Shadow Work Isn't What You Think: The Hidden Patterns Running Your Life

Shadow Work Isn't What You Think: The Hidden Patterns Running Your Life 

When you hear the phrase shadow work, what comes to mind? Darkness? Trauma? The parts of yourself you'd rather avoid?

In this illuminating episode of Star Women Rising, Melinda explores a different perspective on shadow work—one that isn't about fighting your darkness, but about uncovering the unconscious patterns, roles, and survival strategies that have quietly shaped your life for years. 

From being the fixer, caretaker, peacekeeper, and performer to constantly managing emotional environments and anticipating the next crisis, Melinda shares how many of the traits she once believed defined her were actually protective mechanisms developed long ago.

What happens when you stop identifying with those roles? What if the shadow isn't something to fear—but a doorway to discovering who you really are?

✨ In this episode, you'll discover:

•  What shadow work really means beyond the spiritual buzzwords 
•  How survival patterns become mistaken for personality traits 
•  Why people-pleasing, fixing, and rescuing can drain your life force 
•  The hidden connection between hypervigilance and emotional exhaustion 
•  How unconscious behaviors quietly shape your reality 
•  Why setting boundaries isn't selfish—it's healing 
•  How self-discovery begins when you stop living for everyone else 

This conversation is an invitation to grab a flashlight and gently explore the hidden corners of your life—not with judgment, but with curiosity and compassion.

Because your shadow isn't the enemy.

