The epiphany:
The shadow is only dark because we have blocked it from the light.
The (incomplete) unpacking:
We speak of the shadow self as the darkness, or even the parts of ourselves that are ‘dark,’ but those parts of ourself are only dark because we have kept them out of the light. They are not inherently dark, and darkness is not inherently bad.
Shadow work is less about ‘going into the darkness’ and more about bringing those parts of ourself out into the light.
It takes bravery because we’ve hidden those parts away for a reason, and mostly those reasons are incubated in fear. We hide them because they are not acceptable within our immediate social environment. We hide the things that make us individuals, that differentiate us from our peers.
This happens as we grow through childhood, as our personalities are molded, before we’re aware enough to see it happening. Children desperately need their closest social contacts on a deeply instinctive level. We are helpless to this process, and in fact (from an evolutionary perspective) it serves us well in childhood, when we are helpless without our families. Maybe not each individual specifically, but as a species, it does.
Where there is pain, there is an injury; this is just as true for our emotional selves as it is for our bodies, and just as we will shy from a fire after being burnt, we will shy from a trigger of emotional pain. We hide our most vulnerable, and our least accepted, parts of ourselves in the shadows. Thus grows our shadow self as something to be feared.
Typically our ‘toxicity’ is only the mechanism by which we have sought to protect those parts that we hide in the shadows. Bringing the shadowed parts of ourselves into the light negates the need for maladaptive coping mechanisms, and makes it possible to heal.
In this metaphor, ‘light’ is only comprehension and acceptance, and ‘dark’ is only that which we have yet to understand. There will always be darkness, but what hides there isn’t good or bad, it’s the wounded parts of our self.