Why Success Feels Empty (Shadow Psychology 101)

this is something that always you know confused me I got bullied a lot when I was a kid and I was like why the hell does this guy do this right why do they show up every day what do they get like I'm just minding my own damn business I'm not bothering them and they show up every day on the playground and they just just like you sneeze occasionally it's like occasionally this person comes up and Bullies me for no apparent reason that's because it's a psychological conflict in here they're being motivated has nothing to

do with me it has everything to do with what's going on inside them so nowadays I see a lot of stuff about Shadow in like a really sexy kind of way like oh like get in touch with your Shadow and you'll find some sort of deep dark power within you and you will be like reconnect with yourself and stuff like that and I do think Shadow work can be incredibly helpful I've seen it help a lot of people who are like incredibly High performers where nothing is wrong with them but they sort of feel burnt

out they feel like they're sort of not they're like kind of going through the paces of life I think Shadow work is really helpful for people who struggle with like motivation and interestingly enough Shadow work has also been incredibly helpful when dealing with people who are like stuck in life and sort of have this Failure to Launch where they like didn't really amount to much but they had a bunch of potential so that may sound weird because okay how can it help someone who's like a high performer who's burnt out and someone who had a

failure to launch and I think that's where we just have to understand really what the shadow is okay so this concept of the Shadow was developed by Carl Jung and I think one of his very classic diagrams about the shadow will sort of give us a clue as to what this is okay so here's you you so you have lots of thoughts and feelings on kind of the inside here's your conscious mind and your unconscious mind and then you have a sense of ego you have a sense of I am this right so this is

what you are consciously aware of if I ask you who are you your mind is going to have some perceptions of who you are I'm a good person I'm a bad person I'm compassionate I'm a pervert like whatever you have all kinds of internal thoughts so then what happens is in your conscious mind you have all these attributes of yourself but then between what you really are and the outer world is something called your persona so there are only certain attributes of myself that I show to the outside world okay and I think the best

way to understand it is to look at his very classic diagram which I have here um which will sort of show us what these parts are okay so I'll sort of explain this a little bit in more detail when people hear about our coaching program their first response is usually why would I work with another human being when I can watch YouTube videos all on my own working with a coach is about amplifying your time and effort we're great at wanting things and even making some progress but we usually struggle with follow through or have

some kind of setback and that's exactly where working with a coach can help coaches provide personalized support to help you set appropriate goals make progress and even work through setbacks just let us know what your goals are what kind of support you're looking for and will match you with the best coach for your unique needs check out the link in the description below to see if coaching is right for you so in the middle we have the self okay so this is conscious and this is unconscious mind so we have our sense of self and

if I were to ask you who are you what you would do is you would say I am dot dot dot right so you'd attach certain attributes maybe you're a good person maybe you're a little bit of a pervert right maybe you've got a kink so this is your ego this is your conscious conception of who you are but then out here is the outer World okay and between the ego and the outer world is something called your persona so this is the part of yourself that you project to the outside so if we take

some of these uh you know things that we are if we take the ego we're going to cross these two things out and I'm just going to project that I'm a good person so if we kind of think about your sense of identity there's who you are on the inside there's who you show to the outside world down here is the shadow so the shadow develops in a really interesting way so here's you is a kid right so when you're a baby you have a brain and your brain has all kinds of impulses so your

brain sometimes wants to take things away from other people sometimes doesn't feel like sharing sometimes wants to get angry at your parents for not being there for you um sometimes wants to wiggle your little butt around and make farting noises and things like that you have all kinds of impulses so as these impulses arise Society either punishes you or accepts some of these impulses you are made to feel good or bad depending on what you do so then what happens with a child is they start to suppress some of their impulses right they learn over

time hey this is bad so I'm not going to do this this is bad and I'm not going to do this and then what they start to do is they start to project and develop others so this I'm going to do more I'm going to share I'm going to smile I'm going to be kind I'm not going to be angry so now the question becomes where does the stuff that you suppress and block where does that go that becomes Your Shadow so this is the essence of Shadow work as we grow up there are certain

parts of ourselves that we suppress that we block off that we think of as bad now when we do this suppression there are two things that happen from a neuroscientific perspective one is that we're pruning a lot of our dendritic connection so we're like actually adjusting our neuronal Pathways so in some ways the things that become parts of our shadows we truly do get rid of like they're gone forever like I believe this from a neuroscientific perspective okay that's normal so like good examples of this are things like potty training so once we develop certain