It may be pointing you toward the most authentic version of yourself you've yet to meet.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Star Women Rising, where cosmic roots meet earthly power. I'm Melinda, and together we'll awaken the fire within and above, exploring intuition, soul wisdom, and the ancient truths written in the stars. This isn't about escaping the world. It's about remembering who you are and rising stronger in it. Star Women Rising is part of the Chicology Podcast Collective. Let's jump right in. Speaking of Chicology, if you haven't already, please, please, please, please, check out some of the other podcasts under the Chicology Collective. Some real powerful women sharing some real powerful stories about their own journeys. You're sure to find something there, right? We're not we don't live on an island. So before I uh get started, I'd like to invite everyone, if you're ready, to go to that catch-all drawer you have and pull out your biggest halogen flashlight. Because today we're gonna shine some light on the shadow. If you're like me, this whole concept of shadow work has it's been kind of strange. Like what the what the hell is shadow work, right? And and maybe I'm not looking in the right places, maybe I haven't quite tapped into something that I can relate to. Maybe I haven't been understanding this concept of of shadow work. And it's something I I feel like I've been participating in, but not necessarily in the way that I've always heard it described. I've done a lot of different modalities, I've done some hypnotherapy that I think has actually um tapped into maybe some aspects of uh these hidden aspects of me. Um, but I you know, I just could never quite grasp what exactly people are are talking about when they're discussing doing shadow work. And I I also don't feel like the shadow is this spooky character that you know you're you are too afraid to look at, you know, like it's just too hideous to see. I I have a very different vibe on that, and I'm not even sure that that's what people are portraying it to be. I just I just haven't found anything that I have connected to, other than my own experience of shining that halogen flashlight into those corners kind of reminds me of my morning. I was out vacuuming and got up under some door jam areas and got some of those hidden yucky spiders. I hate spiders. I have a healthy respect for them. You know, they have their place, but I absolutely hate them. And their place, in my opinion, is not in my house. So it's funny, my my life always seems to become a metaphor for my thought processes. So, you know, I I just happened to vacuum up under the jams and got a spider and some spider webs. I thought, you know, this is this is kind of like the shadow. What's hidden up in there? Spiders, I don't like them, they're icky, but they also have a purpose. And our shadows, sometimes they're icky, sometimes we don't like what we what we experience, what we see, but they have their purpose. They're they're aspects of ourselves that I think are um often parts of ourselves that we learned were unsafe, unacceptable, inconvenient. Maybe you were too emotional, too angry, too needy, too much, you know, these things that you're too something, right? It's just it's too much. And so, you know, maybe they're pointing to something else. So instead of bringing them into the light consciously, like being consciously aware of them, they start operating unconsciously. So we sort of go through life with these unconscious patterns that are really driving us. We think they become our personality, and they're aspects of ourselves that maybe are pointing to something else. Maybe they're hiding something else, maybe something far bigger, far grander uh than what we know. And unconscious patterns have a way of quietly running our lives. The shadow isn't just bad behavior. You know, for me, I was the rescuer, the fixer, the peacekeeper, the performer, right? I played sports. And I don't get me wrong, I liked the sports, but there was still this aspect of me performing because it pleased people. I was the caretaker, if you know, I'm kind of got into the holistic thing and I did a deep dive. So people would come to me with their caretaking needs. You know, can you help me with this? Can you help me with that? And I was always really happy to do that. Um, and probably even the the controller that was hidden inside of that helpfulness, they were survival strategies defining me, right? This is what I do. And at some point, those patterns probably protected me. I think you know, I've discussed how as a child there were adult themes happening that really made me not feel good, made me uncomfortable. So I I absorbed them. I I tried to do things to stop the madness or, you know, fix it for lack of a better word. And then on some levels, I think I had to adapt emotionally. I just don't want to be traumatized. I don't want to feel crappy. I don't want to feel this pressure. So you start adapting emotionally. And sometimes what we call our personality is actually a protective mechanism, right? We we have learned these behaviors. I think some of them are learned, I think some of them are ancestral. And even in the ancestral side of it, I think there are patterns that have probably existed for eons that just keep playing out, and the responses are the same. So there's never really any resolution, and you just kind of learn it. I really lately just started kind of diving into my feelings of responsibility for emotional environments, right? I don't like the awkwardness, I don't like how um how people are behaving. I don't want there to be a fight. You know, we get these little family gatherings, and we did this this just happened the other day. And um funny thing is, is just before this incident happened, my two roosters started fighting, and they don't they haven't done that in a while. We brought a new one in, they had to establish their dominance, they figured it out, and they just stay away from each other this particular day. They start fighting, and I'm trying to break them up, and I'm also not trying to get my ass kicked by a rooster, you know, it's kind of like breaking up a dog fight. Like, I don't want to become the object of their aggression, but I couldn't get them to stop fighting, and I thought, man, this is really weird. And literally, I walked inside the house, and within a couple of minutes, the men in the house were having a conversation that was sort of turning into a debate that was turning into an argument, and then kind of this battle of wills of you're gonna hear my point of view, and your point of view is wrong, or whatever. So it was really interesting because my, like I said, my life always seems to give me these metaphors or these heads up for what's to come and this uncomfortable feeling, and I wanted to