~c.g. jung
In previous chapters we learned that experiencing all our emotions is key to becoming an integrated and therefore regenerative person. This integrity translates to how wisely we act and how we treat others and the natural world. Additionally, to heal from past love wounds—our small “t” and large “T” traumas—and face current climate trauma, we must be able to tolerate and be transformed by a broad range of emotions. If we cannot contact and embody all our emotions, we can’t mitigate their harm or reap their boons. To summarize, befriending and embodying all our emotions, especially our difficult ones, allow us to:
1. Heal through our past love wounds.
2. Cease displacing so much of our pain onto the world and exacerbating climate crisis.
3. Better cope with the pain arising from the breakdown of our world.
4. Increase our fear-mark so we can interface with climate crisis and work for its cure.
To this end, we must identify both pleasurable and difficult emotions that are repressed and underrepresented in us and strive to skillfully experience and express them. This form of emotional intelligence is what I call “positive and negative emotional shadow work.” This chapter therefore is about uncovering our shadow emotions so we can embody the emotions we need for full-spectrum emotional intelligence and to offer a more holistic contribution to climate cure.
In traditional depth psychology, the shadow refers to unconscious aspects of our personality with which we do not identify. Shadow may also refer to the entire contents of our unconscious—everything of which we are not fully aware. Shadow is the unknown side of ourselves, the parts to which we say, faithfully but mistakenly, “that’s not me.” While these hidden aspects, or blind spots, usually refer to tendencies, motivations, or qualities, in this chapter we primarily explore our shadow emotions—those emotions trapped inside us we have rejected as “not me.” My experience is that these hidden emotions often strongly influence, or indeed govern, our motivations, beliefs, and actions. We will also explore why it’s imperative to acknowledge and integrate these powerful, dormant forces.
Half Full and Half Empty
As we’ve learned, emotional transformation and subsequent integration are the path to “becoming the change we want to see in the world” and “changing our consciousness.” There’s much more to these phrases than is commonly gleaned, which is why our world has not transformed and is crumbling. The rub for our failure to be this change in consciousness rests in the difference between an embodied (Earth-oriented, black-and-white, emotionally intelligent) and a disembodied (imagination-oriented, black-and-white, emotion-denying) orientation. Shadow work, from which we birth comprehensive kindness by working through darkness for the light, is key to an Earth-centric life because it helps us to transform our pain into service … rather than weaponize our pain.
Shadow emotions are those we have difficulty accepting not only in ourselves but in others. Some of our “positive” and enjoyable shadow emotions include joy, ecstasy, inspiration, empathy, and pleasure. “Negative” or challenging shadow emotions include grief, anger, fear, worry, and despair. Reclaiming both our positive and negative neglected shadow emotions helps deepen our finer jewels of being human. I place the polarities of “positive” and “negative” in quotation marks because, remember, these are relative states and perceptions, not concrete value judgments.
While we have learned the importance of befriending our negative emotions, liberating our positive shadow is also essential, true to Yin-Yang wisdom. Embracing sustainable, non-addictive, pleasurable emotion is just as important as embracing difficult emotions. Our capacity for pleasant psycho-spiritual states keeps our love of life and our will to live alive. Our cultural norm is to repress and marginalize negative shadow emotions and to celebrate and encourage positive emotion. We generally deny our grief, fear, anger, and despair more than we do more enjoyable states. For this reason, here we focus on integrating our “negative” shadow emotions.
Jung believed that shadow is our link to more primitive instincts, which we override with our conscious minds during childhood. In this sense, our emotional shadows often result from traumas big and small, as we discussed in the previous chapter. We may find it just as difficult to feel pleasure as we do grief, for example. Without joy, we become cynical and quickly descend into nihilism and apathy. This extreme can lead to unrealistic, pessimistic perspectives based on emotional reasoning. It can also lead to black-and-white thinking and catastrophizing—seeing an empty glass even if it’s half or a quarter full. When we can hold our dark and light sides hand in hand, we see a half-filled glass as part full and part empty, not only part full or part empty.