Pathways we are permanently in control of our bowels until they reach a certain point but there are certain things that are basically permanent changes and we can have permanent changes in potty training and we can also have permanent changes in some amount of like emotional change within us so we can strengthen our ability to suppress anger we can control our anger we can actually become less angry I do believe that's possible we don't do that for all the negative emotion so the unfortunate thing or fortunate depending on how you look at it is that for

a lot of the things that we suppress they don't truly disappear we simply become numb to them we wall them off let's say I am taught to be caring and share a lot with my friends even though I don't feel like it even though I'm conditioned to be a certain way doesn't mean that that's actually the way that I feel deep down inside what I'm doing is I'm suppressing this part of myself so I see this a lot with like people who are you know who get parentified a lot so when children become the caretakers

of their parents what tends to happen is they have a lot of thoughts and feelings which are dormant underneath the surface which they have to wall off they are not allowed to feel those feelings but those feelings of let's say resentment or anger or sadness or what whatever kind of feelings you have down there will still exert some pressure on you and will cause problems in your life so basically what we're doing is I am a complete human being right and when we think about a child we think about a child as innocent what is

the difference between an innocent child and a cynical adult the biggest difference is the parts of themselves that they deny right so I see this a lot for example with people who are struggling with their sexual identity or gender identity where they are suppressing a part of themselves and it causes all kinds of problems in their life really good examples of this are also like people who are bullies so bullying is generally speaking an insecurity within me and in order to block off in order to deal with my feelings of insecurity if I can make

you feel small and me feel big as a result right because now I'm better than you then I will feel better about my own insecurity if I feel small in here but I can push you down and Elevate myself that makes me feel good on the inside bullies do that for a reason right they're basically trying to suppress their own insecurity so this is what we tend to see when we develop a shadow is that we wall off a part of oursel and it causes problems so really good examples of this for the people that

I work with that are incredibly successful we're talking about engineers at Fang we're talking about directors at places like Goldman Sachs or Lazard like these are major investment Banks we're talking about about people who are like trauma surgeons like people who are incredibly successful content creators often times what they do is when they're growing up they are taught not to have fun they are taught not to be angry they are taught to be Bots I'm going to turn you into the most efficient Cog in this machine I don't care about your artistic stuff I don't

care about what you want I don't care about your joy I'm going to craft you into a successful human right I'm going to you're the project we're going to turn you into something perfect and you must be perfect but this is a child and they want to have fun and they want to make fart noises but we're going to make all of that go away and then you get conditioned and as you get this conditioning you start achieving and as you achieve you get some degree of positive reinforcement right but the reason you need that

positive reinforcement is because you don't feel good about yourself on the inside because those natural impulses that you had to make fart noises and make art all of this creative self-expression and joy the desire to play games with my friends instead of study on a Friday night all of that gets squashed so there's something fundamentally incomplete within you and then you get stuck in this cycle of I feel incomplete because I basically cut off the parts of myself that bring me joy because who the [ __ ] needs Joy you need to get into Harvard

kid that's what we have to do like we have to be successful so now that you don't feel fulfilled on the inside now something beautiful happens as you start to achieve you get some degree of approval from the outside and as you get this approval from the outside since you're missing something on the inside it feels really good it's not a perfect substitute though it's like a meal replacement shake instead of food right so it kind of does the trick but it doesn't really feel you satisfied but then what happens is you get it gets

reinforced now you need to achieve more now you need to achieve more because remember it's achievement that makes you feel good about yourself but an achievement doesn't last for a decade you need another one and another one and another one and so then you get stuck in this trap of high performance you get stuck in impostor syndrome I saw this so much when I was like doing you know Stress Management and resilience work at Harvard Medical School working with medical students and residents who are like the best of the best and they're chasing not this

