What Shadow Work Actually Is and Why Men Avoid It

What Shadow Work Actually Is and Why Men Avoid It

Most men have heard the term. Almost none actually understand it. And the ones who think they do, most have never really done it.

In this episode José Alejandro breaks down what shadow work actually is, where it comes from, and why it's non-negotiable for any man serious about becoming who his life requires.

He starts with Carl Jung and the quote that reframes everything: until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Then gets specific about the shadows men actually carry. The rage that's grief. The arrogance that's shame. The hyper-independence that's fear of abandonment. The jealousy and envy that sit quietly until the world activates them.

He shares his own shadow around defeat and shame, how it shows up as shutdown and sabotage, and what it taught him about letting himself collapse instead of powering through. And he walks through how to actually do the work, including the 3-2-1 process, and what integration really means.

Not releasing darkness. Reclaiming what was always yours.

This episode is for you if:

• You keep hitting the same patterns no matter how much work you do
• You react in ways that don't match the moment and don't know why
• You're ready to stop calling your shadow your personality

"What you don't feel, you carry. What you don't face, you repeat. And what you integrate sets you free."

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

So what the fuck is shadow work? Seriously. Because if you've spent any time in the personal development space, if you spent any time in any well-being spaces, period, men's work spaces, then you've heard the term. It's everywhere right now on social media as well. And most people either think it's something dark and woo-woo, spiritual, not for them, or they've heard of it and they think they get it, but they never actually done it. So today we're going to talk about what it actually is, what it isn't, why most men avoid shadow work, and why it's one of the most important things that you can do if you're serious about becoming the man that your life requires. I'm Jose Alejandro, and this is the initiated path. Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and one of the most influential psychologists in history. He is the one who coined the concept shadow work. And when he talked about the shadow, he wasn't talking about evil, evil, he wasn't talking about the dark side of the force, like in Star Wars. He wasn't talking about anything demonic. He was talking about the unconscious. So we could literally take out the word or swap out the word shadow with unconscious for the rest of this episode, and it would still be relevant and based in fact. So there is part of our mind that is unconscious, part of our mind that is conscious. The unconscious are parts of yourself that you've pushed out of awareness. And again, it's not because they're evil, but because at some point you learned that they were unacceptable. So Jung had a quote that I think about a lot, I use it a lot, I share it a lot, you may have heard it. You may until until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. So listen to that again. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Meaning everything that you haven't looked at is still running you and your life. So you think it's bad luck, you think it's other people, you think it's circumstances. Now here's the thing there are a lot of things in our lives that are out of our control. Circumstances, people, environments, etc. And oftentimes our relationship with these things is impacted by our upbringing and our patterns. And some of them are conscious and some of them are unconscious. So it's not fate, but really it is your shadow and your uh program behaviors that are influencing your life more than you know. So Jung also talked about the persona, which pairs directly with the shadow. So the persona is the mask that we show the world. Think about that. Persona is the mask that we show the worst world. So it's the identity that we construct in order to be accepted, to be respected, to fit the role. And for men especially, the persona gets really thick. So think about the persona of the provider, the persona of the stoic who doesn't feel anything or express anything, the persona of the leader, the persona of the fixer, the guy who has it all together. I see this all the time within myself, but just more specifically in our men's groups. So on this past Thursday, we had a MRM community experience. It's the first time in a while that we had a free call. And we had over 93, 95 men sign up, uh, and about half of that showed up to the call. And before we get into any sharing, any connecting, any conversation, we share standards, and one of the standards is removing the mask. And it's just so powerful to see how much more men can express and the range that they have available to them when they know they're in a safe space to be able to remove the mask, aka the persona. Here's the part that matters. So the more polished the persona, the denser the shadow. Because the more we polish our persona, the more we're trying to hide, or the more we're trying to manipulate others to believe that we are a certain way. Because everything that doesn't fit the mask just gets pushed down, it gets buried, and what gets buried doesn't disappear. It actually just runs the show from underneath the surface. Now I want to talk about the misconception about the shadow. So a lot of people, especially religious people, hear shadow and they immediately go to something evil. Quite literally, you can find content online that says integrating the shadow is integrating demonic entities. I have seen this quite often on Instagram. That it's something dangerous, it's something that you should that should stay buried because that's where it's below it belongs, or it's not a part of you. It is something that's lashed onto you. Now, I'm not going to dive into the conversation in this um episode about evil entities or spirits. I'm a believer in God, and I also believe that there are malevolent beings, and it is very important to be discerning about what you open yourself up to. That's not the conversation we're having. And I know it's easy to think malevolent is in the shadow, evil is in darkness, so if we use the term shadow, then it means the same