When pessimism divorced from reality overtakes us, we have little incentive to work toward a better version of ourselves and the world. Such negativity becomes the weakest link in our ability to be part of climate cure. For this reason, it’s important to have some positive emotion already in hand before we dedicate ourselves to the not-so-fun and temporarily distressing self-work of confronting what’s painful. This reservoir of positive regard is what’s called being “well resourced.” Being well resourced also includes self-care and support from others, including the natural world. Experiencing the Yang of pleasure, fun, and happiness helps to integrate the Yin counterparts of grief, anger, despair, and fear. Unsustainable living arises when we excessively cling to positivity or negativity. Modern Western culture is guilty of the former: we collectively cling to too much positivity while our unconscious negative shadow emotions run the show of violence and destruction. This denial of our shadow leads to climate bypassing. To remind, climate bypassing means to deny difficult emotions that arise in relation to climate crisis, which leads to our ignoring climate crisis and prevents us from wholeheartedly engaging with it.
Befriending Our Shadow
Each of us has a unique preponderance of emotional tendencies. Noticing which emotions we have difficulty expressing, or being present with in others, can be a portal into our emotional shadow. We may, for example, find ourselves unable to celebrate another’s joy or success. We may be uncomfortable around or unable to tolerate another’s anger, fear, or sadness. Noticing this, we can choose to practice welcoming and expressing these emotions. A first step into emotional shadow work is naming the emotion. “Oh, that’s sadness I’m feeling” or “Wow, I’m angry!” We also can practice hanging out with these emotions in others to integrate our shadow. At first this might be uncomfortable, so we need to practice tolerating the discomfort.
Emotions we are uncomfortable with often lead us to our hidden love wounds. Why is this? Two reasons are: learning and mirroring. We grow up around others who don’t share or tolerate certain emotions and we learn to abandon or repress the same in ourselves. We also mirror the emotions of our elders, embodying those they express. Or, if we recognize their shadow, we knee-jerk to the opposite extreme to “not be like them.” Either polarity separates us from our wholeness, because the extremes neglect the positive aspects of the shadow we reject. For example, we may gravitate to kindness and softness in reaction to a caretaker who abusively expresses anger. As a result, our own anger—along with assertiveness, boundary-setting, and protection—becomes repressed under a façade of gentleness. A more holistic solution is not only to seek out kindness, but also to embrace the anger and all other emotions that arise in us (emotional honesty) and process the pain the abusive anger caused us. This way we protect ourselves and retain the core benefit in anger and any other emotions.
If we cannot express our emotions in the face of hurt, they become locked inside us, repressed in our shadow. When we encounter these hidden emotions, such as we did with grief in the previous chapter, they are linked to the story of that heartbreak. Memories and images of a painful past may surface as these emotions are released. Working through shadow emotion that results from fractioned learning or unhealthy mirroring is best done in therapy, aided by our own self-care resources such as journaling, peer support, and nature connection.
There is no shame in harboring shadow emotions. Everyone I know is heartbroken to some degree. It’s our soulful responsibility—for sacred permission—to reckon with this hurt. In the process, we become more experienced with and integrate aspects of our vitality, which then become part of a fuller psychic palette. If I don’t express or feel much anger, for example, this can be a clue that I’m harboring substantial hidden anger. Releasing repressed anger, while uncomfortable and unwieldy at first, liberates the visionary and exuberant energy trapped inside it. This creative mobilization of anger can also act as a powerful antidepressant, as it did not only for Greta Thunberg but also for youth activist Mary Annaise Heglar. Author Ellie Hansen writes, “Heglar’s depression only subsided, she says, when she channeled her despair into anger and passion for climate activism.” 112
Shadow Gifts
Shadow emotion, creativity, and passion are intimately linked. In her essay on the shadow, psychologist Carolyn Kaufman shares Jung’s view on the connection between our shadow and creativity: “… in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness—or perhaps because of this—the shadow is the seat of creativity.” 113
Repressed anger, as just discussed, mutes our passion (creativity + vitality) and can lead to physical health problems related to what we call in Chinese medicine “excess heat” syndromes. Anger, we recall, pertains to the Yang-natured Wood Phase, which corresponds with heat and creativity. The healthy expression of Wood Phase energy is creativity, which emerges in part from healing through and integrating anger’s positive and negative aspects. Anger’s hot, rising, creative energy needs to mobilize its vitality (sustainably engaged and expressed heat). The creative, expressive gifts inherent in anger are both vital capacities for climate mobilization. The courage for rebellion, the inspiration and creativity for engaging in regenerative solutions to carbon-heavy activities, and the willpower for making personal changes and “sacrifices,” are all fueled by anger.
