Facing The Mirror: Dealing With Your Shadow In Relationship
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Every single man, all of you have a shadow that inevitably shows up in your relationships with women. And it's the thing that I see time and time again, your insecurities, your reactivity, your fear, all of those things show up in the relationship and begin to erode and sabotage the relationship. Every single man, all of you have a shadow that inevitably shows up in your relationships with women.

Every man casts a shadow into his relationship and onto the people that he loves, but few actually dare to turn and look at what their shadow is. In love,

This shadow is the quiet storm of intimacy when you disconnect and shut down and pull away from the closeness that you desire. And the shadow often steps forward, uninvited, unacknowledged, but undeniable. You don't want it to be there. You don't want to sabotage. You don't want to blow up and get angry. You don't want to shut down and pull away for days. You don't want to disconnect and pull away from intimacy, but it happens.

Today, we are going to explore how your shadow reveals itself in relationship and

And how, if you have the courage and the willingness, you can face that shadow and integrate it into your life, into yourself. And this is the real kick. This is the real key to the shadow. The misconception about shadow work is that it's about some type of personal growth, that it's a growth-oriented process. I'm going to do this and I'm going to be so much better because of it. I'm going to be bigger because of it. I'm going to grow because of it.

When Jung talked about the shadow, these parts of us that we've rejected, we've denied, we've avoided, our fears, your insecurities, your doubts, your judgments about yourself, how you show up and perform sexually in the relationship, all of those things.

What Jung talked about was a process of integration, of actually welcoming these rejected parts back into yourself in a process of being more whole and more complete. So this is not about personal growth. This is not about growth in any way, shape, or form. This is about integration. This is about returning to a quality of wholeness that you have always had access to.

So let's dive in. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you are watching or listening to us on, whether it's YouTube or Spotify. Don't forget to hit the like button and share this video. Man it forward with somebody that you know could use the reminder or would love to hear it. I'm going to start off by giving you a quote from Mr. Carl Jung himself. I'm going to show how the shadow shows up in your relationship and why this happens. And then how do you actually start to work with it? How do you integrate this part?

So this quote I think is great because it really emphasizes how important this work is. Jung said, the new man must bear the burden of the shadow consciously for such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself. Whatever is wrong in the world

is in himself. And if he only learns to deal with his own shadow, he has done something real for the world. He has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic unsolved social problems of our day.

So here, Jung is kind of pointing to purpose, really, that for men specifically, when you feel like you're missing a sense of purpose, when you feel like you're missing a sense of direction, shadow work is actually a part of mission, of purpose, of direction, right? He says, if he only learns to deal with his shadow, with his own shadow, he has done something real for the world.

That in itself is an inherent purpose. It has meaning baked into it. So there's some real substance to being willing to face and confront your shadow. So let's talk about how the shadow shows up in your relationship. The shadow is not a monster, all right? It is what you have refused

to see in or about yourself. The shadow is where you refuse to see in or about yourself. It might be the parts of yourself that you've rejected. Compassion might be one of them. Healthy anger might be some of it. Grief might be another part of it.

confidence might be a part of it. Being willing to initiate connection might be a part of it. I mean, the list can go on and on and on, but how it shows up in relationships specifically is through the act of projection. So how you as a man relates to a woman, and this is the line that I wrote in my book,

men's work, which if you haven't checked it out, you absolutely should. Tens and tens and tens of thousands of men have gone through this book and absolutely loved it. But in the book, I wrote a chapter about how you as a man relate to women. And I specifically talked about how a man treats a woman is how he treats his unconscious. So how you treat the women that you date

is how you treat the unconscious parts of yourself. That might seem like a little conceptual and like hard to grasp, but the basic version of it is you project all of that unconscious content onto the women that you are dating. So if you hold in your unconscious the fears that you don't like to talk about, the insecurities that you don't like to talk about, they get projected onto the women that you're with. It ends up happening, right? That shadow comes out and gets projected onto them.

And so this is why so many guys, there's this very interesting correlation between the more attracted that you are to a woman and the more disheveled

and messed up you end up becoming, right? It's like, I'm so attracted to her. I want her. I want to be in relationship with her. I love her so much. And all of your fears and insecurities start coming forward. You get all kinds of messed up, right? You start becoming this nice guy that has no boundaries. You don't speak up for yourself or advocate for yourself. You don't say no. And

all of that just kind of falls apart. Why? Because the shadow and your unconscious gets projected onto that woman and into the relationship. So the main piece here is that the shadow wears many masks.

How it will show up in the relationship is a few different ways. Jealousy, blame, emotional distancing, emotional neediness can also be another way that the shadow shows up. Reactivity, so getting really reactive, going on the attack. Defensiveness is another way that the shadow will show up. And generally, the shadow's aim is

unintentionally, the shadow's aim is to be integrated into you and to be a part of the relationship.

