When Shadow Work Becomes Self-Harm
By then, I’d woken up in enough strange beds to know that a new place wasn’t going to save us.
For the better part of four years, we had been jostling aimlessly around the country like a discontented tumbleweed, always chasing the possibility that peace could be found in the next time zone. We wandered from coast to coast, repeatedly uprooting our lives in pursuit of some elusive place where our problems might loosen their grip.
They never did.
So there I was, awake in yet another strange bed, cold sheets against my skin and hot tears on my face, trying to understand how I could feel so spectacularly untethered and yet suffocatingly trapped.
This trapped feeling was not new. It was a childhood friend. It was the oppression of having to remain inside a life in which I felt unsafe and unloved. If this feeling had followed me so faithfully, I wondered, what was the pattern I had yet to see?
I had recently read Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliott. One of the book’s central propositions is that “having is evidence of wanting.” Whatever ugly or painful circumstance you find yourself in, some hidden part of you must get off on it.
I had not fully made heads or tails of my own feelings about the approach, but the idea had stayed with me, rattling around like an errant marble in the back of my mind. So, lying in that strange bed and disappearing under the weight of my own captivity, I began to wonder whether this trapped feeling was something I had wanted all along.
What if some disowned part of me was secretly turned on by my own oppression?
What if I could find her?
What if I could heal her?
Maybe then he wouldn’t need to treat me this way.
If I could identify this twisted, self-destructive desire inside of me, I could honor it, integrate it, heal it… and then watch as his need to mistreat me magically disappeared.
Maybe he would become tender. Safe. Supportive. I might finally get the love, protection, and partnership I was desperate for.
All I had to do was become SO healed and SO whole that he could finally love me correctly.
It was just fawning draped in spiritual robes.
But I willfully pressed that thorn of inquiry into my side that night and carried its pain for quite some time. After each new cruelty, I turned further inward.
What was left in me to heal?
What shadow had I failed to integrate?
What lesson was I still refusing to learn?
These questions gave my restless mind something to hold onto. They gave me work to do. They allowed me to remain hopeful that the relationship could be saved without requiring me to confront the possibility that the man I loved might never become the man I needed him to be.
Those questions would eventually lead me somewhere valuable, but I was asking them before my most basic need had been met: safety.
From the safety of the other side, they might have helped me understand why I compulsively adapted to the person harming me instead of trusting the part of myself that wanted to run.
I remain an enormous supporter of shadow work. I believe it is a foundational pursuit in the evolution of the Self. But this chapter of my life showed me how easily a powerful tool like this can be weaponized against oneself.
This line of inquiry could never make him safe.
I didn’t need to change my mindset. I needed to leave.
I was on a sinking ship, and instead of heading for a lifeboat, I sat there contemplating what it was about drowning that secretly made me feel all hot and bothered.
But it wasn’t turn on. It was terror.
This approach to shadow work borrows the language of BDSM without adequate reverence for consent. Without consent, kink simply becomes harm. That was a distinction I had been encouraged to overlook.
This seems like it should go without saying, but being in a situation is not the same as consenting to it.
That feeling I had of being trapped was not proof that some kinky part of me enjoyed my captivity. It was the part of me that had already withdrawn her consent and was trying to communicate that to me in the clearest way she knew how.
And instead of honoring the sacred wisdom of that NO, I continued to investigate what inner yes must be hiding beneath it.
This is the line where shadow work can become self-harm.
If we accept that our circumstances are entirely a creation of our subconscious desires, the victim is suddenly always responsible for their own abuse.
I don’t find liberation or enlightenment in that. I just see gaslighting.
The seductive part of this type of self-reflection is that it offers us the comfort and self-satisfaction of “doing the work” while allowing us to avoid the actual work that frightens us most.
For me, the actual work would have been listening to that part of me that felt trapped. It would have been honoring her strained screams that she did not consent.
If I could go visit my younger self, lying in that strange bed… I would take her hand and softly whisper:
You don’t want this. You never have.
That’s the whole point.
Come with me.
With love,
Shannon
If you’d like to go deeper…
I created Safety Before Shadow, as a companion to this essay. It is a tool to help all of us find the sacred balance between self-inquiry and self-preservation.
This resource is a guided reflection worksheet that will walk you through…
…Separating reality from interpretation.
…Tuning in to what your body and soul are trying to communicate.
…Assessing whether further inquiry is healthy in this moment.
…And (when ready) approaching shadow work from a place of gentleness and self-love.
Safety Before Shadow is available to paid subscribers, along with the growing Longing & Light library of guided reflections and companion resources.
