so this video is going to be a little bit different and it's going to be different and kind of hard well not like a lot of my videos aren't hard but what I'm trying to say is there is a dark side to our childhood trauma symptoms and our issues maybe my video editor can throw in some Halloween music or some lightning bolts cue that stuff and I'm trying to be funny here to lessen this stuff and this video is going to be about not taking our dark side so seriously by accepting it which is actually the way through it something called Shadow work and I'm kind of making fun of how there seems to be a Vibe about how Shadow work kind of has to involve Darkness or dankness which is a little bit over the top for me you know a lot of my videos cover abusive family System Dynamics our symptoms our issues and stuff that we're trying to fix and what that process might look like and it's important to feel seen and validated in that stuff because if given the choice early on in our childhoods we would have chosen none of this mess that we're going through however there is also a dark side to a lot of us there was for me we can be intense we can be defensive we can be neurotic we can be negative we can even be vindictive things can come out of nowhere for us and we might freak out on those who are close to us including ourselves we might control we might be highly pessimistic of course those things are there too for us it's part of being human and I think to be human is to have some kind of wounding that we all all have to deal with at some point um this is in directly in line with the surgeons and people looking into Shadow work which a lot of is rooted in Yi and psychology Shadow work as I understand it is uncovering our unconscious which is like the major role in good Psychotherapy I think and accepting that we have some hard things and hard ideas that kind of run us um accepting that we have difficult behaviors and difficult thoughts the hard part is I think due to shame and putting on good image of ourselves to the world something known as the Persona we came up with this Persona or mask if you like for survival and it creates resistance to having a dark side or resistance to knowing about our flaws or admitting to our flaws being a people pleaser for an example is a Persona that we came up with for survival and it's hard to be called out on it because we think it's kind of totally who we are when that's not exactly true looking down deep in an Advanced way is looking
at why we people please and at the beginning of our recovery we are usually really disconnected from all of those reasons about why we took on that Persona so like when someone tells a childhood trauma Survivor I've heard this a lot that they're intense um it's hard to agree with that because the inner child just interprets it as maybe just criticism or we've made a horrendous mistake or it feels like again someone is messing with us when we're just trying going to do our best so that's the feelings around being told that we're intense but the reality is many of us are super intense I was um we take things very seriously due to that shame rooted in childhood trauma we might walk away from being told we're intense as like what do you know you know or you don't know what it's like to be me or I'm going to do better and never be intense again I'm going to be perfect from now on that's usually some common reactions we might have to being told we intense but there is no learning in that it's just more of the same of trying to hide it or put it away um those are more strategies of making it not true to ourself so let's look at some examples I'm going to go through four of behaviors and ideas that are about our shadow I'm going to be giving some examples from my own life that you'll probably resonate with and many of these these four are going to overlap with each other so it might be a little bit confusing so I'm going to be going over the example where it comes from in our childhood and other ways that it might manifest and towards the end of the video I'll give some ideas on how you can work on the shadow issues in the form of prompts so as always if you identify with being neurode Divergent you may have to factor that into these examples which can be tricky I'm giving it I'm neurotypical so I'm giving it from that lens as best as I can try to focus on it coming from the lens of childhood trauma if you can kind of do that so here we go here's number one it's something that I'm calling guarded distrust that kind of comes out of nowhere and it's rooted in really the shadow issue of around trust so in the middle of my own trauma work I started dating this amazing woman we were really young we were about 22 or so uh and we were in that like glorious 5 to six week falling in love period that beginning of a relationship we worked together at this restaurant it's how we met and one night we were going along fine but she called me one night and told me she needed to c
