While many of the negative events or experiences which happen to us in childhood don’t affect us for life, some of them do, because they get in the way of a man living the life he wants to be living. So the question naturally arises, “What can you do about all this?”

How you can heal emotional wounds – shadow work

What you can do is to find a way to take the energy out of your unconscious and make it conscious; to open up to whatever you’ve hidden away, out of sight if not out of mind. Then you can transform it into something more useful and helpful that serves you better in your life today.

It’s an approach that takes the parts of yourself you stuffed away as a child out of your shadow and brings them back into the light. And it honours them, heals or transforms them if necessary, makes them into a positive and helpful part of you, and finally integrates them into the essence of who you are today.

There are many names for this approach: “Healing The Shadow”, “Emotional Process Work”, and “Shadow Work”, for example. But whatever you call it, this is all about getting your sabotaging, holding-back, limiting and now generally unhelpful parts out of shadow and giving you control over them so you can access their energy in a helpful form. In short, these techniques can make your shadow energy available to you in a healthy, emotionally mature way to use in your life today. And if that sounds exciting, so it should!

You’ll discover how to step into your power. You’ll become more emotionally mature, stronger, more independent, more balanced, and better able to give and receive love.

You’ll be better able to set healthy boundaries and you’ll become a stronger and more powerful leader in your life. You’ll develop the strength and will to get things done more effectively, think more clearly, and stop making harsh judgments about yourself and others.

You’ll develop a much easier relationship with love so you can give and receive genuine love freely. In fact just about every other problem that you have in your interactions with other human beings will become more and more manageable and simply melt away over time.

Perhaps you think that sounds too good to be true. But just for a moment imagine how your life might look right now if you’d enjoyed an ideal childhood in which your needs were fully met. A childhood throughout which you were loved and supported unconditionally and where you were allowed to express your personality exactly as you wished. A childhood in which you could grow to embrace all your qualities and values and learn how to manage all the emotional energies within your personality.

Imagine what your life would now be like if you’d had the opportunity to fully access every part of your psyche rather than having to use your energy in repressing parts of yourself that were unwanted or unsafe to express for some reason in your childhood. Do you think that might have made a difference to your life? Yes?

You are absolutely right; your life would most likely have been very different. Now you can bring those changes to life anyway. Through Emotional Process Work, Healing the Shadow, Shadow Work – call it what you may – you can fully grow into your true self, overcome the blocks of emotional development which have held you back until now, and heal your emotional wounds. And you can do this no matter what stage of life you have reached.

What’s even better is that this approach is equally effective for all of us, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin or any other characteristic which appears to separate us. For when we say that in our workshops and one-to-one consultations, “All of you is welcome here”, we really mean it. And we mean it because our work focuses on the one thing we all have in common – our humanity.  More of that later. For now, let us turn our attention to the archetypes.