When anger’s creative energy is stymied, excess heat accumulates inside us, which can lead to insomnia, irritability, apathy, and volatile rage. Repressed heat and creativity also lead to impulsivity, needless busyness, and compulsive activity. In this light, “excess heat” is actually “misused or misdirected heat.” This agitating, misused heat translates to more outward heat as aimless, fleeting, and frivolous activity—often in the form of “fun” and entertainment—resulting in needless greenhouse gas emissions. Here we see how internal (personal) warming affects outer (climate) warming.
In addition to anger, all our challenging emotions impart hidden gifts. I discuss these dynamics in my article, “Dark Jewels: Mining the Gifts of Eight Difficult Emotions,” which I summarize here:
1. Guilt returns us to our values, morality, and care.
2. Fear, as the “helpful” variety discussed in Chapter 4, alerts us to our limits and boundaries for self-protection, thereby guiding us to right action, and therefore to care.
3. Remorse signals that we have made a mistake, caused harm, or could have done better. Remorse, like guilt, informs an appropriate apology and remedy.
4. Despair can help us face and grapple with the truth, let go of worry, anxiety, and unnecessary control, as well as reveal inner strength we didn’t know we possessed.
5. Worry and Anxiety, when realistic, can show us what we care about and prompt us to helpful action.
6. Grief shows us what we love, clears our pain, and slows us down. Grief curbs anger, can alleviate anxiety, and helps us empathize and connect with others in pain.
7. Envy and Jealousy reveal what we aspire to, pointing us to our greater potential and fulfillment, as well as what matters to us and what we want to protect.
8. Anger or Rage alerts us to where we have been hurt (which we can also grieve), what we care about, where our boundaries lie, what we want to protect, and provides the fuel for right action.
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Eight Difficult Emotions Reflection
For each of the above eight difficult emotions, describe an event or issue in your life which has elicited that emotion. Allow yourself to express that emotion by feeling it and/or journaling about it, or by any other expressive means. After you’ve expressed yourself, identify any of the hidden gifts this emotion might bestow upon you and how this new dynamic might affect your life.
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A patient named Dana recently came to my practice. She felt stuck, frustration (a form of anger), and struggled for a sense of purpose. Feeling stagnant and frustrated are symptoms of a Wood phase imbalance in Chinese medicine.114 Dana also was dealing with painful, inflamed acne, a clear sign in Chinese medicine of excess heat.
To address Dana’s complaints, I first used acupuncture and herbs to address the excess heat in her liver and heart organ networks.115 Simultaneously, I helped Dana identify the places in her body where she felt “stuck,” by asking her where she felt chronically tight, dissociated, and bothered. As she felt into these places, she encountered feelings of anger and frustration in her throat, chest, and abdomen. Because she liked to write, I invited Dana to journal what these angry and frustrated feelings wanted to communicate to her. What emerged was remarkable.
As Dana’s emotional repression and heat were mobilized and cleared both through treatment and therapeutic journaling, she rediscovered her voice and a heartfelt calling: to do creative writing work with children, a passion she had abandoned years earlier. In my experience, a dormant creative longing often lies hidden behind repressed liver and heart heat. The liver and heart organ systems in Chinese medicine are intimately related. They collaborate to help us galvanize our passion into action. After more treatment and soul-searching, Dana resolved to pursue her revived calling. Her frustration and, eventually, her acne also eased.
Although the acne was not the root of Dana’s complaint, this symptom helped lead her to the core of her dis-ease. She understood her painful breakouts as a disguised, maladaptive expression of her pain caused by not following her desires. Trapped within her repressed anger were her finer jewels of inspiration and creativity, meaning, and purpose. Through holistic treatment, she transformed her unused, and therefore misdirected, heat into passionate service. It took courage for Dana to acknowledge and embody her anger. She is an example of how we can all use the goodness we have in hand (her original courage) to create more goodness (her renewed, amplified courage). Leaving her frustration, irritability, and physical symptoms unaddressed, Dana’s vitality and calling would have remained buried in the shadow, depriving herself and others of her gifts.