ancel hanging out with me because she had a friend who was kind of in trouble and I had this immediate trigger and told her we were finished like right there and then on the spot I had all this contempt for her that came out of nowhere and there was this automatic immediate experience that I don't know where that came from and it was just a huge reaction not warranted for the situation kind of tells us that we're going through a trigger it's like when the punishment doesn't fit the crime kind of a thing and there is this classic childhood trauma Survivor Vibe is that I was like you're dead to me you're dead to me Fredo like a mafiosa thing and and the poor poor woman was confused she tried to talk me out of it she tried to reconcile but there was really no going back for me I was way too self-righteous which is a sign of being triggered very triggered as a side note this guardedness overlaps with some other issues on my list such as later when I talk about being self-consumed so occasionally in the right circumstance of triggering factors I would do this highly distrusting angry thing with people here um that kind of came out sideways you might have heard me talk before about how our trauma comes out sideways and I still regret doing this to this person and she was like really lovely and wonderful and was probably very confusing and hurtful to her and again we were doing fine so this came out of nowhere which is really the point I keep emphasizing this Shadow piece came out of nowhere came from the unconscious in therapy I was able to get help in figuring out that whenever I felt someone close to me was letting me down or was manipulating me from a place of like that part of my trigger was feeling kind of toyed with like I like you but that has its limits or it has a shelf life to it and here's the real me I'm really not that into you is what probably my trigger was about um and I would get really angry and self-righteous in those moments so where this comes from in my own childhood I grew up in a lot of emotional neglect I grew up in alcoholism and really inconsistent parenting inconsistent bonding and as a young child like in grammar school my mother would leave for a full day to go drink or do whatever and not tell us sometimes where she was going and our father would sometimes do the same thing to gamble so we would be left alone a lot or worse if she left us with him and he was home because he was really a nightmare to deal with so this wou
ld also happen during like things like being promised something like yes we're going to go see ET tomorrow I promise that that's when we'll do it and I remember on those days waiting an entire day by like the window waiting for my mother to home like a good 8 or 10 hours I'm five or four years old and then the time had already passed to go see the movie or do the thing so back to the present as an adult when my inner child felt that others were placing more importance on something else the knives would come out because it would my body remembered exactly what it was like to be with my parents and their addictions and always coming last so that's the trauma around it and for humans that stuff gets forgotten our childhood stuff usually gets forgotten or put away or simply survive through but the body and the inner child or the shadow it's all relative remembers um but the kicker is is in our present life we can put more anger and distrust and those big reactions onto those close to us in the present because they are safer to do that with than to do so with say my mother at the time you know we can be punitive as is how my my mentor Amanda curtain says that we put this well of childhood trauma onto others why you know it's I'll I I would never tell my mother how scared or disappointed I was due to the fear of losing her further but we can put that misplaced mess of emotions onto friends and lovers and family in the present because they're kind of safer to do that with they're going to be more available to do that with sometimes um another reason to be more in tune and more aware of things in our sort of Shadow Self so other examples of how this issue the trust issue might manifest it might manifest in being obsessed with your with infidelity like with your partner it might come from keeping score about like invitations or inclusion with people around you it might manifest in the way of sabotaging like you leave them before they leave you kind of stuff again think trust um or building a case for how they actually don't want you it's another version of it or not fully going deep into situations and kind of playing it safe and superficial and aloof for not wanting to get into situations where the trust is like a risk so that's that first one about guarded trust issues the second one like I mentioned in the intro is around intensity what I'm calling intensity taking it way too seriously out of nowhere um you can probably already see how those two things
are related like the number one and number two so in jobs I would often get this feedback about being way too flustered um when it wasn't really that important or took things way too seriously and even after a lot of trauma and group work I remember a good supervisor that I had at this weird entry level Finance job that I had for like a split second like this great guy the supervisor and he would ask me questions about something that I would interpret kind of as an attack and one day he just really called me out on it you know it's actually super helpful when we like and we respect people that call us out on some things it makes for better safety and kind of landing or or taking it in um about we kind of do things so it's helpful if you it's helpful if you like them when you're getting feedback from them and he asked me a question one day and I got really defensive and answered it from this place think like Beaker from The Muppets you know like self-consumed some anxiety and he was like I'm just asking like you kind of you get all hyped up when I just need to know things and we had a good enough relationship and I had done enough work at that point that I could hear it or not take myself too seriously at that point and even change my vibe around him or my intensity