Shadow Work

 

Property of Stormberry

To be perfectly honest, shadow work scares me. I just... rather not do it, but I start to think that the world around me is slowly pushing me to face my wounds and my shadows and start solving them. And who likes to poke the places that hurt? Not me, I can tell you.

Ever since I'm living alone (even though close to my family), I have been able to take distance, take place and see the things that have been harming me, the things I react to, the things that make me feel vulnerable and chip away from my sense of security, my sense of safety and even my own capabilities. By actually spending more time alone, with myself (another blessing in disguise from the pandemic and the enforced work-from-home), I have been able to start unravelling why I do some things or why I can't stop doing, saying, feeling or thinking about certain stuff.

One such thing, that has taken a lot of time for me to accept, is the fact that my relationship with my dad isn't a good one. My dad is a very toxic person, and with age his toxicity only gets worse. He doesn't like to be wrong, and he doesn't like to admit that other people might know things better than him. With age, he has lost his ability to admire people, and so, when the feeling arises in him, it turns onto bitter envy. Along with all this, he has lost his ability to be humble. Understanding this for me has taken a while, but has been inportant, so that I can learn to question the things he does and says, instead of taking them as "the only right way to do things", which is how he presents them. And it's not easy.

I'm sure a lot of people out there know people like that: only what they say is right, even when you know it's not, but they insist and fight, and go as low as insult those who question them or prove them wrong, up to the point of making you doubt what you know and probably know better than them. Why is it important to recognize this? Because interacting with people with this behavior can chip away your sense of self-worth, self-respect and even your self-trust. It puts you  in an edge, when you try to do something for yourself, the way you think it should be done, because if there is one single mistake, one single flaw, or even if your attempt fails, you will feel the failure far bigger than it even is.

I'll give you an example: my house - which I LOVE - has a "complicated" roof because I wanted gables, which is not common in this part of the world. Because of it, it is prone to have leaks. And it has leaks. A lot of them have been fixed, but some appear here and there, and some are stubborn. The "original" building crew couldn't fix it, and abandoned the house, and my dad declared that "it can never be fixed and it will always leak". Oh, and he blamed my architect, basically because she's a woman and not the architect he picked. Well, I wasn't going to have that, so I hired some workers recommended by a friend, who actually did the job really well, and guaranteed the job. Of course, my dad still found faults, and all of those faults were false. Like, he said they were so expensive, whene he doesn't know how much they charge me. Or say they work really poorly, when they have fixed the things they have been hired to do.

Now, fixing leaks isn't all that easy, and so, as part of the guarantee, when the leaks appear again, they come and fix them free of charge. However, each time a leak reappears or a new one appears, I feel so anxious because it has been hammered in my head that I can't fix it, that my decisions are wrong, and only my dad knows how to fix them (after he said it was impossible to fix). I've grown anxious with rain, when I used to love rain and rain storms, because of that, because a single little drop makes me feel like I can't do things, that I need help. And it's stupid, and rationally I know that, because I already have the solution for it, and I also know that leaks take time and many tries to fix.

Now, I finally getting to the point where I know that, I understand that, but now I have to work on fixing that, in accepting in my head and in my spirit, that I am capable, knowing my true limitations and how can I overcome them or accept them. Recently I also understood why I had such a hard time letting a person go, why I couldn't stop thinking about them even though I had nothing positive to say. I realized this was so because I was repeating the same toxic pattern I have with my dad, because this person has the same toxic nature, in the same manner as him. I saw the danger I was in.

Shadow work is important, so you can live a fuller, happier life. And sometimes, like with my roof, you must do your shadow work with the aid of a professional.