say, hey, stop, knock it off. But I'm learning to not do that, I'm learning to not intervene. I really just want to have this clear energy. It's my sanctuary. I want things to be relaxing and peaceful and coherent and you know, whatever. And and honestly, life just doesn't happen that way. But I had I sat with this super uncomfortable feeling of hearing this back and forth and this argument that's kind of escalating. You can see this dominance trying to be established and this questioning, you know, well, what makes you think you know this and you're this, you're a program, and you're this, and man, it was it was rough. And I desperately wanted to stop it because it made me feel very uncomfortable in my own home, but I really had to resist that because I'm learning not to intervene. And the reality is I'm I'm learning to deal with my own emotions and not be responsible for the emotional environment. And this has been coming up quite a bit. And I think sometimes it happens to test me to see how far I've come. But I had to resist the intervention or, you know, the the desire to control it, to intervene. I also became the person who literally was always managing the next crisis. Like, oh my gosh, like I was on high alert, right? I'm I'm I'm hyper-vigilant, uh, you know, just waiting. When's the when's the hammer gonna fall? When's the next bomb going to go off? Uh I never was able to circumvent these problems. It didn't, it didn't stop what was coming. It just pulled me in. It pulled me in emotionally, it pulled me in um sometimes physically, uh, but it didn't, it didn't stop what I was trying to avoid. It happened and then it just grabbed a hold of me. And in that, you've heard me talk about the level of exhaustion that I experienced. I mean, I hit a wall so hard. I told you I was looking in the mirror and a dead person was looking back at me. Who is that person? This dead person, and that I think it was showing me like you are, you are uh, you're not who you think you are. And looking back, I was never who I thought I was. All of these quote-unquote personality traits that were either unconsciously coming through me or consciously coming through me, but I was thinking that it was what I was supposed to do. I'm supposed to be the caretaker, I'm supposed to be the um the peacekeeper. I'm supposed to shut down these arguments. Um, so these were all these things that I thought I was supposed to be doing. I thought it was who I was. And some of those very traits I thought made me a good person were also wearing me out. Uh some of these aspects of myself, some of these shadows were survival-based, right? Um as a child, you know, you're you're feeling like in order to survive in the chaos, you have to adapt. I went on to a career in law enforcement, which I learned a lot. I I it was a tremendous experience, but it also contributed to this hyper-vigilant aspect of me that you know, always the head on a swivel, that always assessing danger. And even after I left, I'm still that person. I'm assessing danger. Everybody, everybody looks at me like I'm crazy. They roll their eyes at me, the kids will be out playing, having a good time, and I'm scanning. I'm scanning for the next potential broken something or injury, or you know, that's not safe. And I it's kind of the joke around here that I'm the safety officer. And and that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's probably not based in the healthiest place, definitely a shadow aspect. But I don't think it's a bad thing to be heads up. But when it starts running your life, you know, where you cannot shut off because you're always looking for the next disaster, the next crisis, uh, then it becomes very unhealthy. And the reality is you're not really going to prevent anything from happening. You know, you just don't have that kind of control. You know, you're if you're dealing with with somebody who's just clipping down that road, ignoring all the warning signs, and and you're going, hey, you know, you're the road's out ahead. You you need to slow down, you need to stop, you need to turn back. And they're like, huh, what? Uh I'm fine. You're not going to be able to stop them from going off that that cliff. If that's if that's their lesson, if that's what they've got coming, you can't prevent it. You may be able to circumvent it for a time. You may be able to, you know, put some little detours or whatever up for a little while, but eventually they're gonna break through it and they're gonna go off that cliff. And I've spent a lot of my time trying to circumvent these disasters. And in reality, they happened anyway. And maybe they even happened worse, right? If when you intervene and you don't allow things to express the way they need to express, sometimes it escalates. And I had to really be honest with myself at that I maybe in my attempt at keeping the peace and avoiding disasters that that I just really didn't help anything. It still happened, and I wore myself out, became that dead person staring back at me, and then here not too long ago, I was like, who am I? Because all that stuff got stripped away. All of it got stripped away. Who am I? I am not that person, and I'm it's it's still a a work in progress, but I'm I'm just I'm not that person anymore. You want to duke it out, duke it out. You'll either figure it out, you'll walk away, leave, or kill each other in the meantime. But what whatever option is fine. I and that's the point I'm at when I'm looking at these situations now, and I have to really pull back and say, this is not mine to carry. And boy, that's that's a scary, strange experience, but it's also incredibly freeing and liberating at the same time. Not mine to carry. This is not for me to resolve, this is not for me to get involved. I'm going to stay in my center and I'm gonna go to my garden and I'm gonna pick strawberries and I'm gonna do what I want to do and follow my own little path and not break myself down anymore. Those were definitely shadow sides of me, but what they were really pointing to was this is not yours. They're screaming at me. This isn't yours. This is this is not your bag, this is not for you to do anything with, this is not for you to manage. And honestly, I've kind of become this very different person. Um these these aspects of me that were probably there all along are starting to step forward. I would have never thought that I would enjoy gardening so much. I would have never thought that I enjoyed baking and doing some different recipes and stuff that I'm I'm just learning some new things about myself that were swept under the rug in my attempt to rescue and fix and you know prevent disasters, you know, for everybody else. So these these shadow sides that I was operating under mostly, I just thought that's who I was, so unconsciously. But I was aware of the feelings