around him but I had heard it before though I had heard from co-workers in other places and they were like dude it's just chill it's just not that big of a deal so where that might come for me in childhood is growing up we lived like a lot of toxic families do in survival mode and shame you know going to another family's house who was more put together than we were you had to look better than you actually were and to hide the shame or or hide the condition of the house that you lived in if you grew up in some chaos and poverty you had to really clean and prep things for company despite the house still looking kind of chaotic and neglected so there was a charge to looking a certain way to people this is how shame manifest in our lives you know or if people found things out when you were trying to hide things such as like you know domestic violence um that would happen or the craziness or the drunkenness that you were growing up around we were trying to cover up the shame of our parents' lifestyle and dysfunction so you kind of lived on an edge that carried over say into my schooling years like grammar school adolescence High School you were terrified if someone said anything to you l
ike a bully or a teacher because it felt like you were failing at keeping up a good front this is tricky how shame manifest in other places and you don't have to grow up in a family like I grew up any if you if you have this like kind of looks good on paper affluent you have to look amazing that's another form of of we can be intense around those things because you're a bad person if you don't sort of like get A's or look good or whatever so um so there was this energy for me is like please don't let anyone find out what my home life is really like and and and things like homework or what you wore uh if you were cool or not or what you said in class those all those things had such high stakes for kids who are being abused at home so other examples of how this intensity or this neuroticism might kind of look like um it's all actually pretty you know normal if you're growing up and when in in a lack of safety it can look like perfectionism so one way we can be neurotic another or perfectionism that is rooted and not looking foolish another version of it um being more focused on things like things being done right like being controlling versus being empathic or or chill you know making the stakes way too high like what you bring to a party and how you look matters too much all of those fall under that kind of intensity that is coming from childhood trauma and if we're not connected with it if we're not really connected with making that conscious um it's not we're not going to learn from it you know I mean we're just going to still do the same things so moving on to number three a huge one here is taking it personally wounding it's kind of like what I'm talking about um this one is so big this one is super tough because our families often use our sensitivity as kids or just how we're wired as a way to Gaslight and there is a paradox that we become highly sensitive to criticism because growing up criticism was often really pointed and really personal it was personal so feedback from me um and I'm assuming for you as well if you grew up in toxicity that was really really often childhood trauma survivors there is often a trigger around feeling like you're being kicked when you're already down that's what feels very personable about feedback so some overlap and the prior two examples that I gave um I took that girlfriend's rescheduling on me that night very personal I took the questions from that boss really personal because it felt like in my body that
when someone disappoints you it's a message about you it's a personal message about you that's what it feels like that's not the reality but that's what it feels like or if a boss was asking something their asking was kind of thinking that I was sketchy and now they needed to control me or monitor me all very personally speaking so related to that in my groups in my childhood trauma groups once in a while I do this exercise asking the group how they respond to feedback positive feedback negative feedback or neutral feedback positive feedback can feel manipulative and not really true and we can take that personally negative feedback which feels more familiar unfortunately we can become defensive about it and kind of take it all or take it all in which is also to take it personally um and taking it personally doesn't always mean rejecting it it can mean absorbing it resentfully believing that they're right or whatever but still having personal feelings about it and neutral feedback is really the worst because it makes us feel very untrusting like they're withholding something from us and we can take that personally like you ask your partner like how's the spaghetti I made you know I made you and they're like yeah it's good spaghetti you know we can even take that personally because we believe that they're lying to us or something like that anyway hopefully that makes sense so where this comes from for me in childhood is I shared this in another video and I'll put the description around this incident with my mother in the link of the description of the video and this incident was around um like an awards ceremony at the end of grammar school in short at the end of grammar school in sixth grade I got the class clown award um I wasn't really interested in being a good student or Sports I was interested in making people laugh to get attention and it worked you know I could have a bit of a social life and make a teacher laugh or annoy them as a way to feel like I mattered or I had an impact on others when that very much wasn't true at home and my mother came to this ceremony like half drunk or drunk and she raged at me when we got out of there for getting such a lame award which was like a was like a which I was proud of actually but it was like a reflection on her despite the feeling of shame that my friends got sports or academic Awards so she really really got in my face about it and my mother made this very personal like I was making a fool out
