This is kind of an interesting video on the shadow and how surfacing it can help us. What I like is that she provides some practical advice on this topic. She talks about how a person asking her in a seminar, "What's good about being a bitch?" led to her to change her life.
[Video]
A few things I got out of this:
- Our story (poor me) becomes our excuse as to why we don't have what we want in our lives; our stories limit us
- We blame others for the condition of our lives
- We have an internal dialogue with ourselves and tell ourselves destructive things
- The most important thing is to understand what our story is so that we can know how it impacts our thinking
- To understand what that story is, write down 10 incidents that you regret or wish didn't happen to you. Then ask yourself what is the blessing or good thing from that event?
- Forgiving ourselves is an important part of the process
What are your thoughts on this topic? What's your shadow?
Hated it. I had trouble watching more than a couple minutes. It's the usual New-Agey mish-mash: Freudian repression, Alcoholics-Anonymous-style confessions of drug abuse, self-actualization, spiritualism (lessons from Buddhism), personal transformation: "When people leave one of my 3-day seminars, they are totally in bliss!"
By the way, she was identified as a Jungian at the start, but ultimately little or nothing was specifically said about Jungian shadow functions.
All the subjects I mentioned in the first paragraph are legitimate subjects of conversation. But ideally they should be dealt with separately, in their own contexts. For example, in the first five minutes of the video Ms. Ford is basically talking about Freudian repression (the personal stuff that we tamp down and deny and that resurfaces as maladjustments): Ms. Ford acts as though repression is bad. But in reality repression is also a good process. There are some things we *should* repress, such as rage, violence, narcissism, inappropriate desires, etc. It's a balancing act. We want to repress enough that we can fit in with modern society (i.e., not turn into an axe murderer the first time we're denied something), but not so repressed that we can't enjoy life. And so on with the rest. Her overly simplistic handling and conflating of a lot of traditional self-help mantras dilutes any real message there.
I think her basic message is about how the personal narratives that we construct about ourselves (our "stories," in her lingo) can become confining and limit us when we don't challenge them occasionally. So we have to work a bit to expand our comfort zone.
I think that's where the focus should be on this stuff: Personal narratives, comfort zones, the degree to which we limit ourselves when we run scared of our Jungian Inferior function, and the ways we can construct new personal narratives that encompass non-Dominant functions. I think that's what she was really getting at. But she turned it all into such a mish-mash with the usual New-Agey stew of "bliss" techniques that the message just came out as one more piece of dingbat New-Age self-empowerment nonsense.