It’s worth highlighting the difference between this deeply regenerative form of treatment and the typical, corresponding Western medicine protocol of pain killers, sedatives, and topical acne cream. The latter treats presenting symptoms with medicines that carry deleterious side effects, and ignores the psychological drivers of the soul’s desires that, once revealed, contribute to a more beautiful world. Western medicine’s linear treatment of disease misses the poetry, meaning, and messages in our symptoms and the deeper causes of distress, which can arise spontaneously in holistic treatment or with a little digging, as they did for Dana. Allopathic treatment focuses on fixing the physical manifestations of disease, which is sometimes what is needed. Holistic treatment facilitates the symptoms of pathology into gifts, while curbing their harmful effects.
Not all medical symptoms have hidden meanings, but often there is more to our diseases than meets the eye. An example from my own life is when I tore the medial meniscus in my knee at age twenty-five (which I eventually healed with natural medicine). The pain was excruciating and my tears flowed abundantly. But after about thirty minutes, something surprising yet providential and beautiful occurred: I realized I was crying not because of my knee pain but over my parents’ recent divorce. My femur represented my father and my tibia my mother, and I (represented by my meniscus) was in between them, torn and aching. This experience propelled me into psychotherapy, where I did the bulk of my grief work that transformed my life.
When we address the physical, emotional, and relational aspects of disease, we join our inner genius with a world that needs and benefits from these gifts. When medicine embraces our dark, shadow emotions—in Dana’s case, her pain, frustration, and longing, and for me my hidden grief—instead of viewing them only linearly and pathologically, we create integrated, holistic cures and human beings more able to minister to and steward a thriving world.
Experiencing and wisely working with all our emotions re-wilds, regenerates, and creates a thriving “jungle” inside us. A vibrant inner ecology translates to a vibrant outer ecology. When we ignore this inner-outer holism, we ignore beauty and create horrors inside and out. The problems of our world, such as climate collapse, are rooted in our failure to engage with our best-kept, most healing resources—the treasure trove of difficult emotions in our deep hearts from which emerge our finer jewels of being human, to augment the goodness we already have in hand, with which we create sustainable thriving.
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Emotion in Illness Reflection
Can you recall any illness or physical injury that revealed your hidden desires or emotions? Did their release help ease your physical discomfort? Did the discovery of these positive or negative shadow emotions enhance your life? If so, how? Feel free to journal about any other aspects of your experience and realizations.
Catharsis
Unprocessed grief (a Yin emotion), as we’ve learned, often manifests as depression, and apathy. It also contributes to symptoms of imbalance in its counterpart emotion of anger (a Yang emotion), which often manifests as violence and unsustainable destruction. For Dana, it manifested as a loss of meaning and purpose. Additionally, the degree to which we are uncomfortable with another’s grief can indicate the degree of core grieving we have to do.
Recall that grief is the emotion of the Metal Phase. The lung and large intestine are its corresponding Yin-Yang organs. Challenges with expressing grief often show up in this pair of organ networks. They also show up in the heart, since grief and love are two sides of the same coin. Acupuncture helps to facilitate the embodiment and expression of grief. Patients have teared up and outright sobbed while receiving acupuncture on the meridians (called “channels” nowadays) corresponding with these organ networks. And not because of any pain from the needles! As a result, blockages of unprocessed sadness, as well as other symptoms pertaining to the lung and large intestine organ systems, can be mobilized from the body-mind. Patients often appear and express feeling renewed after releasing grief this way.
Holistic medicine is beautiful because it works on all aspects of our humanness simultaneously. We can access emotion via the physiology and organ system body maps, and vice versa, all within the cogent and time-tested paradigm of the Five Phases. Please don’t worry if you don’t fully grasp the Chinese medicine terms discussed here. The takeaway is that this holistic medicine’s integrative paradigm can help us release under-expressed shadow emotion and curb compensatory, over-expressed emotion (as in Dana’s case). In the same way our mind, body, and emotions are inextricably interconnected, the metaphorical framework of Yin-Yang and the Five Phases helps us understand our interdependence with, and mutual effects on, the biosphere and the planet.