thing. No. Again, shadow here just means unconscious. So that's not it. Again, let's drop the word shadow for a second. Let's just call it what it is. These are parts of you that you are hiding, these are parts that you're afraid to bring to the surface, these are parts that you might be ashamed of. And if you're doing any kind of therapy, any kind of self-reflection, if you're exploring your triggers, if you're exploring parts of yourself that you keep sab that keep sabotaging your life, or showing up as the same patterns in your relationship, you're already doing shadow work, even if you don't call it that. That is the definition. Exploring the unconscious, uncovering repressed emotions, hidden fears, parts of yourself that you haven't acknowledged. So it's not dark in the sense of evil, it's just unlit. And here's where it comes from. Somewhere in your childhood, in your trauma, and I know the word trauma oftentimes gets associated with you know capital T, uh, child abuse, sexual abuse, all of these different things. But trauma are just experiences that flood your nervous system, flood your emotional body, flood your mental capacity to uh just be in the moment without dysregulating. You learned these things in the way you were raised, and the way you were taught to be a man, you learned these parts of you were unacceptable. So what did you do? You buried them. And when something stays buried, like I said, it does not disappear. It runs the show from underneath, it causes self-sabotage, it causes you to react in ways that don't match the moment, it shows up as triggers you can't explain, patterns that you keep repeating and you don't know why. And here's a stat that I like to share often. Studies show that 95% of what drives our daily actions is the subconscious, and 5% is conscious. Five. Think about that. So that means that your decisions, the decisions that you're making in your life right now, the choices that you think are yours, 95% of them are being steered by what's underneath, by the stories, the beliefs, the wounds, the patterns that you have not examined. So let that land for a second. You think that you're building your business consciously, you think that you're choosing your relationships consciously, you think that you're leading consciously. But if you haven't done this work, most of that is actually being driven by the 95%. Now, this doesn't mean we get obsessed with doing nothing but the work. I've definitely gone to that side of the pendulum where I want to be in full control of my life. So I try to explore every single part of my mind and dive into every single emotion. Again, conversation for another time. I dove into this a bit in the last podcast episode about personal development, spiritual development, and maturity. But what it does mean is that you are responsible for exploring your patterns. You are responsible for really exploring the parts of you that are running on idle autopilot from childhood, from trauma, from what you learned about who you had to be in order to survive, this persona that you created. This is why two men can have access to the same information, the same strategy, the same opportunity, and get completely different results. It's usually not about the information, it's the operating system underneath. And shadow work is a great way to update the operating system. Now, here's a big piece uh that I think is important to dive into is why men avoid it. So if this is so important, why is it that men avoid it? There's two reasons I have seen within myself and other men that I've worked with. The first one is that they don't see the connection, so they don't understand why exploring the subconscious matters for their actual life, for their business, their relationships, their leadership. It sounds too internal, too abstract, too therapeutic, and not action-oriented enough. Like I don't need to explore my shadow, all I need to do is take action, be disciplined, decide which way I want to go, and be disciplined towards that. But here's the thing: the threshold that most men hit in their work, their relationships, in their growth is almost never a strategy problem. It's almost never an information problem. It's oftentimes a subconscious pattern problem. It's an unexamined wound, it's an unexamined pattern. Uh wearing the business problem costume, wearing the relationship problem costume. The man who can't close, for example, in business, I see this often. A lot of my clients are founders, entrepreneurs, creators, community leaders. The man who can't close sales isn't missing a script. A script can help create a framework, but more often than not, when I coach these men, he's what I notice is he's carrying shame around his own worthiness and is leaking into every conversation. The man who keeps attracting the same relationship dynamic isn't unlucky. He's probably running a pattern from childhood that he hasn't looked at yet, where he's projecting his mom onto women or pendulum swimming, swinging to the other direction in order to fill a void that his mom wasn't able to offer him as a kid, or that he hasn't offered himself and the feminine within himself. The man who keeps uh self-sabotaging every time he gets close to the next level of his vision isn't lazy. He's got a shadow that is trying to protect him from something, and it's only doing what it's what it knows how. The second reason is that men avoid it, is even when they understand the importance, is they don't know where to start. Alright, so this is a big piece. If you're listening to this episode, that's probably you. Or you're probably on deep in the journey of it already, and you're just listening to my perspective, but you're probably not listening to this episode, or you're probably not listening to this podcast if you're not committed to or understand the importance of exploring your subconscious of doing the inner work. So the shadow by definition. Well, actually, let me share this. This work is genuinely hard to do alone, right? So the shadow by definition is what you can't see on your own. That's why it's been in the shadow. So you need mirrors. One thing I like to see is that um every man is capable of taking responsibility, but no man can get a full 360 view of himself, right? So you could take a hard look in the mirror and see certain parts of yourself that need to be corrected, that need to be adjusted, that need to be worked