of her when in reality I didn't have any structure or parenting help with grades it was always you better shape up and don't be a loser like that was the extent of the parenting and that's a big that's a big example but a smaller and one of the on the more daily examples where my mother would make it personal if we needed help from her like getting to a store about getting a school project done for school and we were burdens and they let us really know about it in a very personal shaming way there was like verbal abuse it was intense shaming um simply you know shaming a kid for being a kid and blaming them for things out of their control all very personal that you'll probably relate to um and this took a lot of sorting out in therapy to realize that the alcoholic blames others around them for their highly chaotic and dysfunctional lifestyle and impact they have on people so some other examples how this issue kind of manifests for others um taking it personally it can look like keeping score like being passive aggressive or waiting for your partner to mess up so you can give it back to them when they gave you feedback Good Times another is interpreting when you see other co-workers or other friends having relationships that don't involve you taking that personally like it's something about you um feeling someone will get recognition or attention and you're not can feel a bit personal there can be competitiveness you know comparing yourself to others and having stories in your mind it can feel very personal um when you see other people get opportunities and you don't so as a side note here my mother acted like there was a conspiracy against her in the world she took the world very personal um if the neighbor got a new car or they went on vacation I can still you know hear my mom like must be real nice to be handed things like that um and she couldn't connect her drinking or her codependency or the mess in her life as things maybe holding her back from having more abundance or more healthy things in her life and she took the fortune of others you might relate to this as one of your parents if they did this um you know she would she took the fortune of others or actually that they were doing better in life in terms of functioning she took that very personally which we kind of absorbed as her Outlook in the world so as a late teens and my early 20s I had a pretty disgusted view of people my age who grew up in better families or higher functioning families a
nd had better opportunities must be nice to have parents that fly you home for the holidays when I'm really kind of out there you know familyless kind of a thing so I'm not dismissing different socioeconomic factors here I you know waited tables in several restaurants outside of places like Harvard and MIT and I served kids who who landed in those universities while I picked up their used plates and brought them more ketchup you know and it felt very personal to me but that actually wasn't the truth we can gradually shift out of our disdain or taking it personal or being overly focused on the fairness about the world to kind of not caring about that so much the world definitely didn't have a conspiracy going for my downfall but it felt like that during the time when the reality is there was kind of a conspiracy in the world about My Success much later so that was number three taking it personally and I hope I kind of made sense there number four is being self-consumed I've got this labeled as essentially a problem of the Shadow when it comes to Ego um we could almost look at this one as the culmination of the last three trust taking it personally being Intense or being neurotic being self-consumed I think means to be operating in what Eckhart Tolle describes as the pain body meaning that you're operating from a place of pain rather from a place of presence it doesn't mean like you have narcissistic personality disorder I get that question a lot it does mean we can have some kind of narcissistic traits because to be self-consumed from childhood trauma means to be in a bit of a vacuum or a bubble and we grew up in bubbles we grew up in vacuums especially if you were neglected so what do I mean by that picture a coworker you might relate to this you might have worked with people like this picture a coworker who feels like the place is out to get them and they're kind of on edge they have an edge to them they feel like things feel very personal in meetings or not being invited to when other co-workers go out to lunch they feel it's personal that everyone around them comes from such better relationships or better families which probably isn't all that true maybe they feel like the place makes it personal and they get intense about projects or don't trust that the new person isn't going to take their place or get them fired did anyone relate to somebody like that out there what I'm trying to say is that coworker is really unconsciously behaving just as they did in t
