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Belongs to: Therapist Reacts to Forty Six and 2 by Tool
I keep outruning my shadow but it keeps catching me. It got me again and it wants me dead. I feel like I can run from it but it always catches me. It has me now and I want to escape it. My shadow wants me dead and I get tired of running and hiding and I let it take over.
It can definitely feel that way, but your shadow doesn’t actually want you dead. It wants reintegration with the whole of you. We tend to repress all the parts of ourselves we dislike into our subconscious mind, but that doesn’t remove them. It just relegates them to the realm of unconscious reactivity, where they can wreak havoc on our lives from our shadows. As scary as the shadow is, it’s the running from it that is harming you. If you keep running from the dark, scary parts of yourself, you just exhaust yourself while also making those parts darker and scarier. It’s in facing your shadow, accepting yourself in all your texture, in all your fullness. Stepping through your shadow, integrating with it, and coming out the other side, transformed. It is hard work and it’s terrifying but it’s so worth it. When you understand yourself, accept yourself, and have your own back in any given situation, life becomes so much more comfortable, satisfying, and enjoyable.
You can’t escape your shadow, it is bound to you. But you can learn to understand it. You can give it what it wants and needs so that it no longer feels any desire to throw grenades into your life. It takes a lot of time and patience, a lot of repeated reframing of things for yourself. It takes rewriting the stories you tell yourself about yourself so that you can come to a better understanding of yourself. It is the work of a lifetime and I won’t lie to you and say that it’s easy, but it is possible and you can do it. I believe in you.
Hi there, I hear you being through a solid struggle. Fighting with your shadow, dealing with that, running, being chased. Sounds like a lot of effort.
I don’t know what happens in your life, but i see that it took a lot of your energy and that you really want to keep fighting but being tired at the same time. What i know is that we all sometimes need some rest, to relax, to take a breathe, to be kind to ourselves even if this needs us to sit down in a run for a second. Maybe we need sometimes just to take a rest and appreciate to ourselves that we are doing our best ? To give us a bit of credit for strength and endurance. Maybe we sometimes needs to reflect as for really our reasons we are running, maybe we dont have run but solve whatever is chasing us? I don’t know that for your case, but i know that when i was in somehow close place it helped me to stop for a second and think if i really want to be running or if my shadow really want to harm me, or maybe we can live together?
I believe you can be kind to yourself, to reflect on what have you achieved in this journey and appreciate how hard you try and how big this is. You got all the strength to solve your troubles!!
Here with you, even if from a distance.
Matt