on. For example, if your hair is a mess, you look in the mirror and you can do something about it, but you might not notice you have a hole in the back of your shirt, right? So you need mirrors, you need people who can ask you powerful questions, who can reflect back to you what you're not seeing, who can sit in the fire with you while you're navigating this process. Even if you are journaling, right, uh, and answering questions that you downloaded uh online, that there's an element of self-reflection, but also there's an element necessary, uh, there's an element there of receiving questions as if you were having them asked towards you know you were being offered them. You need a container for it, a community, a guide, a therapist, uh, men's circle, something that creates enough safety and enough challenge at the same time for what's underneath to actually come up. And this is part of why I believe that men can't fully initiate themselves in isolation. You need other men to hold what you can't see, and this is true since the beginning of time. I mean, uh it rites of passage work, all of our ancestors practiced coming of age rituals, and it was not something you went and did on your own, even though you were on your own through the ordeal, you were supported in it, and especially supported in the integration piece, so that all the things that you faced off with, all the things that came up for you, could be reflected back to you and integrated and witnessed in a way that you can't witness on your own. So let's talk about the shadows that men actually carry. I'm gonna give some examples because you know, shadow work can sometimes sound very abstract until you recognize yourself in it. So, one example is the rage that's actually grief. So the man who blows up in an argument is usually not angry about what's happening in the occurring moment. He's carrying a grief that he's often carrying grief that he's never processed, and anger is usually safer to express. It feels more powerful. Grief feels like collapse, right? So oftentimes that rage is underneath the the the conscious and in the shadows. The arrogance, that's actually shame. That's another example. So think of a man who's always needing to be the smartest in the room, who can't receive feedback, who subtly just tries to dominate every fucking conversation. He's often not confident, even though he's trying to seem that way. He's actually often terrified, and arrogance is shame, just with a better feeling to it, right? Uh third example is hyperindependence that's actually fear of abandonment. This is a big one. I've definitely uh witnessed the shadow within myself. So this is an example is a man who does everything alone, who can't ask for help, the lone wolf who pulls away when he gets close to people, and he didn't act you more than more often than not, he didn't actually decide to be like that. He learned that depending on people leads to pain because maybe he depended on someone, early caregivers, uh previous partner, and it led to pain. So he built walls that help him feel stronger. Another example is the need to fix that's actually discomfort with feeling, with experiencing emotion. So the man who jumps to solution mode every time someone shares something vulnerable is often not trying to be helpful, he's trying to make his own discomfort stop. Why? Because sitting with his own emotion or someone else's is oftentimes unbearable. Again, a shadow that I've definitely had to work on, integrate, explore myself. And I want to give one more. So jealousy, envy, bitterness. This is a big one. So these emotions are ones that I definitely have had a hard time looking at. And in all all the spaces I've ran, all the men I've held and supported, I see this as a through line where men do not want to look at it. They feel ugly, they feel like something is wrong with them, they feel feminine for experiencing it. Um maybe they've been shamed for being honest about experiencing jealousy, but jealousy isn't weakness, envy isn't a character flaw, bitterness isn't something to be ashamed of. In fact, the more shame we have over anything, the more it actually runs our life. They're just data. So every one of those emotions was formed by previous experience. They built themselves into your persona, into who you are, and they sit underneath the surface, quietly, invisible, until the world activates them. So jealousy was always there. There's a there's a part of you that that developed that jealousy was developed, and a part of you is underneath the surface, waiting for a moment that causes it to come up. So until something happens that presses exactly the right button and suddenly you're reacting in a way that doesn't match that moment. Which is why oftentimes when we're inhibited, when we're under the influence of alcohol or drugs, we uh do something that we're not proud of, and then we say that wasn't me. But really, it was us, or I should say, it was a part of you that you keep well hidden and tucked in underneath the surface and underneath your thick persona. And alcohol removes the inhibitions, and then something, some sort of trigger is present, and it comes up to the surface, right? So the man who can't watch someone else win without something tightening in his chest, you know, it doesn't mean that you're a bad man. I I I compare myself to people on social media very often. I've been on a long journey with that because I've been active on social media creating content for some time before I left corporate in 2019. Um so it's not as bad, but I still find myself feeling bitter whenever I see someone doing something that I've wanted to do but haven't had the courage to move forward with. Right? So it's just an unexamined wound that I get to tend to. And rather than saying, why the fuck do I feel envy and jealousy? Um, like I I I feel like a little bitch or whatever the fuck, you know, the internal voice uh sometimes says is, oh, I feel some envy, some bitterness right now. More than I think I should. No problem. I wonder, I wonder what it's trying to tell me. Right? The wound is usually pointing at something that that man wants, something he's afraid to claim, something he's told himself he doesn't deserve, something he hasn't gone after. The trigger is the map. You probably heard this. The triggers are your teachers if you're willing to follow them. So, how do we actually do this