What’s Your Shadow Trying to Tell You? (Special Episode)

0:02When you are pioneering anything or introducing new ideas to the culture, you get criticized. You do? Yeah. Did you hear about that? I didn't find the one. I found someone I respected and we made it the one. In a sort of longing kind of view of love, people understand each other as if by magic. Nothing in itself is addictive on the one hand. On the other hand, everything could be addictive if there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled. I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. This is the Goop Podcast, bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders, and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers, and seekers, here to start conversations, because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world.

0:58Here we go. Today's episode is a departure from our standard setup, and it's a special one because it's part conversation, part workshop, led by two psychotherapists we admire greatly at Goop, Barry Michaels and Kristen Sargent. You likely know Barry as the co-author of The Tools and his pioneering psychotherapy work with his co-author Phil Stutz, which is work that Kristen continues to evolve. Today, Barry and Kristen are sharing the tool that they feel has the potential to bring about the greatest growth, which is the shadow. If you're not familiar with your shadow, you're about to get to know it.

1:39It's comprised of the parts of yourself that you may have rejected or pushed deep down into the unconscious many moons ago. Today, Barry and Kristen walk you through getting to know your shadow and explain why this can be so simple, but also so transformative. Let's get to it.

2:00My name is Kristen Sargent, and I'm a therapist and a coach. And I just want to thank Gwyneth for inviting us onto the podcast. She's been really open and vocal about the profound effect of your therapeutic work together, Barry. And I'm just so grateful to have the opportunity to introduce a broader audience to the very innovative and unique approach to psychotherapy that you and your mentor, Phil Stutz, have pioneered. It's pretty cool and evocative and different. Today, we get to talk about a figure, the shadow that both of us hold near and dear. And we would say it's probably the highest yield tool in our chest for transformation and growth.

2:47I like to say the shadow, should you accept this mission? Should you listen to this podcast, have something in it resonate for you and decide to kind of get on the ride of shadow work, your shadow has the power, your relationship with your shadow, cultivating a relationship with your shadow, has the power to really get you to your deathbed. It's kind of your best shot at getting there without regret, which is a really big statement. And so that's kind of, you know, I want to pique your interest and your curiosity, because that's what we're going to dive into today is what does that mean? And how is that true?

3:27And how can this invisible stranger living inside of you, living in your unconscious, be the gateway to clarity, courage, and stamina to fulfill your potential so that, again, you get to your deathbed and you can let go of your life with grace and ease. So that's our setup. Just that. But before we dive into that, I just want to tell the listeners that you might already be familiar with Barry and Phil's work. They've written a million articles. They have two New York Times bestselling books, The Tools and its sequel, Coming Alive. I was introduced to their work through a really brilliant New Yorker article that came out when the first book was published.

4:12It's called Hollywood Shadows, and it's just a really fun, interesting, evocative read. I was a young therapist at the time and desperate to get my hands on tools and technology that could activate substantive, meaningful change in people. And I felt that, you know, the work as I had been handed it, even at a very progressive institution, I wasn't able to create a lot of change in people. And so that article, I was desperate to, you know, find you, Barry, and it took me 15 more years to actually, you know, track you down on the planet and learn this work firsthand. Your approach to psychotherapy is incredibly, I always call it the Apple products of personal development.

4:54It's intuitive, it's efficient, it's user-friendly, it's elegant. It's just really succinct, again, powerful work. And essentially what our work does is it gives people a way to encounter the ghosts and demons of their past in the here and now and transmute that pain into potential. That's what tools do. Tools are these little interventions. Today, we're going to zero in on one tool in particular, which is this shadow work that you and I, again, feel we're just gaga for this work because every day of the week, both of us in our practices, you for 40 years, me for fewer years, just bear witness to the incredibly healing, powerful effect of the shadow.

5:47It's transformative. It creates inner authority, emotional independence from the outside world. And it's just endlessly, not only fascinating, but ultimately very life-affirming, even though you're encountering the darkest part of yourself. That's the beginning of why I'm a nutcase for shadow work. Will you talk a little bit about why you care so much about the shadow? I care about it because it's a kind of a mind-boggling concept. If you think about it, you are living. your life right now with a mysterious companion inside of you. And you can either ignore it for the rest of your life, which is what most people do, or you can begin to explore it and discover who it is and what it has to offer you.