And so it will be repressed and repressed and repressed. And you'll pretend like you're not jealous and you'll pretend like you're not needy. And then all of a sudden you'll, you know, text bomb the living crap out of the person that you're dating. You'll love bomb on them, you know, or you'll get super insecure and like, are we okay? Is everything all right? You know, and you're kind of like testing the waters with them constantly. And you can't just find a place of settling into the relationship. Or

Or you might find yourself trying to play the hero and you get into a relationship with a woman that you constantly need to rescue or fix. And then that only collapses into resentment, right? Playing out this cycle that is probably an echo of your past. So the shadow was created in the past.

It's stuff, it's content. You can think about it as psychological and emotional content that you tried to discard somewhere in your past. You got bullied in school for looking a certain way and you became very insecure about your looks, but you never talk about that in relationship.

Or, you know, you had a bad sexual experience with, you know, a girl in college or whatever, and you could never, you know, you had problems getting it up and you felt super ashamed and embarrassed about that and you never got into it. And that is in the background of the relationship, right? What if, what if, what if, what if, and this sort of sexual insecurity there.

builds and builds inside of you. So that's the shadow. It's an echo from the past, usually from family system, right? Hypercritical father, this sort of smothering mother that was constantly pushing through your boundaries. And then it shows up in your relationship by you being hypercritical, you pushing through boundaries constantly. So that's what the shadow can look like in relationship. That's how it can show up.

Why this happens is...

Simple but complex. There's sort of two things that I want to talk about. This happens because all of you wants to come into relationship, even the hidden parts, even the parts of you that you're ashamed of, you're embarrassed about, the perspectives and the insecurities that you hold about yourself that you think are not welcome in a relationship. All of you wants to be in the relationship. Your healthy anger, your grief, your sadness, your insecurities, that all wants to be a part

of being loved. It wants to be a part of you, but it also wants acceptance from another. So the more that you reject certain parts of you, and I'll give you one specific example to really land the plane on this.

Nice guys. Nice guys have almost always discarded their anger. They have almost always neglected and rejected their anger into the shadow. So they have very poor boundaries. You know, you don't say no to certain things. You don't stand up for yourself or advocate for your wants and needs.

And then that builds into resentment and then you blow up, right? And you become hostile and angry and aggressive and it pops out in passive aggressiveness. So nice guys neglect and reject their anger into their shadow and it pops out later on as the relationship builds. Another version of this for nice guys is compassion.

Nice guys very rarely have a deep level of compassion towards themselves. They might have compassion for their partner and the person that they're with, but they will often lack that compassion for the self and it will build up in this neediness. I need you to feel sorry for me. I need you to love me. I need you to whatever it is because I can't do that for myself. I can't give myself the love and the connection that we want.

So what you'll see is that how the shadow shows up is you'll often be either projecting onto your partner the things that you're hiding about yourself, or you will be needing from your partner the things you have rejected and neglected giving to yourself. Those are the two dynamics. The last part of this is that in love,

you encounter the anima, the inner feminine, and she does not want to build a relationship with you in a very easy way. She brings with her everything that's been disowned. So as you build a relationship with a woman, and of course I'm talking about a heterosexual relationship here, but it's true for all. As you build a relationship with a woman,

your relationship to your own internal feminine will start to come online and your partner will become a mirror, sort of like the vessel and unwilling bearer of that unlived feminine expression. So how you've treated your own emotions, how you treat yourself,

right? If you treat yourself with hate and hostility and aggressiveness, then there's a very high likelihood that you'll either attract somebody that mirrors that back to you, they're aggressive with you, they're hostile, they're combative, or maybe you attract somebody who's so loving and caring and nurturing, but you just continue to entrench yourself. You sabotage the relationship by just becoming this victim, right? Constantly and chronically

Chronically, it's like you are the harbinger of dysfunction within the relationship. And so we have to start to look at how does this actually show up? So a couple of things that I would encourage you to do. Number one is...

Have some awareness. So how do we actually work with this? How do we work with the shadow and start to integrate it into ourselves so it can also be a part of the relationship? What did I accuse my partner of today and where might that live in me?

What did I accuse my partner of today? So this is just a journaling prompt. This is a daily reflection that I would encourage you to do for like 30 days. What did I accuse or judge my partner for today? And where might that live or show up in me? So this is really about starting to gain some awareness of what are you actually projecting onto her?

And you might even want to, depending on how long you've been in the relationship, right? If you're married or you've been in the relationship for a couple of years and the two of you talk about, you know, therapeutic work or personal growth work, you might even want to say, what do you think I project onto you? Or what do you think I accuse you of?

that is actually more about me than is about you. And sometimes, depending on the woman that you're with, she'll give you a pretty fair assessment of, here's what you project onto me. You're super needy and you need me to like coddle you and love on you because you're so damn harsh to yourself. Like you're just not compassionate, you're not loving towards yourself.

You have no empathy for yourself and you need that from me all the time. So start to reflect on that. What do I accuse her of that also lives in me? So maybe you have a judgment of how she deals with money. Maybe you have a judgment of her sexuality. Maybe you have a judgment of her body, how she deals with her anger. Notice how and where that lives within you.