that came from all these different circumstances. I was acutely aware of that, but my responses were unconscious. They were this person who thought that they had to be a certain way and respond a certain way, and that was never true. And I'm definitely now figuring out what makes me click. I have a creative side. I didn't know that. I had no idea. I always thought I was just an athlete when I had my job. I thought I was a law enforcement officer, and I identified heavily with that. Not over the top like some people, but I definitely identified with it. You know, it in my life, always assessing danger, always sizing people up, always looking for the exits. Don't have your back to the door. Um I'm realizing that's I'm not that person. It does have its, it's uh, its usefulness. I mean, there are aspects. Yeah, certainly I want to be heads up. I don't want to be caught off guard. Doesn't guarantee that that's how it's gonna play out, but there it has its usefulness, you know, but I don't have to live my life hyper-vigilantly like that anymore. It's it's just totally exhausting. But I think these shadow sides end up coming out sideways, right? They end up expressing themselves and and sometimes in some very unsavory ways, but I think they're pointing to this far more powerful aspect of yourself that really wants to come out, and I think the shadows are where we play small, and I'm learning to become that beautiful, brilliant being that was always there. I enjoy my interaction with my animals. Who knew? I had no idea I would like chickens so much. Um I've gotten really good at At getting baby chicks and bringing them up and sick animals caring for them, and there's no pressure. There's no pressure there. So that caretaker has it has its place. It definitely has its place, but not to the degree of completely sacrifice myself to be that person. Those shadow sides are still there. They have their usefulness, but not when they completely dominate your existence and break you down and wear you out. It was just shocking, shocking to me how worn down I had become living unconsciously these shadow aspects of myself. So things for me now I think are a lot lighter. I am in a very deep mode of self-discovery. I am trying new things. Not everything is something I'm gonna follow through on, you know, I just experiment. Uh, you know, I do some different things in the garden, and then I learn, oh, this doesn't work. And you know, maybe next time, as opposed to this doesn't work, I'm a failure, you know, but everything has to be perfect and just so I'm learning that I'm perfectly imperfect and that I'm perfectly human, but I'm also so much more. There's so much more to me that I haven't even discovered yet. But I feel the opening. I feel the opening is there to explore. There's there aren't these constraints anymore that says, no, you you have to be this person. This is your duty to manage everything. You know, we we pigeonhole ourselves into kind of these roles of of who we are and how we should behave and what we're supposed to be. And a lot of that, I think, is shadow. I don't think the shadow is a big scary monster. I think you know, you get that flashlight and you start looking in these corners and seeing where you may not be living to your fullest potential, where you are operating unconsciously with these thoughts of who you're who you are, who you should be, how you should behave. Uh, you know, get a little wild. You know, there's a shadow wild side. You know, the people that are really wild, you kind of say, oh, that they're operating from their shadow. No, there's something, there's something beautiful and healthy about being a little wild. I remember when I was probably unhealthily wild, but there was some aspect of that wildness that was just so freeing, that was just so liberating. But I think now my wildness is really more on my own terms. Not because I'm trying to entertain people or trying to impress anyone. I have a very wild aspect to me, but it's but it's for me. It's embracing that aspect of me. And it comes out in different ways that for me are far healthier. So don't be afraid of your shadow. The whole idea of doing shadow work makes people a little uncomfortable, like you're gonna, you're gonna dig into something and you're gonna not like what you see, and you're gonna, you know, it's gonna break you down and you know, make you feel like you're a terrible person. And I that's that hasn't been my experience. That the shadow is pointing to something else that's probably far greater that wants to be expressed. And we just shove it down. I had these these strange thoughts that the shadow said, you know, if I if I blew up at somebody, you know, that was being the shadow, you know. No, if I blow up at somebody and they deserve it, that's that's honoring my boundaries. That's not that's not necessarily a shadow. That's honoring my boundaries. Did have a lot of confusion about what the shadow actually was. You know, taking charge of your life, setting your boundaries, not playing small. Um that to me, that's not shadow. The shadow are those real subtle things of how we uh define ourselves that really are aspects of us that are trying to please other people or not be too much or not be too needy. Those real subtle uh things that keep us from being who we we truly are, that to me is is the shadow, and they're not scary, they just they just need some light, they just need some attention, and I'm still in the middle of this journey. I'm still learning and exploring and meeting myself, meeting this person who is far more amazing than I ever knew. And I don't I don't think that ends. It's not it's not defined by anything outside of you. Invite you to explore your own shadows. Like I said, get that flashlight, start looking at ways you you feel it. I think you feel it in your gut. Something in you contracts when you do something that is not for you. You do it to impress, or you do it to save somebody else's feelings. There's a part of you that contracts, and pay attention to those feelings. When you feel that contraction, that's usually a clue that you're operating from something that is not um genuinely you, that is not your own desire or who you really are. That's been a big cue for me. So I'd like to invite you to just explore that. Uh, I think you will not regret it. So until next time, thank you for joining me here on Star Women Rising. If today's conversation stirred something in you, trust it. That's your fire awakening. This podcast is part of the Chicology Collective where women everywhere are reclaiming their voice, their power, and their light. Be sure to subscribe, share this with a soul sister, and explore more shows under Chicology because we rise higher when we rise together. Until next time, keep reaching for the stars and rooting deep in your power.