Befriending our own difficult emotions and purging our pain ultimately translate to better overall health. So does accepting, and even rejoicing in, these emotions in others. Greater emotional breadth and depth augments our compassion and empathy, helping us build more intimate and resilient community networks. Holistic healing via the web of organ networks translates to more robust social and ecological webs of connection. We create relationships with more common ground, the way Pema Chödrön, one modern champion for our humanness, describes so aptly in her book, Comfortable with Uncertainty: “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.” 116
Pathos
Another way to get in touch with under-represented shadow emotions is to notice which emotions arise in us, or fail to, during provocative moments. We might notice these most poignantly when watching a movie, listening to music, reading a poem … or an article about climate change. In ancient Greece, such elicitations in oratory and theater were the function of pathos: an appeal to the emotions of the audience to evoke feelings lying dormant in them. Because of its power to heal, such catharsis was an early form of psychotherapy.
In pathos we identify with certain characters and themes to release or simply notice unexpressed or under-expressed emotions. Our emotional reaction to a sad song or scene might range from feeling completely unmoved, to choking back tears, to feeling the welling up of tears that do not spill, to weeping uncontrollably. These instances show us which emotions we have difficulty expressing or are most prominent for us. Being open to feel these emotions and allowing them to see the light of day, if only gradually, and being with any triggered memories of past or current loss that are still “alive” for us, can help us process backlogged pain and free our hearts.
None of this suggests we should indulge any emotion at any time. Yet, when we can feel and appropriately express a wide range of emotion in skillful measure, we embody and flesh out the full Yin-Yang symbol of our heart-minds and become more regenerative people. When we have difficulty experiencing any of the Five Phase emotions (anger, joy, worry, sadness, and fear), we can overidentify with a world event, become excessively angry or sad, afraid or excited about it. This too creates a shadow, resulting in misaligned relationship with reality. As a result, we may displace our personal, backlogged pathos onto global issues. Accurate assessment, measured concern, and wise resolve get lost in the projection of catharsis. Yet, because they purge us, such projection and displacement are ultimately helpful, as long as we realize we are doing it. We are dealing with real life, after all, not a theater performance or movie. I’ve observed this dynamic frequently—which, ironically, saddens and upsets me—when discussing activist issues on social media: lots of drama, little measured discussion, and even less resolve to take action.
When we need to vent, we can mindfully allow our overreactions. Shadow emotions we make contact with will often emerge from us in extreme form. This extreme usually modulates over time, once the emotion is processed and the issue surrounding it is metabolized. A key to being skillful when this occurs is to be aware of the overreaction … and allow it to happen, in private. For example, when I contact rage (old or new) I find it most helpful to journal it, scream it, or otherwise share it with a trusted friend or therapist—not express the bulk of it publicly in the moment. Releasing the rage helps unburden me so I can levelheadedly revisit the issue and adjust any misperception of reality I assumed during the upheaval. This way, I honor myself by releasing what has been trapped inside, and remain cognizant of reality by not allowing emotional backlog to unreasonably skew my view of objective facts. This also helps prevent emotional reasoning and unhelpful knee-jerk reactions. All this is true integrative healing: working with head and heart to better ourselves while being fair and kind to the world around us. With skill and attention, we can release extreme emotion and keep our heads on straight—or mostly so!
Reflect on any movie, play, speech, performance, poem, or other piece of art that has elicited strong emotion from you. Which emotions were most strongly stirred for you? Briefly describe the eliciting event and your experience of the emotion/s that emerged from you, including how the experience has helped and changed you. Which emotions do you feel might currently be “stuck” inside you and need more expression? What form of pathos (external, eliciting event) do you sense could help you release them?
The Costs of Avoidance
In his powerful essay on racial justice titled, “What Kind of People Are We Becoming?,” Umair Haque writes, “We look away from the things we must look at, because they frighten us with the knowledge of ourselves.” 117 When we displace shadow emotions and simultaneously overidentify with the emotions we are more comfortable with, we might avoid dealing with crucial issues altogether because we can’t handle the shadow emotions triggered in us. In other words, we avoid exposing ourselves to difficult reality because we fear how it makes us feel. This is the dynamic of our “fear-mark” as discussed in Chapter 4.
