1849 || you are what you avoid

0:00Welcome to the Make Your Dan Bed Podcast, a daily motivation podcast designed to help you get out of bed every morning with a little company from me, Dr. Lee Marica. If you struggle with consistency, let's build a little momentum together, whether you make your bed or not. Good morning sunshine, welcome to another day of the Make Your Dan Bed Podcast. I've been sharing an article from meridianuniversity.edu about shadow work specifically through the lens of Carl Young's work. Now it's important to note that a lot of people who have done a lot of research and work with the shadow stress the importance of containment. You need structure, you need formal reflection, and sometimes some professional support to explore the shadow. Otherwise, this work can become destabilizing or self-justifying rather than integrative. But in general, when talking about how to practice shadow work, we are speaking about how we attend carefully to our recurring patterns, our emotional reactions, and our projections, rather than by applying a fixed set of techniques, we're looking at our personal interaction with the world.

1:19A grounded starting point is to focus on one repeating pattern instead of attempting to analyze your entire personality. This might be a familiar conflict in relationships, a predictable reaction in social settings, or a recurring sense of shame, a resentment in our daily life. Working with one single pattern at a time keeps the process psychologically contained. Attention can turn to mapping the experience rather than judging it. Useful questions include identifying what triggered the reaction, what part of your self image feels threatened, and what impulses arise immediately. Then we can move to what feels intolerable to acknowledge in that moment. Over time, this starts to clarify which shadows are active beneath the surface, and beneath the behavior. Projection, as we mentioned yesterday, offers another entry point. Young explains that you cannot eliminate projection, but you can become conscious of it sooner.

2:23A restrained, reflective practice involves noticing what you strongly dislike or idealize and others, and then asking yourself how those qualities exist in you. Even in an inverted way, or in a muted way. For example, when you judge other people as selfish, it might coexist with a refusal to recognize your own needs. You might not even realize you resent their ability to stand up for what they need. Now the aim, as always, is never to self-blame, or even self-correct. The goal is simply to contact parts of your personality that have been excluded from the conversation, or from conscious awareness. This work is ongoing, it requires honesty, patience, and boundaries. Shadow integration unfolds gradually through reflection and relationships, not through force or self-optimization, or just some simple decision that you're going to do better.

3:23Approached in this way, shadow work remains aligned with analytical psychology and mental health responsibility. It supports greater conscious awareness, rather than some quick fix or transformation. Now, young, really focused on the unconscious mind, specifically through dreams. Dreams matter because the unconscious mind is able to express itself with fewer social filters. Dreams theory treats dreams as symbolic communications that compensate for the conscious attitudes that we hold in our waking life. It often reveals what the ego is neglecting or refusing. In practice, dreams from the shadow often contain a threatening figure, an embarrassing exposure, an animal that might evoke fear or fascination, or scenes of pursuit, concealment, or moral compromise. The point is not to interpret these literally, but to ask what psychological situation the dream is staging or mimicking, or what attitude it's trying to correct.

4:26In a period where you are overly controlled, the dream might present chaos, in a period where you're overly identified with being helpful, the dream might show aggression, in a period where you're denying grief, the dream might show abandonment. This is one way to begin seeing your own shadow without making a philosophical concept about it. But it's important to note that in young Ian psychology, shadow integration is not some isolated practice. It belongs to the larger process of individuation. Individuation refers to the lifelong integration of conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche. It's not self-centeredness, but a movement towards greater internal coherence, where you relate to your own complexity instead of splitting into a public persona and a rejected underworld you never show. As this process unfolds, the self emerge as an archetype of wholeness. The self is not the ego, and it's not the higher self as a motivational slogan, but a symbol of psychic totality.

5:32That reorganizes your personality around the deeper center within, rather than social adaptation, which is how most of us have adopted our personality. Young develops this most explicitly in his work, Aeon, where he situates the shadow engagement as a necessary task on the path towards a more integrated psyche. This framing can help us clarify a frequent confusion. The goal of shadow work is not to become the best version of yourself and delete your shadow traits. The goal is to bring more of yourself into alignment with your consciousness, so your life is shaped by your choices rather than your compulsions. Shadow work can support personal growth only because it reduces the need for denial and projection. It can soften the intensity of emotional reactions, not by erasing our emotions, but by making them more intelligible, more understandable, or better communicators. It can support better relationships because you become less driven to assign your unwanted qualities to others and can start to have more empathy towards your initial judgments and compulsions.

6:40But shadow work is not a promise of inner peace on demand. It's not a shortcut to constant confidence. It's not even a guarantee that you'll never struggle again or that your life will become simple. Young's model assumes complexity. What changes is your relationship to that complexity. This is where a lot of the more contemporary thoughts on this work can be really helpful because when archetypes are understood as dynamic organizers of meaning that unfold through our natural development, it becomes easier to see why the shadow doesn't disappear with one insight. You can't just acknowledge it and it goes away. It is shaped by your history, your attachments, your culture, and your ongoing adaptations. It's a part of you whether you like it or recognize it or not. Now, shadow work itself can be incredibly empowering work, but it can also be destabilizing without containment. If you're in a period of acute distress, severe dysregulation, or intense, unhealed drama activation,

7:42diving into your shadow materials alone can overwhelm your capacity to reflect. It doesn't mean you're incapable of doing the work, but it means the work's going to require additional resources, maybe professional help, and a safer pace. In Singer's work, there's a clinical emphasis that is especially relevant here. She treats young Ian work as something that unfolds inside boundaries, where the psyche has room to reveal itself without collapsing into chaos. If you notice that shadow exploration increases your panic or dissociation, or you're urged to harm, whether it's yourself or someone else, or it just severely disrupts your daily life, it's not evidence you're doing it wrong, but it is evidence that you need more support and containment and shouldn't persist in the way you're doing it. The point is, you are not only what you consciously intend. You are also what you habitually avoid, what you deny, what you disown, but your shadow is not your enemy,

8:45and it's also not your whole identity. It's a place where your refused life accumulates, waiting to be integrated into a more conscious relationship with yourself. When you approach shadow work as a reflective practice, you stop trying to become an idealized average person, and you start becoming more real and whole, and that realism often brings a deeper form of ethical strength, because you're no longer pretending you're exempt from the very human capacities that you judge and others. As always, you can access this resource and any other relevant ones that I've found in the show notes, if you're interested. Either way, just know I love you so much, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and I'll talk to you tomorrow while you make your damn bed. Goodbye, cutie. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of the Make Your Damn Bed Podcast. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss tomorrow's episode. You can follow on Instagram and TikTok at NYDB Podcast for occasional updates, and if you could rate and review this episode 5 stars wherever you're listening,

9:49it genuinely helps the podcast at its core. And if you have anyone in your life you think might be interested in hearing what I have had to say, it also makes a huge difference in the sustainability and my ability to make this something worth sharing. So if you have questions or want specific advice, you can email me at nydbpodcast at gmail.com. In the meantime, I've been your host, Julie America, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and I'll talk to you tomorrow while you make your damn bed.