honic hedonistic treadmill they're on this treadmill of like continuing success where I need more money I need more Prestige and like no amount is enough right like even to this day like it's it's conditioned so deeply like my mom will tell me about random achievements from like people from our Social Circle and it's like yeah I mean I think it's great you know that someone else achieved something but she's constantly making comparisons and it's like I don't know what more you need mom like I went to Harvard Medical School and like I'm one of the

most famous psychiatrists on the planet but I guess you still need something else my point is that this is the treadmill that people fall into the only antidote is to be healthy on the inside to be content on the inside right and this is where Shadow work comes in because if you really want to stop chasing the next big thing what you need to do is be happy on the inside you need to be whole on the inside happy is actually not the right word whole is a better word and so a big part of

Shadow work is integrating our negative portions of the self so that's high performers next thing that we're going to talk about is actually the opposite picture and I see this a lot too so you know when I started my private practice I was working with all these high performers but there was a part of me that's like look these are not my people my people are 25-year-old degenerates who maybe graduated from college and never had a job never had a girlfriend these are my people I was born on Twitch I was born on the internet

I was born on 4chan that's where Dr K came from so I helped these people too and what I see in them is a far more dangerous Shadow than cutting off Joy what I see in them is when they were growing up they had positivity right they actually did accomplish something in life they were passionate and excited and they were social they were able to make friends they were so incredibly social but they're on the Spectrum but they have ADHD but they have parents who are depressed who don't know how to teach them social skills

so they had a lot of positive potential these are the gifted kids then what happens is something happens that punish es them for that I have Asperger syndrome I'm really social I love people but then I get bullied I try to socialize with other people and I get punished for it I've also seen really really terrible cases of you know kids who did really well in school whose parents were so jealous of them that they started punishing them they started sabotaging their child's ability to succeed they didn't encourage them to go go to college they

said hey you don't need to go to college you need to start working at the age of 15 you need to help out in the family store now that you can work we're going to hold you down instead of elevating you and what I see in these people is that they've walled off their confidence they've numbed out their positive potential and so what happens is anytime they strive to do something that energy that I can do it that sense of confidence that sense of like I can accomplish something actually gets actively suppressed and then what

happens is they get in this really weird situation where intellectually they know that they're capable they know that they can do it but something in them is blocked and Shadow work helps these people let's understand how so remember that the shadow forms because we wall off a part of our self and there are two problems that this creates the first is that the pro parts that we wall off become toxic and will infect other things so one of the ways that we can do Shadow work one of the best things that we can use to

figure out what our shadow is because remember the shadow is unconscious right so it's like we don't know what the shadow is that's what makes it so hard to do Shadow work so one of the things that we're going to use is something called projection so projection is when a human being has something in here that I don't like about myself I am going to shift this bad thing about me because my ego can't handle that I am this way so what my ego ends up doing is I take this negativity in me and then

I shift it around to someone else so here are some examples of projection number one that I've dealt with is people who are homophobic repressed homosexuals so they have homosexual thoughts and feelings they are conditioned in such a way where these are bad these are terrible you know you should these are you know the sin the devil things like that right and I'm not even making a value judgment about whether that's true or not I'm using it as an example of projection so then what happens is I hate this part of me right I'm taught

to hate this part of me and it like hurts to do that right because it's very exciting and it's like potentially even love like these are like people who will fall in love with someone of the same gender and then I want you all to imagine for a moment how painful it is for something like love to be demonized so much now the ego can't handle this level of cognitive dissonance you know you just can't function unless your ego is like unified in some way right and some of y'all know what I mean because there

are times where you are so internally conflicted that you literally can't do anything I want want to study but I don't want to study I'm trying to avoid this thing but I really need to do this thing and you are literally paralyzed that's what happens right so when we're internally conflicted if I'm trying to pick up this glass of water with one hand and pull down this glass of water with the other hand the glass of water doesn't move anywhere so our egoo in order to move in any direction suppresses particular things and then it

