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.
Wow, Jessica! Very clear, very true, and deeply moving! thank you!
Peter Sterling@whatishealth21
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Thank you, Peter. Your collaborative work on allostasis and what constitutes true health is inspiring.
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The reason Jung did not own up to his sexual sins publicly was his community would have punished him for them, and he would not have been recognized as an authority in psychology. If we could see the purpose behind things we might even see Jesus not as a messiah son of God but as a person, who, because of his spiritual development, the degree of soul he got to, was representative in his morally oppressive culture of the many in that culture who could not fit in because of sexual sin, which in his case was his mother’s, which was visited upon him as if he were guilty too, and he was an illegitimate child, and being accepted by his community, his people, became an aim of his life, because among his people he could not belong such were its moral constraints. You don’t believe his people thought him the son of God do you?
They didn’t get it, and we don’t get it today so much superstition clouds the symbol, like we cannot yet interpret the meaning of our dreams (albeit I bet some communities in ancient times could), and sexual wrongdoing is still, like it always has been, the heart of our morality, what we react to and castigate people more for than even murder in the revulsion we feel towards the offender and the outcasting we do to him or her, but I’m not condoning sexual sin; it might have more to do with madness than we now realize when it’s visited upon young children, and it can wreck havoc in our sense of self when it means being sexually violated as an adult.
The acute sense of sexual violation is so pronounced today in the wake of the net that seems to hone in on our dirty little secrets more than it does our betterment. If you examine yourself, it might be why you don’t include grandfathers also as the dispensers of wisdom in some indigenous cultures and have something to do with why the idea of great men grates on you. It might have a lot to do with the backlash against colonialism that peppers your paper and the academic and intellectual zeitgeist if we were to get right down to it.
But I’m interested in your own shadow. I don’t hear you talk about it here, unless I missed it. I would not imagine you believe you don’t have one, but I’d also imagine that you haven’t gotten down to its bare bones reality by the wellness tropes you use and the tone of your article, which wants to come across as coming from an integrated person, one soul-developed, someone who sees reality as it is, but it only comes across that way and does not reach the sincerity it suggests you have, as I read it at least. Can one’s shadow lie not in actual sin but in the reaction to it that gives hatred or ill will to the sinner as opposed to the goodwill to heal? Can you deal with the word pedophile? Will you read my poem? https://harms-end.com/2025/06/04/chase-the-button/
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Dear Donny, You’ve raised many important and complex questions—about morality, cultural perception, spirituality, judgment, and especially how shadow is seen and held, both individually and collectively. I’m not sure I can address all of them here (or am even fully qualified to), but I appreciate the depth of your inquiries.
Regarding my own shadow, I do reference one aspect of it in the article: “Do I too seek praise, applause, and my own value mirrored to me for what I offer the world? Yes.” Of course, that’s just a small piece. As I suggest in the article, shadow is something we all carry, and I believe the work of recognizing and engaging with it is ongoing. My larger hope in using Jung as an example was to highlight this process and to invite a broader cultural shift—toward making shadow visible, talkable, and less likely to cause harm when it stays hidden. That kind of change, to me, takes introspection, humility, and curiosity, whether done privately or in community.
Your reflections on how society responds to sexual wrongdoing and how that influences our collective shadow are powerful, as is your question about whether shadow can lie in our reaction to others’ behavior. Maybe part of stewarding our own shadow means not only owning what’s within us, but noticing how we judge or reject what we see in others. That’s hard work—but necessary if we hope to move toward a more honest and healing culture.
I hope in rereading the post, you may hear the tone in which it was meant– of wanting authentic change in how we discuss history as well as to live connected and singing in harmony with others.
Warm regards,
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I’m replying in the appropriate reply field on the off chance you didn’t see my reply yesterday to your reply, since I posted it as a comment, not a reply. You might also be very busy, why I mean you haven’t replied to yesterday’s comment, and I should be grateful for the time and energy you took to reply to me initially. So, let me thank you for that.
I don’t know if you’ve read the poem I’ve asked you to, but I would very much like to know your feelings on that poem (or any of my poetry or of the poet) in light of what you say about becoming stewards of shadow, which I do in poetry, and as a result, my verse could be Shakespearean in quality, I mean in its poetic reach of what it means to be human, not in the style of the poetry of either yesterday or today, and no public would visit my poet such is the stigma of the shadow I integrate, showing that integration in verse. Are you with me?
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Yes I heard the desire for authentic change about how we hold our history and each other and hear now your sincere reply to my comment. And I can see that you see that in each one of us not realized, spiritually enlightened, there is who we think we are and want to be, and there is who we are. You seem to have a strong sense of your integrity, but it might not hold water in the circumstances I show. I’m actually being unfair and criticizing a negative reaction I’d bet you’d have to someone doing just what you ask, integrating and showing their shadow in their public work, or, at the very least, you would not share that work with others, even if you really liked it, what I’ve experience with 99.9% of the people who have encountered my poetry; they morally react to it, read it to find crime, or like it but are afraid to share it, and, although time has not yet said it, it’s poetry in the sense of the word, a new style of verse. With you I would very much like to be wrong. Blog stats are not accurate, but it appears that you have not yet read the poem I asked you to. Will you if you haven’t yet?
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