heir family of origin say as a scapegoat there's that pain body that we might see in somebody else or what they're operating from another example like have you ever gone to a social Gathering maybe you're not in a good place and you kind of assume there's this kind of energy and you're feeling like people can see right through you and that's exhausting to you um that's what childhood trauma does to us in terms of being self-consumed meaning that we we really feel like convinced that it just it just feels like there's a conspiracy going on and kind of that people know how awful we are or something like that so when I think of being self-consumed it means for me it means to be convinced that people think of you in a certain way when in reality they don't really think about us at all since they're just focused on themselves and what's in front of them it's my experience another way to look at it is how this played out for me was I had this sense that being around others felt like everyone knew how terrible I was in college classes or at jobs I had in Friendship circles or bands that I played in I was always acting out unconsciously from having this to prove myself to people who I assumed thought I was kind of terrible while having that belief that it's what people really thought about me which wasn't true another way this played out for me is when I started therapy and shortly after sobriety I was all about it to the point that I really annoyed people I had to let everyone know that I was figuring things out and I wouldn't stop talking about it I had to let everyone know that they probably had terrible families too and would really I would really go out of my way to let them know that like that's big I guess I'm probably still doing that but this was really different in recovery there's this period of being being somewhat on a pink cloud or being a bit intoxicated with a new healthy reality um but being self-consumed also comes with a lack of awareness of how you impact others and how you make them feel what's a little bit scary about that it's a lot like our family so we kind of learn to be self-consumed by self-consumed people and as a weird note looking back um being self-consumed during that period in my life that early recovery was like having a self for the first time it's like I was trying it on for the first time and I had an opinion about things and I had a way to be in the world but it highlights how we can be so wrapped up in our own stories and ou
r own stuff and our own pain and our own uniqueness that we can't really see beyond ourselves and as a side note about being self-consumed what complicates it if we're struggling with dissociation meaning being in our heads not knowing that how to really read people in the moment and like perhaps if we're kind of dominating a conversation with somebody because we're anxious or we're nervous and we're not allowing for reciprocity because we're already feeling squirly um about being there or what we're sharing it's another version of kind of being self-consumed here are some other examples of how being self-consumed manifests in our present life one is I really want you to take this one in it's one super important being at odds with people and I say this from experience as a pretty self-consumed young man I would walk away from positive experiences or social interactions or neutral ones kind of triggered and in this like what the f was all that what did they mean by that why did they look at me like that blah blah blah blah blah I had all these stories in my head or like geez that person was totally disinterested in anything I had to say when in reality that person that I was triggered by they might have had something kind of going on or if we're at a party maybe they had been too much to drink or or were just preoccupied with something and to be self-consumed means to make things about you it's a clue if you notice if you're often disconnected or kind of baffled with others that your inner child might be interpreting or overly reading from that place of self-consumed pain um or they're just all jerks that could be a reality too um but maybe they can't be all jerks you know there is I'm not I'm not trying to take away a present piece there but if you feel really disconnected from people or baffled by people that kind of might be a clue moving on another example of being self-consumed in the present is being overly aware of what others might be thinking about you we think about it way too much being a people pleaser and reading that you weren't appreciated or acknowledged enough being evidence that you didn't please enough or provide enough in a good enough way that's another version to be kind of self-consumed another example is noticing that you feel the need to connect with others from a place of either negativity or complaining or things like gossip lots of people do that but do you notice that you connect with others in a certain way like oversharing or