work? So, first, you don't need a special process to start, you don't need a retreat, you don't need a therapist or a coach or a ceremony. Although all of those can help bring you more clarity, the simplest entry point is a powerful question. That's it. Right? The next time you get triggered, and I mean really triggered, in a disproportionate, reactive way, the thing that hits hard hits you harder than it should, instead of explaining yourself, instead of pretending that it's not there, instead of feeling bad about feeling that way, ask yourself these three questions What is this actually about? Where have I felt this before? And what belief about myself is being activated right now? And the last one, I'll add a fourth, which I find is the most important one, is what do you need or what are you trying to teach me? And sit with it. Don't rush the answer. The answer usually doesn't come from thinking, it comes from feeling, from following the sensation in your body where that shadow actually lives. Journaling is another one. So open-ended writing. And with that comes the topic of integration, because this word also integrates, it also uh scares people when we're talking about shadow work. So they hear integrate and they think you're inviting something dark in, you're letting a monster out of the cage, but that's again, that's not what this means. Integration means you're bringing something forward, you're getting clear on it, you're understanding how it's been serving you, how it's been costing you, and deciding consciously how you want to relate to it going forward. And the part of this that a lot of us don't talk about is that not everything buried is unhealthy. That's another part, right? And also not everything um buried or or not everything that we're ashamed of or feel bad about is the shadow. Some some things are actually just not ours. And energy, evil spirits, however you want to call it, we do need to banish it, right? Um, but I'm talking more about the the, you know, not everything in the shadow is un is quote unquote unhealthy. Like it's not all jealousy, envy, anger, all of these things. Some of what's in your shadow is the most alive part of you. So it could be a part of you that was suppressed because someone told you it wasn't acceptable, and that could be something like joy. Joy sometimes is hidden in the shadow. I can't tell you how many men stuff their sh their joy down into their shadow, right? And they create this persona of a man who's stoic and does not express joy, right? Maybe they were told it wasn't masculine enough, it wasn't appropriate for who they were supposed to be. You know, so joy expressiveness. Maybe when you were a kid, you were told that showing yourself uh that way, expressing yourself that way wasn't okay for a boy, right? So you buried it, and now you're grown and you're uncomfortable watching other people be expressive. This is something I felt. I used to feel uncomfortable when I saw other men really enjoying themselves and being fully expressed, and that was the little boy and me, who at some point had to rush growing up because his joy made other people who were not in their joy feel uncomfortable, right? So I shoved it down. Right, so I didn't let myself be playful, right? Maybe you didn't you don't let yourself access something that just isn't wrong in the first place, right? So joy is an example of something that could be in the shadow. It's not evil, right? It's not it's not something bad, it's rather suppressed, it's a healthy part of you. One of my teachers, so I did six months of shadow work with my teacher, Rainier Wilde. Shout out to Rainier, he's an incredible teacher, author, go check him out on Instagram. Um he told me that he believes that our shadow is actually more authentic than who we ref who we what we reflect out into the world. Think about it. If 95% is your subconscious and 5% is your uh conscious, right, there's more of you in the subconscious, there's more authenticity behind and underneath the persona that you've had to create to fit in and to create the the life that you thought you needed to create. Right? So even when we say things like uh uh that's just who I am, right? Or I'm I'm being myself, more often than not, that's not you. More often than not, it's a persona you created in order to hide a part of yourself that you thought that if you expressed, you would not belong. You would not receive love, right? And when you actually look at it, when you bring it forward instead of keeping it buried, you realize you want that. You want to be more fully yourself, more aligned with who you actually are. That is what integration looks like. It's reclaiming what was always yours. So to close off, just want to say that this work is not optional. I just want to say that directly. You can, again, take out the word shadow entirely if it doesn't resonate, call it whatever you want. But the process of facing what you've been avoiding, the unconscious patterns, the buried emotions, the parts of yourself that you've decided aren't acceptable, that that's a non-negotiable for any man who wants to actually lead in his life. Whatever leadership looks like for you, whatever it is that you're leading, whether it's becoming the best father and husband you can be, or building a multimillion dollar business that impacts people in a profound way, building a movement of men who lead with open hearts, right? What you don't feel, you carry, what you don't face, you repeat. And the world doesn't need more men who are performing their growth, it needs men who have done the real thing, men who have sat in the fire of their own unconscious and come out the other side more present, more honest, more capable of actually being there for the people who need them. That is the work, regardless of what word it comes before the work. So if this landed, share it, because there's probably a man out there who is calling this in. And he's calling his shadow his personality and wondering why he can't get out of his own way. And if you want more, check out my newsletter at josealejandro.co slash newsletter. Free resources, including my quiz at josealejandro.co slash resources. Remember what you don't feel, you carry, what you don't face, you repeat, and what you integrate sets you free. You don't become initiated by accident, you become initiated by choice. I'll see you in the next episode. Peace.