Fear of feeling dark emotion compromises us, for example, when we hide from climate awareness and persist uninformed, or when we hide from having a difficult talk with someone we care about. An artist I know is unable to discuss important issues because he becomes defensively angry when someone challenges his beliefs. When triggered like this, he perceives he is wrong and shames himself. “I am bad, wrong, stupid, and worthless,” he tells himself, when self-correction is all that’s called for. He could replace his self-shaming with, “I misspoke or made a mistake or didn’t realize something; I am not a bad person.” He experiences his triggered emotional reaction but fails to inquire into the inaccurate conclusions informing his reaction. As a result, he needlessly retreats in fear of being upset, when the cause for his upset is misperceived, via emotional reasoning, to begin with.
Perpetually perturbed, my friend avoids engaging in such discussions, concluding, “I’d rather be happy and just do my art.” This way, he conceals his wound, disengages from further edification, mistakes the facts, perpetuates defensiveness, and remains wounded and in hiding, a victim of his own lack of reckoning. If he were able to work with his anger and the feelings of worthlessness and shame that arise when he is wrong, he could bolster his emotional intelligence, see beyond his emotional reasoning, unburden his heart, create more valuable relationships, and experience more joy. He might also discover more passion and fulfillment than he does by merely “doing his own thing.” Overcoming shame indeed helps us welcome goodness and become happier, more engaged, and more effective.
When we compromise our emotional healing, we shrink away from what begs for our participation. Noticing our emotional discomfort zones and reckoning with our shadow and backlogged love wounds reduces this maladaptive tendency. As we learn to handle the feelings that difficult issues stir, we knee-jerk less, think more realistically, become more equipped to face troubling external issues, and speak up in the name of justice. This is why emotional intelligence and its attendant critical thinking have everything to do with contributing to climate cure. We see now how truly difficult—if not impossible—it is to act consistently wisely and compassionately enough without shadow work. Our global predicament originates inside us.
Our capacity for pain, horror, and empathy are limited, and chronic overexposure can shut us down. Constant media streams of traumatic events desensitize and cause us to avoid learning about important issues. We respond less to news of the hundredth mass shooting or species extinction than we do to the first few. We become inured and can no longer take even terrible tragedies to heart for too long anymore. We must unconsciously filter out overwhelming information just to remain functional. Learning to filter information more consciously, however—similarly to how we extend awareness to what feel like overwhelming emotional triggers and extremes—enables us to selectively take note of information that is crucial not to ignore.
Another reason we don’t care as much as we could is that we relate to bad news as another reality show or movie, when it’s not. This is another pathological form of normalization. We unconsciously assume, if it’s on TV, it’s entertainment and must not be real. The parents and peers of mass shooting victims and survivors from any of the recent massive hurricanes or floods can assure you the horrors are real. After enduring two massive evacuations—first from the Thomas Fire in southern California and then from Kilauea volcano’s lava eruption on the Big Island of Hawaii—I also assure you these events have severe impacts beyond our mere imagination of them.
Inner and Outer Collapse
It’s arguably more important to prepare psychologically and spiritually for further climate breakdown than it is to prepare physically. One way is to begin a process of conscious personal collapse that simultaneously renews you. To use a metaphor from current climate change events, this self-initiated collapse can serve like a controlled burn for a wildfire: a little pain now to help mitigate greater devastation later.
Personal breakdown is preparation for climate breakdown, and vice versa. You can begin such a process of relatively controlled chaos by feeling all your feelings, exposing yourself to climate change news, critically thinking through any unrealistic rosy or catastrophic assumptions you have, and addressing any major, unresolved grief in your heart. These practices increase psycho-spiritual resiliency by helping you to acknowledge and meet reality while wholeheartedly facing challenging experiences.
With support from others, this kind of emotional shadow work will free up your vitality, creativity, and sensitivity, and prepare you well for difficult news, climate activism, and tougher times ahead. Another incentive for engaging these initiatives now is to take advantage of the relative calm and regulation present in yourself and in your community before times get tougher.
