Facing the Shadows: How Carl Jung Guides My Inner Work

Most of the time, we move through life on autopilot. Ever get in your car, drive somewhere familiar, and realize you don’t remember a single turn? You knew the lights, the lanes, the rhythm — but your mind was somewhere else entirely. Fascinating… and a little scary. That’s how much of my life ran, too, until the replays started: knee-jerk reactions, the whispers of inherited voices, echoes of old patterns.

For me, the knee-jerk was people-pleasing. I was trained to serve, to make everyone else comfortable, even if it hurt me. That mindset shaped my choices — in school, relationships, and even in the long delay before I finally learned to please myself. By my 50s, I realized the loudest voice in my head wasn’t just mine. It was a chorus of inherited trauma, ancestral stress, and my own self-judgment.

I carried quiet regrets — the “I should haves,” the anxiety over choices I’d made — and they shaped how I treated myself, my body, and even how I approached food. I devoured books, searching for women who had dismantled similar scripts, women who had reclaimed themselves from mindsets that felt automatic, oppressive, inescapable. Zora Neale Hurston’s words stayed with me: “If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

Even decades away from my childhood home, the whispers followed me. Then I discovered Carl Jung. His work on the shadow — the parts of ourselves we suppress or inherit — gave me language for what was happening inside me. The shadow isn’t evil; it just drives behavior when ignored. For me, it fed cravings, self-criticism, and the constant tug-of-war over food and body image.

Shadow Work in Practice
I started journaling, letting guilt, anxiety, and frustration spill onto the page without judgment. Patterns emerged: my beliefs often weren’t mine; they were echoes of my mother, cultural pressures, and survival strategies passed down through generations. Slowly, I saw that much of the anxiety wasn’t mine at all — it was the inherited voice I had been letting run my life.

Physically, the stress showed up too. My waist expanded, blood pressure climbed, and the life I dreamed of felt further away. I resigned myself to quiet, uneventful years — until a doctor finally listened. I poured out my story, and she said, “I want you to try something.” That was my introduction to GLP-1.

As my body responded and the internal noise softened, I finally had space to sit with my mind. I asked myself: Which impulses are genuinely mine? Which are echoes of fear, scarcity, or old conditioning? Jung helped me reframe failure as experience, mistakes as information. Shadow work wasn’t about erasing the past; it was about understanding, integrating, and reclaiming agency.

Daily Alignment
Shadow work is practical, not theoretical. When I feel heaviness, hear a critical voice, or notice anxious thoughts about my body, I pause: “Is this me, or an echo?” Awareness is power. Journaling, meditation, and reflection help me notice triggers and choose consciously. Alignment isn’t perfection — it’s a daily, deliberate practice.

GLP-1 became a tool in this process, quieting my body’s noise so my mind and spirit could do their work. Shadow work is messy, humbling, and deeply freeing. It’s about reclaiming your life from inherited scripts and stepping fully into your own wisdom, every single day.