6:36The shadow is a separate being living inside of you, and it has thoughts and feelings and ambitions all its own, completely separate from yours. And it also has a visceral sort of animalistic intelligence that we normally lack. So it's kind of like having a mysterious wizard living inside of you. It has so much wisdom that if you relate to it consistently, dirty little secret, it eventually replaces your therapist. That's fantastic because you can stop paying your therapist and start listening to it as an inner source of wisdom. In fact, that to me should be the goal of therapy, which is to replace the therapist with this inner source, the shadow.

7:21But maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves, Kristen. Maybe we should talk about what the shadow is in nuts and bolts terms. So, yeah, by way of definition, you know, you might be familiar with the word shadow. the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung first put that word in psychological context and kind of coined it as a psychological phrase or concept. And what he meant and considered the shadow to be is the dark side, the negative side of the human personality. It's all the things we wish we weren't, but we are. And the way it gets created, there are really two kind of primary ways the shadow gets formed inside of us.

8:04So growing up in early childhood, two things happen. One is that we have painful experiences or experiences that we can't make sense of at the time in real time. And all of the stuff that we can't process in our childhood, we shove into the unconscious. We kind of, you know, to be handled later, it gets pushed into the subconscious. The other thing that happens is that we're getting messages all of the time from the environment, both our family, but also the culture at large. We're getting messages and they may be spoken, but often they're just implicit, but we pick up on them. And the messages are telling us who it is acceptable and safe and okay to be and who it's absolutely not acceptable and safe and okay to be.

8:57And what we feel our environment won't approve of, we shove into the unconscious, even if it's an authentic part of who we are. If I'm growing up in an environment where it's not okay to be gay, for instance, or as a woman, it's not okay to be outspoken or too intelligent. I, in order to survive and stay, hey, you know, kind of keep my sense of belonging, I'll take all that stuff and qualities that I don't want to be and I'll disown them and I'll put them into the unconscious. So the shadow becomes the carrier of all of that unwanted, you know, intolerable at the time content. The problem is that those feelings and impressions and qualities don't go away.

9:41They form a separate self or an alter ego. And I have a conscious identity, kind of who I think I am and how I experience myself again, consciously. And then I have all of this other material that lives in my subconscious and it actually gets embodied in a form and a figure called the shadow. And the shadow, again, it's the embodiment of that. It's the carrier of that content. And in our work, you learn how to bring that self alive and start to build a relationship with it. Now, the problem with keeping it unconscious, because we as egos going along in 2024, we don't want to deal with it. It's got pain buried inside of it.

10:26It's hard. It's like a confronting thing. So we don't want to deal with it, but there are problems that occur from not dealing with it. Number one, And so you're just a house divided. You're at war with yourself all the time, whether you are aware of that or not. And I would say most people are not aware of that. Certainly when people show up to work with me, they're not really aware that they're in this hidden battle with themselves. But a couple of things happen when you're at war with yourself. Number one, you don't feel good. You always have kind of a low-grade sense of either shame or something's wrong with me, a lack of belonging.

11:01You just don't feel at peace inside of yourself in your own skin. The second is you really can't fulfill your potential when you're at war with yourself. It takes up a lot of psychic energy to be at war with yourself. And then the third thing, which is really, you know, the kind of crazy, dangerous state of affairs is that that part, the shadow takes over intermittently in your life. It will not, the shadow will not remain a silent passenger in your life for your whole life. It just doesn't work that way. That split off part of the self occasionally grabs the wheel from the subconscious and takes over.

11:42And that takeover may be in the form of like out of control behavior and acting out, or it actually may be in the form of withdrawal and paralysis. But there are times for all of us when we experience these, you know, behaviors that creep up through us that we're out of control of and they mess us up. They get us, you know, stuck in all kinds of ways. And again, I would say that's how people, you know, come to us is they're experiencing some kind of symptom and can't move forward in their life with their full, whole selves or full, authentic selves. And, you know, the shadow really becomes the key to, you know, to resolving that.