Climate change aside, this is the work of a lifetime to rejuvenate and awaken your life. Climate crisis included, it’s even more important. Case in point: at several junctures while healing from my losses to the lava in Hawaii, I realized the inner resiliency I had cultivated prior—in particular through anxiety management, grief work, and clawing my way out of depression—allowed me to endure the moment-to-moment unknowing and eventual loss of my home and farm without going mad and falling apart.
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Collapse Reflection
Reflect on any instances in your life when you have fallen apart: had a nervous breakdown, fallen seriously ill, or suffered significant physical injury. For each instance, describe how it changed you and made you more resilient. Then, pick out key words from your writing that capture the ways you overcame or grew stronger and wiser through these experiences. For each word you choose, describe how that quality or aptitude might help you cope with climate stress.
Our Climate Shadow
Climate disease is human-made; it originates from us. If its cure were as simple as changing our behavior, we would already have done so. Indeed, climate crisis results from deep psychological processes that propel us to act persistently against our survival despite the overabundance of foreboding evidence. Climate cataclysm therefore reflects our collective inner crisis. We heal this inner crisis via shadow work, in particular emotional shadow work.
To become one with climate breakdown is to recognize it as part of who we are. This allows us to take radical responsibility for it. When we recognize climate crisis is our unresolved darkness descending upon us, we begin to heal it by owning our shadow. Because climate crisis is arguably the greatest darkness ever to befall humanity (and true to Yin-Yang and depth psychological wisdom), it also holds the seeds for our greatest light, which is to create a sane and equitable life for all. Transforming our inner darkness transforms climate darkness because it changes the nature of the emotions that propel our actions, and therefore the effects of these actions. Instead of hurt people hurting others, we become healed people healing others. We change infertile, denied shadow into fertile, integrated shadow. The latter bears sustainable light; the former remains a death wish.
To become climate-aware and climate-engaged in the most holistic sense is to become able to act wisely in all domains of life and to continue acting and adjusting wisely in relation to external cues. Our emotions, when we are attentive to them and they are regulated, alert us to these cues. Our difficult emotions in particular alert us to when our wellness is in jeopardy; this is why our dark emotions are adaptive and secretly at the helm of saving the planet and ourselves.
Because we collectively deny our shadow, radical climate cure is a steep learning curve. But since we have to become shadow-aware to save ourselves, emotional shadow work is crucial to this end. The most potent way to engage this is to position ourselves so our dark emotions—especially those that arise from climate crisis—can transform us. An example is the grief work described in the previous chapter. This orientation requires humility, honesty, and courage. In this sense, pain is our guru, not our enemy. Our shadow pain can save us. But if we act on our fear of avoiding it, it will destroy us.
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Climate Shadow Expression
Which climate-related emotions, that you don’t readily feel or express, do you sense might be lurking inside you? Jot them down. Then, allow yourself to journal freely about them, or otherwise creatively express these emotions. See if you can write from instead of about your emotion. An example of writing about anxiety is: Stronger wildfires are predicted in the future and this scares me. In contrast, writing from your anxiety is: I feel afraid about future wildfires. Beginning with the words “I feel” can help you stay embodied in the emotion and write from it.
Integrating Shadow
We never wholly vanquish our malevolent shadow. We integrate what we can by learning to make our unconscious conscious enough, tend to its pain, notice when it hides or acts out, and appropriately encourage or moderate its expression. We also get better at noticing our triggers and managing our reactions to them, which translates to compassion and preventing harm. Such mindfulness and emotional work allow renewal to outweigh malevolence.
One way to address our sadness and anger is to cry or yell out from the pain these emotions cause us. Bursts of raw emotion renew us in the act of breaking us open. It’s important we also understand when to willfully curb these emotions, especially when we are powerfully tempted to direct them outward at other people or the natural world, especially before learning the facts. Another way is to work mindfully with both fear and anxiety, as discussed in depth in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. This kind of inner activism does not render us perfect, but better—better enough to stay within a functional range of death and rebirth, inner work and outer action, humility and boldness, Yin and Yang.
