Walking Through My Own Darkness: Shadow Work on the Path to Self-Discovery

When we were little, they always told us about the light.

They said, “Be good.”

They said, “Think beautiful thoughts.”

They said, “Have a pure heart.”

But none of us learned what to do with the darkness inside us.

With our jealousy, our anger, our hurtful sides, our repressed desires, the “shameful” thoughts that cross our minds, the parts of us we say, “I shouldn’t be like this” about...

We were expected to ignore them.

We were told to act as if they didn’t exist.

And so we did: we covered them up.

But darkness doesn’t disappear where you cover it.

There it keeps seeping inward.

Paths to Myself is, for exactly this reason, the name of a journey where I faced not only my bright sides but also my shadow sides.

The darknesses we hide inside...

For a long time I tried to see myself like this:

“I am a well-intentioned person. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I try not to break anyone.”

There was no lie in these sentences.

But something was missing: I was not only well-intentioned.

I was also someone who got jealous, who felt anger, who secretly harboured resentments, who sometimes became selfish, who sometimes felt the urge to hurt.

Even writing this would have sat on my chest like a heavy shame years ago.

Because I had this template in my head:

“If I have such feelings inside me, I am a bad person.”

Yet today I understand this: if there is no darkness inside a human being, that means there is no human being.

Everything that exists has a shadow.

If it receives enough light, it also casts enough shadow.

My problem was not the existence of my darkness, but that I did not know what to do with it.

We need to face the parts we say “I shouldn’t be like this” about...

Inside each of us there is a room we show to no one.

In that room live the thoughts that pop into our mind and that we immediately push away, the feelings we say, “I wish I hadn’t felt this,” the impulses we catch in ourselves and feel ashamed of.

For me, this room was lined with shame.

Whenever I felt secretly hurt by someone, whenever I envied what someone else had and felt wounded, whenever I became selfish, whenever I noticed how much I resembled someone I was judging, I immediately attacked myself:

“How can you think this way?”

“Does this suit you?”

“So this is your real face.”

The period when I first met my shadow side was the period when I was tired of these attacks.

After a while I realised this:

I was not splitting myself in two by fighting with my darkness, but by ignoring it.

One “me” was the me that “should be,” and the other was the secretly living, hidden, already declared guilty me.

And at the end of the day, the war inside me never ended.

Paths to Myself and the first encounters with the dark...

While writing Paths to Myself, some lines made my hand tremble as they hit the page.

Because for the first time I was openly admitting:

“I am not made up only of my good sides.”

Some of the sentences I wrote carried confessions my own ears were not used to hearing.

I was catching my jealousies, my resentments, the little revenge fantasies I built in my mind, the unspoken angers, the weaknesses I couldn’t even admit to myself.

At first, seeing all this hurt me a lot.

I looked at myself and thought:

“I am not as clean a person as I thought.”

Then another question came:

“So what is this ‘clean’ you talk about?

Someone with no darkness at all inside?

What kind of person is that?

Do they even exist?”

With this question, a new voice was born inside me:

“You are not dirty just because you have darkness. What will define you is what you do with that darkness.”

That is how I began to face my shadow.

Not by denying it, but by accepting its existence.

What does shadow work mean to me?

For me, shadow work is not a theoretical concept; it is a very practical and painful way of looking.

It means doing this:

Being able to admit to myself,

“Yes, here I was jealous.”

“Here I was wrong.”

“Here I acted selfishly.”

“Here I played this role only because I wanted to be loved.”

And trying not to bury myself in the ground as I say it.

Shadow work is not trying to clear your name.

On the contrary, it is honestly lighting up the places where you cannot see yourself clearly.

It is as much a spiritual confrontation as it is a psychological maturing.

Because when a person starts to own their own darkness, they become less cruel towards the darkness of others.

The sentence “I would never do that” slowly turns into “I have dark sides too.”

And that reduces judgement and increases understanding.

We need to learn to sit next to our shame.

Shame is one of the heaviest feelings in facing the shadow.

It is a voice that says, “You are wrong.”

For a long time I ran away from shame.

I kept my mind busy so I wouldn’t remember some of my behaviours; I clung to constant producing, working, appearing strong so I wouldn’t feel some of my emotions.

Then one day I noticed that running away never worked.

Shame was like a guest that came back when you threw it out and grew when you silenced it.

One step of shadow work was this:

Daring to sit next to my shame.

“Yes, I did this, and I feel ashamed of it.

Yes, this thought crossed my mind and it scares me.

But I am not only this.”

When I said this to myself, instead of burning me to ashes, shame began to soften something inside.

Because when shame is seen and named, it stops being a destructive force and becomes a call to transformation.

So what was the real need under the darkness?

Every time I looked at my own darkness, I saw something very familiar underneath it.

The wish to be loved.

The desire to be seen.

The need to feel valuable.

The fear of disappearing.

Under anger lay vulnerability; under jealousy, a sense of lack; under the urge to control, helplessness.

Working with my shadow sides meant giving up stamping these feelings as “bad” and learning to ask, “What am I hungry for here?”

Walking through the darkness does not mean staying there forever.

On the contrary, without passing through the darkness, you never really know what light is.

So when did you first face your darkness?

As you read these lines, maybe some scenes are coming to life in your mind too.

A behaviour of yours you are not proud of, a thought you have never told anyone, a moment you have not wanted to remember for years...

Maybe you are saying inside:

“I don’t even want to remember these.”

You are right, it’s not easy.

But I would like you to ask yourself this question:

What was the moment when you first faced your darkness?

At what age, in which sentence, in which event did you think, “I am not as innocent as I thought”?

And how did you treat yourself after that moment?

Did you reject yourself completely?

Or are you now ready to open a space of mercy that can include that version of you as well?

Maybe shadow work begins exactly with this sentence:

“I am not only made of the bright pages of my story. But my dark pages were not written to strip me of myself and destroy me; they were written to make me more honest with myself.”

Walking through your own darkness is not losing yourself.

On the contrary; it is walking towards a wholeness in which you can carry even the parts you hide the most.

And perhaps these Paths to Myself do not always pass through bright trails, but sometimes through those dark corridors you hesitate to step into.