12:21There's this really brilliant quote by Carl Jung that alludes to this that is so eerily, you know, true and brilliant. And the quote is, until you make the unconscious conscious. So in our work, until you make the shadow conscious, it will direct your life and you'll call it fate. That's really kind of what we're talking about. That's the ballpark of what we're talking about. If you want to, you know, get to consciously be at choice and move forward in your life and fulfill your potential, you really need your shadow as an ally, not a foe. At Goop, we believe the spaces we spend time in shape how we feel and how we connect.

13:04That's why we're drawn to Convene, a global hospitality brand reimagining work in meeting spaces centered around design and care. Convene's sophisticated, purpose-built locations are designed to inspire connection, whether it's a board meeting for 10, a team off-site, or a workplace membership that gives you and your team a home base. With hospitality at its core, every detail is taken care of, so your in-person time feels seamless, elevated, and intentional. If you're looking for a new workspace or planning your next off-site or meeting, schedule a tour today at convene.com. And for our Goop listeners, mention Goop to receive up to$500 off your next meeting or event reservation rental fee.

13:45This promotion is valid for all new clients on select spaces, booked and actualized prior to December 30th, 2025, and subject to availability. Convene for the moments that move your business. Whatever role you prescribed for yourself, the shadow is constantly trying to break out of that. so I treated a Hollywood producer as very well loved and successful but he was kind of like a good little boy and his shadow got so sick of that role that it just took over and took him out to a mom-and-pop store where the security was lax and he shoplifted and it turned out that he was doing that like once or twice a year he didn't need what he was taking by the way the shadow just loved the thrill of breaking out of the good boy mode and taking something from someone.

14:39You know, another example would be someone who's grown up with really strict gender roles. And the shadow is the part of him that defied those traditional roles and flirted with homosexuality or other, you know, forbidden forms of sexuality. The shadow is always trying to break out of whatever role you've prescribed for yourself. It doesn't want you to be limited to that. It wants you to be the full breadth of who you are and who you're born to be. So that's what a takeover is, is it's an impulsive attempt to free the ego from an ego identity that has become like a straitjacket, essentially. So takeovers are unpredictable and they can really be dangerous.

15:25At the very least, it's upsetting because you suddenly don't know yourself in a certain way. And the solution is not to clamp down even further on the shadow. The solution is to build a relationship with the shadow. It sounds crazy, but if you can have a relationship with this inner part, then it feels less excluded and less compelled to take over. It's already getting what it wants from you, which is simply attention and recognition. And as a bonus, the more attention you give the shadow, the more it actually comes to life as a genuine being. Now, I know that sounds a little woo, but it starts to feel like a separate intelligent self living inside of you, essentially.

16:08You have this kind of partner, this invisible partner that lives in your unconscious. In our work, we relate to the shadow, like you said, as if it's a real being with its own consciousness, its own point of view, and we bring it to life. It requires a big suspension of disbelief. Like what we're about to have you do is going to be really different. It's like talking to an imaginary friend. Yes. Traditional talk therapy is based on a kind of an intellectual mode. It's all about analysis and sort of figuring out a theory of why you're feeling and acting the way you are. This is, this could not be more different from, from that because it's actually interacting with a part of your personality and talking to it and it talking back to you.

16:56So far from being analytical, it's actually experiential. You're experiencing another being inside of you. And the relationship that you forge with that being becomes deeply determinative of who you become, your potential and everything else that's important to you. As for the therapist, by the way, It's a much more exciting form of therapy because instead of staying on the surface and just analyzing what's going on, you're actually getting down inside of the person to affect change inside of them. Yeah. And change doesn't come from, I think, one of the big revelations for me, even though when you introduced me to this way of working, for me too, it was a suspension of disbelief.

17:43I start talking to this part of myself and listening to it, empathizing with it, taking marching orders from it. I mean, it's different. I mean, I want to say it's weird. It's wackadoo. It's different. but what really really resonated early on is that you know the idea that we're going to change by understanding like you said why we are who we are that just the insight is going to create change it just doesn't get you anywhere it leads to like years and years and years of retelling the same story but change doesn't happen and you know you know the good news is for people listening in, you don't actually have to even believe any of this in order for it to start to work and work you and work on you and to click for you.