Because both our dark and light (positive and negative) shadows sequester our finer jewels for being human, ignoring or eradicating them would be akin to throwing the prized baby out with the apparently only dirty bathwater. This is why Jung believed that, “To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his light.” 118 We engage shadow work via negativa style (paradoxically), by fully allowing our under-experienced shadow emotions to emerge and change us, so beauty and light can emerge unbidden from suffering and darkness. Radical emotional acceptance creates nonlinear change and exponentially regenerative actions. In stark contrast, physical healing often requires we actively fend off, manipulate, and try to fix what hurts. We are reminded: different domains of healing require different approaches.
Recognizing and remembering this Yin-Yang dichotomy of linear versus nonlinear healing is pivotal for how we engage with what hurts at different levels of our being. It is also emblematic of the linear and rational versus circular and regenerative models of global progress and transformation. Our overdependence on linear perspectives for personal and global systems creates more derangement than we can sustain. Regenerating biological systems, such as rebuilding the soil, planting new forests and reviving old ones, as well as undamming streams and rivers, are ultimately superior to adding synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, clear-cutting, and blocking the free-flowing arteries of the planet.
Similarly, holistic medicine regenerates our wellness more over the long term, while allopathic medicine helps best in emergencies and when natural means are insufficient. Degrowth and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions by consuming and driving less and regreening the planet are more holistic, sane ways of challenging climate crisis than geoengineering the skies and scrubbing the atmosphere of CO2 with massive machines. But unless we can act preventively—akin to visiting the doctor soon enough—drastic palliative measures akin to global chemotherapy will likely be used.
In addition to a lack of education about climate disruption, our underlying resistance to embodying our shadow emotions drives both the degree to which we confront climate crisis and our response-in-action to it. We must be comfortable with feeling bad enough to welcome Yin (dark and difficult) as well as Yang (light and easy), so we can embody and employ fertile, sustainable darkness to serve goodness. The more we cozy up to shadow, the more we can cozy up to inconvenient truths and effect real change. That’s the rub. We can’t enjoy the light without welcoming its counterpart, and we accomplish this through shadow work. I do not know a greater, more tragic irony than to believe otherwise.
Jung believed that everyone possesses a shadow, and the less one is aware of it, the darker and more entrenched it becomes. If we become aware of our blind spots, we can reconcile them, but if they remain unconscious, we can’t integrate them. For too long we have unconsciously denied the dark, as well as the power of our emotions to shape our fate. Consciously uncovering and working through our positive and negative shadow emotions allow us to change both our personal and planetary destinies.
• Exercise •
Chapter 7 Journaling
Please also refer to the additional in-text exercises for this chapter.
Take out your journal or notepad, place it in front of you, and enjoy creating your responses to the following:
1. While reading this chapter, did you overhear any part of yourself speaking to the rest of you, and if so, what did it say? Write this down, along with any more you learned about your shadow from this chapter.
2. Which emotions are you most uncomfortable feeling, expressing, and being with in others? Honestly journal about why you think this is so. Can you identify any past insults, injuries, or insufficient mirroring from others that dissuaded you from any of these emotions?
3. Write down three names of others you have treated poorly. How have any of the positive or negative shadow emotions you identified in #2 influenced you to treat others poorly?
4. When others act out and “dump” onto you or the ones you love, how do you both protect yourself and your loved ones? What would it take for you to “hold space” for the ones who “dump” (such as practicing “not taking it personally”) by responding with compassion and understanding (when appropriate), rather than merely perpetuating more blame and violence?
111. Jung, “Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology,” 872.
112. Hansen, “Our Climate Change Inaction: Is ‘Climate Trauma’ the Missing Link?”
113. Kaufman, “Three-Dimensional Villains – Finding Your Character’s Shadow.”
114. Note, Chinese medicine acknowledges imbalance more so than pathology, per se, because within pain and dysfunction are hidden joy and functionality, true to the interdependence of Yin and Yang. This is consistent with Jung’s positive and negative shadow being relative states, and not inherently bad or good.
115. Remember, they are called “organ networks” or “organ systems” because they relate to a constellation of mind-body qualities, as discussed in Chapter 3.
116. Chödrön, Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion.
117. Haque, “What Kind of People Are We Becoming?”
118. Jung, “Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology,” 872.