The next thing is about containment. Step number two is about containment. This is about emotional regulation, not suppression. What a lot of guys try and do is when they feel an insecurity, when they feel a fear come up, when anger starts to come up or whatever it is, that is usually dealt with through this suppression habit.

And that suppression feeds your shadow. It actually doesn't help you. It feeds the shadow. And in alchemy, there's this great, there's this sort of great metaphor, which is that the vessel must hold the fire. The vessel must hold the fire.

And so we have to be willing to start to build a vessel that can contain the intensity that lives inside of you. You might have an intense level of anger and frustration. It's just part of your demeanor. It's part of your makeup. And it's the thing that is constantly spilling out into the relationship, going on the attack. You're tearing your partner down. Maybe sometimes you yell or whatever it is.

But you have to start to build a vessel that can regulate and contain that fire, that heat. How you do that is through things like meditation and breath work. The big one for me, I have a lot of fire in my body. A lot of that kind of like anger energy that can turn into aggression and hostility just in life in general. You know, I used to get in the bar fights all the time.

part of what i had to do was when that anger and that fire starts to build up was i had to sit with that anger and so i would literally when that anger would sort of topple over i would

I would go set a timer for five or 10 minutes and I would close my eyes and I would force myself to sit in my body and be with the intensity of the anger that was fuming inside of me and learn to breathe, inhaling through the nose, long exhales out the mouth and actually tamp the fire down, begin to deescalate and downregulate the body so that my vessel became more and more capable of

Of containing that fire and that heat in a way that it wasn't so explosive. It wasn't so in control that I had more emotional regulation. So start to build the vessel that is going to hold the intensity inside of you.

Maybe in your vessel, you have a lot of grief and sadness. You have a lot of heaviness. You need to sort of cook that in a specific way. So you start to think about what do I need to do? And again, breathwork would be a great, great, great thing for that.

being able to develop a nervous system that can handle that type of intense emotionality. The third thing that you can do is a bit of a dialogue. And there's a couple of ways to do this.

Number one, I like journaling. So you can express from the anger, you can express from the judgment. So a good prompt is, if my anger could speak, it would say, or if my judgment could speak, it would say, or if my insecurity, if my neediness, if my shame could speak, it would say X, Y, and Z, and really start to

dialogue out and almost be in relationship with that shadow content. Because again, the jealousy, the neediness, the insecurity, the fear, the judgment, all those things, that's your shadow content. So start to be in dialogue with them. So my anger would say, I'm fucking sick and tired of this BS in the relationship and da-da-da-da-da.

And then you respond to the anger and you journal back and forth, almost like pen pals, you know, like you used to do with pen pals. You journal back and forth with the anger, with the neediness, with the frustration, with the jealousy, whatever it is that is coming up from the shadow, whatever that shadow content is, you journal and have a bit of a conversation with it and a back and forth, have a dialogue with that content instead of

That content coming out and trying to dialogue with the person that you're with. Next is accountability. This is not about guilting or shaming yourself. It is about ownership, taking ownership. My favorite saying, this too is me. This too is me. This too lives in me.

So this is really about being able to see I have a part in the dysfunction that's unfolding. Very common, without judgment, without shame, men usually do one of two things. They point the finger externally, she's at fault for the relationship and I don't have a part in it. Or

Or they take the blame on in such a way that they use that as a flogging system, right? You start to shame yourself and guilt yourself. I'm such a POS. And it really pulls you down. That's not ownership. That is not accountability. So you start to see your part.

in a way that you are honest, without blame, without shame, without judgment. You start to say, okay, I did this. No problem. I brought this into the relationship. No problem. I need to take ownership for X, Y, and Z. Here's the part of me that I've not wanted to show. You start to be honest.

about the part of you that you have not wanted to show in the relationship, the insecurity or the neediness, and you start to just be direct and transparent about it.

I have not wanted to show how much I care and love for this person. I have not wanted to show that I actually have some anger and frustration. I have not wanted to show the boundaries that I want to implement. So taking accountability. And then the last piece is this integration, right? So shadow integration, again, is not about getting better. It is about becoming more whole. And as you do these four steps,

the shadow content will start to integrate into you because it will not be rejected. It will not be suppressed. You'll be in conversation and dialogue with it. It'll have a place in your relationship. And again, it's not about bringing every single thing that you discover into your relationship and inundating the person that you're with with everything that you're discovering. It's more about you building the vessel so that you can contain that content in a more effective way and then determine,

when there's a part of you that needs to be expressed. So this is about bringing the psyche, your mind, that masculine force, and eros, the feminine part of you, that sensual part of you, into communion, into relationship inside of you. So this is not about causing one or the other to have sort of like this dominant control. It's about bringing some harmony into the depths of who you are.

So let me know what your thoughts are below. And I hope that you share this with maybe the person that you're with. Maybe you share this with a buddy and you go through some of the work that was in here today. All right. See you next week. Connor Beaton signing off.