18:32This approach of working with your shadow, again, as if it's a real being, starts to change you. And it is kind of the key to activating change versus talking about the possibility that you could do things differently or be different. So it has this incredible aliveness and catalytic power to it. And again, it doesn't need to be believed to be effective. And I think that's the good news as we ask you to get on this ride with us. So Barry, would you be willing as I walk people through an exercise to just try this out and try it on? Sure. Okay. Awesome. Okay. So for those of you listening in, I'm going to walk you through something and you may need to do it a few times in order to get an image of your shadow.

19:23And that is not only fine, it's completely normal. So you can stop, you can, you know, listen to it again, or what I'm actually going to have you do isn't that hard to just redo in your own mind's eye. We're stepping, we're crossing a threshold into a different mode of intelligence and we're going to start relating to your unconscious. So close your eyes, and I want you to come up with a memory. Remember a time when you felt one of the following ways, either ashamed, guilty, humiliated, embarrassed, vulnerable, or exposed. so I want you to choose a memory and recreate a time that you felt any one of those feelings and for our purposes the more emotional charge in the memory the better and once you've chosen something I want you to use your imagination and your focus and I want you to bring it alive in your mind's eye I want you to recreate the memory as if it's happening right now.

20:28Put yourself back in the situation and remember what you felt like. What was the state? What was that state like inside of you? What was present? What were you feeling? What were the sensations? What were the thoughts? Bring it alive as if it's happening right now. and this takes a little bit of courage and honesty but you can trust what you're feeling and once you have that once you feel connected i want you to imagine that you can take all those feelings and sensations emotions push them out in front of you and give them a face and figure so you're looking at the embodiment of that state whatever it is you went to shame embarrassment humiliation anger guilt exposure vulnerability look at that self look at a separate being and that figure might look something like you it might be a distorted or diminished or young version of you or it might not might not look like you at all just trust what comes there is no right or wrong and your job as the ego as the one who is doing all of this is to just want to see is to ask this part to take shape in front of you and your attitude is i really want to see you i want to know you and just see what comes

22:06and that's great and when you're ready you can open your eyes and so Barry what happened for you when you did that exercise so I went back to a recent vacation that I took with my wife in Hawaii and at the end of the vacation I had to return the rental car and you know throughout the vacation I noticed that my brain just wasn't working very well I was kind of disoriented there were several times during the week when I couldn't find our room. And I just generally felt foggy. And when I went to return the rental car, I got completely lost. Despite using a navigational system, I couldn't find the rental car place.

22:47And when I got to where it was supposed to be, it wasn't there. So what I was seeing was a version of myself that was scared, really scared, scared that I was lost and I would never find where I was supposed to go. And on a deeper level, I was scared for myself. I had this horrible feeling of what is wrong with me. And I felt almost on the brink of tears. Okay. Thank you for sharing that. So let's imagine that that's your shadow. This is a version of yourself that's lost, disoriented, incompetent, incredibly vulnerable and scared. And how did you feel about him when he popped up like that? Like, if you're being completely honest, how did you feel about him?

23:37I don't feel great about this. I'm supposed to be good at this. But at the time, I felt really judgmental. I'm highly educated. I pride myself on my intelligence. I went to Harvard. I graduated top of my class in law school. I'm used to being alert, sharp, articulate, resourceful. And when I saw my shadow, befuddled, confused, unsure of himself, anxious about tasks that are just mundane, normal tasks, I got really down on him. I felt like, what's wrong with you? Get your act together. So that's really normal, what Barry's describing. That's how most of us feel about our shadow when we actually encounter our shadow.

24:24We're embarrassed by it or we, again, we're down on it. We don't want to see ourselves as that. So just take a minute and just see if you can imagine from your shadow's point of view, how it feels when it senses your embarrassment or your desire to hide it. Can you get a sense of that, Barry, what your shadow feels like? Yeah, really easily. It just feels awful. It feels like the most important person in his life, that's me, is now judging and condemning him at the very moment when he most needs help. I think he felt like saying, why are you being so mean to me? There's something wrong with my brain.

