We have been taught to see shadow work as a modern innovation—an invention of psychology, popularized by Carl Jung and carried forward by therapeutic modalities like Internal Family Systems. But before the psyche was carved into parts with elegant diagrams and marketed methods, cultures around the world were already walking with shadow.
Various African healing traditions have long-standing practices of engaging with hidden parts of the self—through dreams, rituals, and guided journeys. Among the Yawuru people of Western Australia, children are taught that their shadow is part of them—something to walk with and be especially aware of when it may impact others. This teaching is deeply connected to cultural values about respect for others, for the land, and for the spiritual world. In Buddhism, Mara is the Lord of Delusion who throws in obstacles to enlightenment and perhaps acts as a “protector” or shadow part who introduces self-doubt just as one is about to transform.
These are not footnotes to the great Western narrative of psychology; they are just a few of the roots.
Decolonizing concepts within psychology is an invitation to expand and deepen them. It means looking at what has been exiled. It means adding context. It means looking more deeply at how psychological ideas emerge, observing the inherent drawbacks of academic lineages, as well as how reverence for any particular person is determined.
The Myth of Great Men
Great Man Theory, proposed by philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s, suggested that history is shaped primarily by a few extraordinary individuals. “The history of the world,” Carlyle wrote, “is but the biography of great men.” According to this view, figures like Napoleon, Shakespeare, or Einstein had special traits that allowed them to make outsized impacts on the world. By holding up such figures to the public, the hope was that others might follow in their footsteps or become obedient followers of the greats.
We persist in telling history as a succession of great men with great ideas. Carl Jung becomes a lone genius who was influenced by a few other great men, rather than a recipient of threads spun from cultures much older than Zurich. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is celebrated for “discovering” flow—a state of being my grandmother entered every morning as she moved through her farm chores with no TED talk, clinical trial, or copyright. Even the term “nudge” was “coined” in 2008 as a way to influence people toward certain behaviors. Compassion itself is now sold in the form of training modules, patented protocols, and branded interventions as if compassion was something invented.
Adding Great Women to the narrative—Anna Freud, Mary Ainsworth, Mary Whiton Calkins as impactful psychologists, or nodding to the intelligent scribes behind the great men such as Josephine de Beauharnais, Elsa Einstein, and Anne Hathaway (wives of Napoleon, Albert, and Shakespeare, respectively), does little truly balance the linear great person narrative. It fails to appreciate the cultural influence of the many unnamed at large that allows natural leaders to emerge.
The marketplace loves a myth of originality that drives humans toward firsts, credit, and ownership. Ancient practices get rebranded as startup products to improve productivity or sell tickets. Soul work gets turned into training or certification, forgetting the roots of a time when true healing and integration was built into daily life. How much suffering is spawned from the contingency of belongingness and personal value resting upon individual status rather than inherent worth? What if more emphasis was on blending harmonies in a choir of voices rather than feeding a culture where everyone strives to be a soloist?
The Wisdom of Place, Not People; Integrity, Not Ideas
Change is more often shaped by quiet currents and unheralded movements within the collective. By grandmothers, farmers, or nameless others who humbly steward the land that holds them. The need to stand apart as special is a symptom of disconnection—the world’s collective attachment disorder. Unhealthy attachment and disconnection from land, from Self, from ancestry, and even collective memory.
In many indigenous cultures, stories were not built around individual heroes, but centered around place. Places, rather than people, took center stage with an understanding that location co-evolves with people to form sacred traditions and culture. Stories became legends to teach meaningful lessons to build and live well in community. The land itself was the main character—teaching, remembering, shaping the people who lived upon it. Myths and legends were told to transmit wisdom, not elevate egos. Importance was not who said it first, rather the focus was what was said, and how it helped communities live together.
Jung himself, widely regarded as a pioneer of the shadow, had seemingly unintegrated shadows. Few talk about his financial backing from one of the wealthiest families in Switzerland—his young wife’s family—or the sexual violations with clients that shadowed his career. What if Jung owned his shadow as publicly as he owned his dominance in his field? What if, instead of idolizing his insights, he was regarded for sitting in the fire of his own contradictions? What if he could have been supported by a community that allowed him to demonstrate a truly exceptional life of integrity and integration?
Stewardship; Not Credit
Professional identity in the Western therapeutic world is often traced through lineages of training—“Who did you study with?” “Which lab did you train in?” These questions are intended to determine credibility, but they often exclude those who carry wisdom in other forms. It is difficult to shift from this way of thinking. To move the needle away from this is, irony intended, Herculean, and requires a collective shift.
What if instead of emphasizing authorship—which funding is based upon—we focused on stewardship? Not just: who coined it? But: who cares for it? Who lives it? Who keeps it alive, not just in theory and not in perfection, but in practice—in the way they walk, serve, stumble, repair, amend, tend, and love?
No one can own shadow work, flow, nudges, or compassion. These are not trademarks. They are emergent truths passed down from one grandmother to the next. The ideas I present here are not original either; quite the opposite—they are as old as the hills. Perhaps the most radical thing we can do is to hold awareness of this particular type of human shadow: the part that instinctually misses true connection and expresses in a desperate need to be seen. And, we could see it. See it in ourselves and others. Acknowledge how we all want to be important—and how we are each important.
And then, change it. We can lean into a life where our value is not dependent upon external validation from institutions or spheres of influence, for what we produce or how many followers we have. What we may need, ancient wisdom offers, is reconnection to the earth itself.
Touch the Earth
I’ve left jobs, churches, and activist groups for reasons related to what I thought had too much individual worship. I’ve even left a Zen teacher because he was unable to address his attachment to the lineage of great men recorded in Buddhism. But at the core, I believe each of these groups had honest hearts before becoming distorted with the desires of single individuals to be important. Sometimes we need to move on and connect elsewhere. And, we need to look at our own shadow.
Do I too seek praise, applause, and my own value mirrored to me for what I offer the world? Yes. And, what I want even more than that is to sing with a blended voice in unison and harmony with you and all humans. I want to sing with nature, together trusting the deep abiding inherent worth of each of us and embrace the infinite possibilities of what emerges when we stop trying to be soloists and blend our voices with one another.
In the story of the Buddha’s awakening, it is not a guru or deity who grants him enlightenment. When Mara challenges him—“Who are you? What right do you have to transform?”—the Buddha does not fall for this trap or argue with Mara. Nor does he name-drop or reference his teachers.
He simply reaches down and touches the earth. Our worth is already here.