has to get rid of it so I've learned to hate homosexuality Within Myself and then what pisses me off when I see someone else who's gay who's living there best life I had to make these sacrifices I had to I learned that this was the most terrible thing the only way I could function was to demonize it so much and now I see you out there living your life being happy with the person you are I want youall to think for a moment about how hard that is for me to sit with I lopped off

my own arm and here you are waving at me with two hands impossible to deal with cognitively so then what happens is I take the self-hatred because it's really hard to hate yourself and I project it out towards this person this person is wrong this person is a sinner this is and this is why like you know not to not trying to get political here but the the number of you know stories I've heard about conservative politicians who end up having very homophobic rhetoric who engage in homosexual acts as like really high like it's really

weird right like I don't know if you guys have heard those stories but whatever so another example we've already touched on which is the bully which is is I feel bad about me in here so instead of like feeling weakness in here because often times bullies are abused right so they're like physically abused at home so I'm made to feel small or emotionally abused or sexually abused so I feel bad in here how do I deal with those feelings of Badness I'm going to take these feelings and I'm going to put them onto someone else

I'm going to project them out you're pathetic you're weak I'm going to show you how weak you are that's like like this is something that always you know confused me I got bullied a lot when I was a kid and I was like why the does this guy do this right why do they show up every day what do they get like I'm just minding my own damn business I'm not bothering them and they show up every day on the playground and they just randomly show up and for some [ __ ] reason it's like

you know just like you sneeze occasionally it's like occasionally this person comes up and Bullies me for no apparent reason that's because it's a psychological conflict in here they're being motivated has nothing to do with me it has everything to do with what's going on inside them I'm simply the screen on which projection arises so bullying is another good example a couple of quick examples that we'll go through one is like marital infidelity concerns so this is something that I see quite a bit where like when I'll see the inside of relationship sometimes there'll be

one partner who is paranoid that the other partner is cheating but one of the most likely outcomes is the partner who is paranoid is the one who is either cheating right or is has desires to cheat or want wants to cheat but those kinds of feelings are so hard for our ego to sit with that we push them out onto other people so that's how projection happens too the last thing that we'll talk about is victim blaming so victim blaming I think is a really good example of projection it's a very a much more modern

example right where we're like so you know we don't want to accept that I am guilty for something so instead what I'll do so like if I feel like I am guilty of something that's hard to sit with there's a really easy way to deal with your internal guilt which is simple you just make it somebody else's fault if you make it somebody else's fault you have no reason to feel guilty your guilt goes away right so I see this a lot with like you know people who are survivors of trauma and stuff where like

their their abusive partner will say like why do you make me do this right there's a hilarious like South Park episode which is terrible but also funny where they sort of like you know in classic South Park fashion where like there's someone who's an abusive relationship he's like why do you make me do this that's not no one's making you be an abusive [ __ ] right but that's what happens is you feel guilty in here and then you can project that out and blame someone else so this is kind of how the shadow Works

projection is a really really important part of like how to understand your Shadow and more more broadly than projection is I would say just judgment in general right so if you if you want to understand where your Shadow is you need to look at the things that you judge harshly and then you need to ask yourself where did you learn learn to judge this harshly where did you learn that artists are pathetic right where did you learn that oh like people who like don't work really hard right so I see this a lot with these

like toxic Sigma grind set folks where they're like unless you've got a side hustle in a double side hustle and a third side hustle like unless you are working your body to the point of absolute destruction you are not working enough like you hear all this kind of crap right and you got to like ask yourself where does that come from where does the loathing towards laziness come from it comes from themselves because they hated themselves for being lazy and then they changed right they stopped being lazy they had to take this part of their

laziness and they had to destroy it and when they destroyed this part of laziness they became something else and if they see someone else with work life balance that really pisses them off because that person didn't have to make all these sacrifices what do you mean you can make a sufficient amount of money and have fun doesn't work like that that means I made a big mistake I didn't have to make these sacrifices that's how you know you're projecting now here's the next thing so a lot of times when we talk about Shadow work I

see this a lot with like the podcast Bros with they're like yeah like I did Shadow work and I such a great like Revelation now I feel like interconnected does all that fine but the primary thing here's how you know if you're getting close to your Shadow the thing that you'll feel the most often is humiliation so remember you are J harshly judging something right so that's a negative thing so as as you reconnect with it the most common emotion you will experience is actually humiliation so let's run through a couple of examples so for

