How to find out what your shadow is

Why you cannot just ask yourself

Every list of shadow work prompts eventually asks some version of: what part of yourself do you reject? It is a fair question and a useless one, because if you could answer it accurately you would not need to ask. The shadow is defined by being outside awareness. Asking it to identify itself is asking the blind spot to describe what it cannot see.

What works instead is indirect. You do not look at the shadow; you look at the evidence it leaves. There are four reliable places to find it.

Method one: the intensity of your contempt

The single most reliable signal is disproportionate reaction. Not dislike, which is often just accurate judgement, but heat. The person whose neediness makes you want to leave the room. The colleague whose self-promotion enrages you out of all proportion. The friend whose laziness you find genuinely offensive.

Psychologists call the underlying mechanism projection. The rule of thumb: when the volume of your reaction exceeds the size of the offence, the extra volume is yours. Ask what the trait would be asking for if it were permitted in you. The needy person is asking to be looked after. If that lands badly, ask when you last let anyone look after you.

Method two: the trait you are proudest of

Every strongly held virtue casts a shadow directly behind it. The identity you have built most deliberately tells you what you have most deliberately excluded.

• If you are proud of being the strong one, your shadow is likely to hold your need for help.
• If you are proud of being easy-going, it is likely to hold your anger.
• If you are proud of being independent, it is likely to hold your longing to belong to someone.
• If you are proud of being rational, it is likely to hold whatever you cannot argue your way out of.

Method three: the voice that is not yours

Most people can recall a moment of hearing themselves say something and recognising, with a small horror, whose voice it was. That moment is unusually informative. What you inherited without choosing it is very often the machinery that runs when you are not paying attention.

Track it. Not the content of what you said, but the tone, and the situation that produced it. The shadow tends to surface exactly when you are too tired, too provoked, or too frightened to maintain the version of yourself you prefer.

Method four: a projective test

The three methods above are all self-report, and self-report has a ceiling. It is limited by what you are willing to notice about yourself, which is exactly the variable in question.

Projective methods get around this. They present an ambiguous object with no correct answer, and read what you project onto it. Because there is nothing to get right, there is nothing to perform, and the material that surfaces is harder to curate. The Rorschach inkblot is the famous example.

Symponia uses a projective method built on animals. You name six that feel like you, and one that repels you. The six describe the self you recognise. The seventh is read as the shadow, on exactly the principle in method one: revulsion is not a neutral signal, and the thing you cannot stand is very often the thing you disowned. It takes about four minutes and it does not require you to already know the answer.