pessimism it's another version of being self-consumed being exhausted by people might also be a sign of being self-consumed like um even people you might want to be around you know like jerks are exhausting so I'm not talking about that but um what the self-consumed thing here is is being self-consumed is being somewhat run by our trauma in our inner child that we feel like we have to present ourselves as wonderful and full of energy and doing great instead of just showing up feeling like you have to tend to be social or hide all the ick or a shame means to be in that kind of pain body in a common situation in my couple's work where one kind of wants to have more of a social life as a couple and the other one wants to isolate um and has little social connections they might be self-consumed in the way that they think that being social is a waste of time or distraction from living in their head it's kind of a thing so now that I've probably thoroughly bummed you out let's get to some places on how to work on it so what does it all mean and how to work on it Shadow work and accepting our stuff and accepting ourselves and diving into these issues will gradually result in the following list number one is taking ourselves so much less seriously um it's actually really nice but don't interpret that as me minimizing you or that you have to pretend to not be bothered by things you've just done enough trauma work to realize that you're just not interested or you don't need to go to those intense places anymore number two is you're less bothered or triggered or offended by people places and things it feels less personal um number three is you see the humanity in others because you've accepted the humanity more in yourself which is really nice you're less self-consumed number four is you don't have to hide negative emotions or issues so much they're more normalized for you because you've embraced your Humanity a bit more number five is you're growing into a more mature balanced place which is really nice number six is you've appreciated that growth and even feel grateful that you're not acting out from those old places anymore and last one number seven is you're disinterested in a really good way about faults and issues and what people do and what people don't do which is really nice here are some journaling prompts or ideas about getting you to look into any or all of those four issues whatever you identify with number one is write out the issues that y
ou really resonate with the four issues again were trust taking it personally being self consumed or being intense write out specific examples of these manifesting in your present life how they might come up unconsciously number two is what comes up for you around these specific examples do you experience shame or regret or anger about being self-consumed or intense and remember the more we judge and the more we repress the more we distance ourselves from having some Mastery over it or some learning um I still feel a little bit of regret from those trust issues or my reactions but I'm also able to hold space in understanding about how my trauma got me to those reactions so the third general prompt is how did the issue that you're thinking of out of the four or all four come from growing up in abuse how might have you been conditioned to be intense think survival mode how did your heart get broken around trust think of those issues about being you know mattering to somebody um our parents in what ways did they make it personal versus using healthy parenting um like being made to feel like a burden when you you know that they signed up to be a parent what caused you to have to go in your head and be on defense so much so those are some questions to there and the last one is what prevents you from having compassion for yourself in admission about these issues you know despite obvious reasons what specifically feels hard to accept or admit to these issues um for many of us it's hard to admit to things like we spent our lives trying to not make true like the intensity was trying to cover up shame so we we we try to do things so perfectly and you know it's it's hard to admit to that um related to that we put a lot of energy into not being like our parents so it's difficult to admit flaws when we really try to do our best and try to be a better person coming from where we come from so those were the journal prompts and if if you'd like to have access to Extended prompts on these issues Shadow work can be kind of a surrendering or admission to things like being Intense or self-consumed and this kind of feels scary because in our family of origin to submit surrender or admit faults meant that you were a bad person which isn't what this is about you also kind of have to have a good sense of humor about it like that was helpful to me I wouldn't be here if I was still defending against my flaws tooth and nail and gradually accepting them actually he
lped me Resolve them and no one died when I admitted I didn't die when I admitted about my intensity or my aggression or my negativity but due to shame and working down through to our actual integrated Persona it can feel really really hard in that way um lastly the hardest times I've had in my recovery I really want you to take this in was when uh I would have a sponsor or a therapist or a fellow group therapy member or a girlfriend challenge me about how I would act out from these shadow places with these issues and how I affected others it might have been the hardest thing to take in their feedback but there was a part of me that knew that they were right but the pain was wrapped up in feeling like again I was being kicked while I was down because I was trying to do my best and all that is a big kind of a big dramatic story in my head at the time and again as kids we put so much energy into adapting and hiding things and surviving and trying to be like this or trying to be like that um that when someone says hey what you're doing there is not really working and you have issues it feels personal again or it feels like a failure which isn't true either so more maturity and more freedom comes from not taking these things so or ourselves so seriously um which is kind of counterintuitive to our bodies since we had to take everything seriously to survive so