the person who has repressed homosexuality right so they have immense feelings of guilt and humiliation if they ever explore their sexuality makes sense for even someone like the bully when a bully realizes what they do right when they realize like this negativity within them generally speaking what do they feel they feel ashamed of themselves I see this in the failure to thrive crowd too and this is so devastating right this is the gifted kid crowd when they if they ever try to connect with their positivity if they ever try to connect with their potential they

feel so humiliated because if they had the potential to do it if you really could have done it all along why the hell did you end up here right you could have had a good life but you squandered it the amount of humiliation with like the realization that oh I could have done it but I screwed up instead what they do in this is how the shadow works like they wall it off they say it was never possible for me I'm lazy I have ADHD they make excuses for themselves so they never have to face

up to the responsibility and therefore the humiliation of recognizing even at the age of 32 if you wake up tomorrow and you really are willing to face the music deal with your emotions put yourself in humiliating situation after a humiliating situation apply for an entry-level job even though you graduated from Harvard start start socializing with people who you think are rejects start having conversations with people where you feel really ashamed of yourself you can even do it today and I've seen it right I've helped these people do this but the primary thing they encounter is

humiliation so if you're trying to figure out where your Shadow is first of all look at the things that you judge harshly and then ask yourself where did you learn to judge those things chances are those are things that you yourself experienced which because of the way you adapted in life you had to make those things those parts of you bad second thing is as you get close to those things you may feel pathetic and humiliation if that's what you feel you're moving in the right direction right this is internal work we don't want this

to be like other people humiliating you now what are the advantages of of doing this kind of work so when you find what this thing is recognize that it is a part of you right there's a part of you that is angry there's a part of you that wanted to have fun when we start to integrate this part back into instead of suppressing it it's a part of me I am flawed right turns out I'm gay turns out I do have the potential turns out I can do it really hard to deal with turns out

that I don't need to work this hard turns out that I want to have more fun turns out that I do feel angry towards my boss turns out that I do have these feelings of insecurity and infidelity and I'm not sexually attracted to my partner anymore these are all things that are really hard to deal with but you have to accept them once you start accepting them depending on on what your problem is all kinds of things will change so when I work with high performers and they accept their Shadow they tend to have more

Vigor in life they feel less burnt out they start being motivated towards useless things things that don't pad their resume but just bring them enjoyment it's amazing like they start to live a fuller life now Fuller doesn't I think it's better but here's what we have to understand about Fuller Fuller means a a wider range of experience so that may mean feeling more sadness more anger more guilt but it's a more complete life when I work with people who are high performers their life is like empty but successful and so if you want to live

a fuller life not necessarily a better one this is what's also hard to understand it's a fuller life but then you'll feel better on balance it's absolutely better you'll start to become more innocent now for people who are like Failure to Launch their life will also be Fuller but what they will add to it is confidence positivity potential hope and hope is a very very hard thing to have I don't know if this kind of makes sense because once you open yourself to hope you open yourself up to crushing disappointment and that's how you learned

how to be hopeless in the first place right it was a protective mechanism to protect you from disappointment because what hurts human beings the most if I expect this much and I get this much I'm fine if I expect this much and I get this much I'm sagge if I expect this much and I get this much I'm happy so I want y'all to think about this for a second if I want to win this equation in life what do I need to do have my expectations at rock bottom so at a minimum I'm not

disappointed and anything else becomes positive this is how people learn hopelessness so to be able to Hope again is one of the benefits if you're a failure to launch person and you do Shadow work so there's been a lot of information about Shadow work kind of going around I really love it as a concept and at the same time I think that it's not quite what people think it is if you feel like your life is inom complete or you feel like you're angry at the world and you judge people really harshly and you want

to change those things Shadow work is the way to do it hey y'all hope you enjoyed today's video we talk about a bunch of topics like this on the channel so be sure to subscribe for more if you're already subscribe to GG and we'll see you in [Music] chat for [Music]