25:10And it turned out, by the way, that he was right. After we returned from that trip, I was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia. It's a neurological condition that causes exactly the symptoms that I was experiencing. And so, you know, this is an important thing to practice. All of you listening in as you play around with this, once you have some kind of image of your shadow to work with, you want to practice kind of putting yourself in your shadow's shoes and getting curious about what it's like, what it's been like for your shadow living inside of you, experiencing judgment, condemnation, rejection, or at the very least, just being ignored.

25:51Because when we're not relating to our shadow, remember, this part has been there for many, many, many years. And again, even if we're not aware of it, it is inside of us carrying all kinds of things we, the ego, don't want to deal with for us. And it's alone in the dark, kind of in the dungeon of the self, right? In the subconscious. And it does have feelings. And so you want to practice. That's something you can do. You can give it a voice. You can give it a point of view and you can get curious and just ask. And a lot of this work kind of taps into the lost art of asking and receiving. Your subconscious has answers and has a voice and has information if you remember to ask.

26:35And so I want all of you listening in to try that with your shadow at some point. Once you have some kind of image to work with, ask that shadow, what has it been like for you inside of me? How do you feel? How do I make you feel? So Barry, for you, is there anything that you did to make an amends with this shadow? Yeah. Later on, when I sort of realized what was going on here, I visualized him and I just apologized for getting so down on him when he himself was suffering so much. I mean, basically I said, I have no right to judge you. I'm just as scared as you are. I'm scared about what's happening to us, but I don't want to make it worse by judging you for it.

27:17And I've found that this is true with my shadow. He just immediately let go of it. I mean, he doesn't hold a grudge like I do. He was just thankful and we both felt reconciled and kind of healed by the thing. That's so incredible. What you're saying is what I also experienced to be true. The shadow is pretty ready to forgive. It really just wants to be acknowledged, to be legitimized, and to be included. It wants us to share our consciousness with it. And when we do that, kind of the forgiving happens fairly relatively quickly. Now, not always immediately. I want to be really clear about that.

28:00Barry's been doing shadow work for 40 years and has worked with thousands of patients, and he's still discovering new front lines of his own shadow work. That's how this work works. It's a forever conversation. It's a relationship that you cultivate and that helps you expand and move forward in the direction of your potential for your whole life. Your first shadow that you encountered wasn't like what you just described. He didn't want anything to do with you. Would you share that with people? Yeah, sure. It wasn't like anything I had read about in any of the books on the shadow. He was a roughly 15-year-old kid at the corner of Chautauqua and Sunset in Los Angeles, where I live.

28:42And I walked up to him and I said, hey, I'd like to talk to you. And he promptly gave me the finger, yelled F you and walked away from me. I had no idea what to do with this. This was not in any of the books I had read on the shadow. So I just decided to show up every day. And every day he gave me the finger and walked away. I don't know how long it took, maybe four or five weeks of doing this every single day. Finally, I walked up to him. He put his hands on his hips and he said, all right, what do you want? Why do you keep coming down here? You know, kind of thing. And And finally, we began to have a dialogue.

29:18So what I took from that is that the shadow really viscerally feels the poison of your rejection. And it's angry. It's upset. And it's okay that it has a reaction to that. You just have to stick with it long enough for it to trust that you're actually interested. So beautifully said. And, you know, we say all the time what the shadow really cares about is consistency and effort. But if you sincerely are open and curious and interested, what I guarantee is that this figure inside your subconscious not only wants to be found, it longs for inclusion, it longs for your attention. And when you start that repair process, that process of showing up, it will reveal itself to you.

30:10It will start speaking to you. It will trust you. And then it will start speaking to you in its own voice. And that speaking, quote unquote, may come through, you know, an idea, an instinct, an instinct, excuse me, an image, an insight. You know, it speaks in various ways, but your shadow wants to be recognized by you. And again, it's the carrier of a whole dimension of intelligence that comes through the unconscious and carries, again, a lot of the information we need to know who we are from the inside out, what the most authentic, truthful version of our life is. So let's have everybody going back to the exercise.