Meeting the Parts of You That You’ve Hidden Away

Carl Jung once said, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

From the time we’re little, we start piecing together who we are. Every choice, every reaction, every bit of feedback we get from the people around us adds another piece to the puzzle of our personality.

Some parts are easy to show, like the ones that got us praise and smiles. Being helpful. Being clever. Being kind. These traits felt safe, so we kept them out in the open for everyone to see.

But there were other parts; the ones that got us told off, shamed, or made to feel wrong. Our anger. Our sadness. Our impulsiveness. Our sensitivity. These parts didn’t feel safe to show. So, we pushed them away, locked them up inside, and learned to hide them.

It can seem like the right thing to do, after all, who wants to risk rejection or criticism? But hiding those parts doesn’t make them disappear.

It’s like trying to hold a beach ball under the water. You can push and push, but the harder you try to keep it down, the more forcefully it pops back up. Suppressed emotions have a way of leaking out - through anxiety, irritability, numbness, self-sabotage, or feeling disconnected from yourself.

That’s what Jung called the shadow - the parts of us we’ve rejected or denied. And here’s where Internal Family Systems (IFS) comes in.

IFS works on the understanding that we all have different “parts” within us, and each part has a distinct role. Some parts step in to protect us from pain. Some hold our deepest wounds. And some carry our joy, creativity, and openness. The shadow often holds the parts that were shamed or shut down when we were young. They were never “bad, they were simply trying to help us survive in the only way they knew how.

When we combine shadow work with IFS, we’re not just digging around in the dark for the sake of it. We’re meeting these hidden parts with compassion. We’re listening to the anger, the sadness, the fear, and discovering the story behind them. Instead of pushing them back into the vault, we’re building trust.

Maybe that means letting your anger speak without judgment so you can understand what it’s protecting. Maybe it’s giving space to your sadness, so it no longer needs to knock you over unexpectedly. Maybe it’s simply noticing a reactive part and saying, “I see you. You don’t have to do this alone anymore.”

The magic is this: when you welcome these shadow parts back into the light, they soften. They no longer have to fight for your attention. And in that space, the qualities they’ve been guarding - your passion, your creativity, your authenticity - can finally come through.

Your shadow isn’t the enemy. And neither are your parts. They are maps guiding you back to the pieces of you that are still waiting to be loved.