What Is Shadow Work? Understanding Suppressed Emotions and How Therapy Helps

Shadow work is a concept that has gained considerable visibility in recent years, often in wellness and self-help contexts online. But the idea has roots that go well beyond any social media trend: it originates in the depth psychology of Carl Jung, who described the shadow as the part of the psyche that contains the aspects of the self we have rejected, suppressed, or denied — the qualities, feelings, impulses, and memories we have decided are unacceptable, dangerous, or incompatible with how we want to see ourselves.

The Jungian Origin of Shadow Work

Carl Jung proposed that the human psyche contains both a conscious and an unconscious dimension. The conscious self — what Jung called the ego — is the part of the psyche we identify with and experience as “me.” The shadow, by contrast, is the part of the psyche that lies outside this conscious identification: it contains the aspects of ourselves that we have concluded, usually from an early age, cannot be part of who we are.

The shadow is formed through the experience of socialisation. Children learn, through the responses of parents, caregivers, and broader social environments, which qualities and emotions are acceptable and which are not. The aspects of the self that consistently produce negative responses are gradually pushed out of conscious identification and into the shadow — not destroyed, but denied.

The Shadow Is Not Only Negative

One of the most misunderstood aspects of Jung’s shadow concept is the assumption that it contains only negative or destructive qualities. In fact, the shadow contains whatever has been rejected from conscious identification — which frequently includes positive qualities as well. A child who was mocked for showing creativity might suppress that creative impulse. A person who was shamed for ambition might relegate that drive to the shadow. The shadow is not a reservoir of what is bad about a person; it is a reservoir of what has been pushed away.

How Suppressed Emotions Develop

The emotional content of the shadow — what many people refer to when they talk about suppressed emotions — typically develops through a consistent pattern: an emotion is experienced, and the experience of having that emotion produces some form of negative consequence. The emotion is then suppressed not because it stops being present but because expressing it, or even acknowledging it consciously, became associated with punishment, abandonment, ridicule, or loss of connection.

The Difference Between Suppression and Regulation

Emotional regulation is the healthy capacity to manage the expression of emotions appropriately for context — not to feel nothing, but to have a considered relationship with one’s emotional experience. Emotional suppression is different: it is the habitual pushing down of emotional experience itself. A person who regulates their emotions is still in contact with them. A person who suppresses them has lost that contact — the emotions continue to exist and to exert influence, but they are not available to conscious processing.

What Gets Suppressed

The emotions most commonly found in the shadow are those that were most consistently met with negative responses in the developmental environment. Anger is one of the most frequently suppressed emotions, particularly for people raised in environments where anger was treated as dangerous or unacceptable. Grief is another: many people grow up in families or cultures where sadness is treated as weakness, and learn to suppress it long before it has been processed. Shame itself is often deeply suppressed — and need and vulnerability are also frequently suppressed, particularly in people who learned early that needing others was unsafe.

How Suppressed Emotions Affect Mental Health

The suppressed aspects of the self do not disappear simply because they have been pushed from conscious awareness. They continue to exert influence — often considerably — on mood, relationships, behaviour, and mental health.

Projection

One of the most significant mechanisms through which shadow material affects conscious life is projection — the unconscious attribution to others of qualities, feelings, or impulses that actually belong to the self. A person who has deeply suppressed their own anger may find themselves experiencing others as disproportionately aggressive. Because the suppressed quality is not recognised as part of the self, it is experienced as belonging to external reality — to other people, to situations, to the world. Projection is not a moral failing — it is an automatic psychological mechanism that operates largely outside conscious control. But it has real consequences: it distorts perception, damages relationships, and prevents accurate understanding of one’s own emotional responses.

The Psychological Cost of Suppression

Maintaining the suppression of significant emotional content requires psychological energy. The effort of keeping difficult emotions, memories, and aspects of the self out of conscious awareness — even when it has become so habitual that it no longer feels effortful — consumes resources that would otherwise be available for creativity, connection, and engagement with life. Many people who have done significant therapeutic work describe a characteristic experience: as the suppression eases, they find themselves with more energy, more emotional range, and a broader sense of what is possible.

Beyond the energy cost, suppressed emotions also affect physical health. Research on the mind-body relationship has consistently found associations between the habitual suppression of emotional experience and increased physiological stress — elevated cortisol, impaired immune function, and a range of psychosomatic presentations. The body carries what the mind refuses to hold consciously.

What Shadow Work Looks Like in Therapy

The phrase “shadow work” is used widely in online wellness contexts, often to describe self-directed activities such as journalling or structured self-reflection exercises. These activities can be genuinely valuable, but they are not the same as shadow work in a therapeutic context — and for significant shadow material, attempting to access and work with deeply suppressed content without professional support can be unsettling and occasionally counterproductive.

In therapeutic practice, shadow work is not a specific technique but a dimension of the therapeutic relationship and process. It happens within a relationship that provides sufficient safety and trust for material that has been suppressed — often because it was historically unsafe to express or acknowledge — to become available to conscious awareness and processing.

Person-Centred Counselling and the Shadow

Person-centred counselling is particularly well suited to shadow work because of its foundational conditions: unconditional positive regard, empathic understanding, and congruence. These conditions create a relational environment in which the client can gradually access and express aspects of their experience that have been suppressed because previous relational environments were not safe for them. The therapeutic relationship itself provides the corrective experience: honesty, vulnerability, and emotional authenticity being met with consistent acceptance rather than the rejection or punishment that originally drove the suppression.

CBT, ACT and Shadow Content

CBT addresses shadow content through the work of identifying and examining automatic thoughts and underlying beliefs — many of which operate below conscious awareness and reflect the rejected, shame-laden view of the self. Bringing these beliefs into conscious examination is, in effect, a form of shadow integration. ACT approaches shadow content differently: rather than trying to change the content of suppressed or distressing thoughts and feelings, ACT develops the capacity to hold them with less struggle — to allow them to be present without being controlled by them.

EMDR and Suppressed Trauma

For shadow content rooted in traumatic experience — memories, emotions, and aspects of the self that were suppressed as a direct response to overwhelming or threatening events — EMDR provides a specific and evidence-based approach. EMDR works with the nervous system’s processing of traumatic material, allowing experiences that have been stuck in an unprocessed state to be integrated. For people whose shadow contains significant traumatic content, EMDR can achieve what talk therapy alone sometimes cannot: the physiological resolution of the stuck material.

Shadow Work and the Therapeutic Relationship

Whether the therapeutic approach is person-centred, CBT, ACT, EMDR, or an integrative combination, what shadow work in therapy ultimately depends on is the quality of the therapeutic relationship. The shadow contains what has been suppressed because it was historically unsafe — and it will only become accessible in a relational context that is genuinely safe. Safety in this context means not the absence of challenge but the consistent experience of being met honestly, with care, and without the judgement or withdrawal that made the suppression necessary in the first place.

This is why shadow work cannot be fully replicated by self-directed activities, however useful they may be as complements. The shadow was formed in a relational context — through the experience of being responded to in ways that made certain aspects of the self unacceptable. Its integration also tends to require a relational context: the experience of bringing what was rejected into relationship and finding that it is held rather than rejected again.

What to Expect From This Work

Shadow work in therapy is not a linear process, and it is not always comfortable. Accessing suppressed emotions and aspects of the self that have been pushed away for a long time can bring temporary distress before it brings relief. This is not a sign that the work is going wrong — it is a predictable feature of bringing into awareness what has been held outside it. A skilled therapist supports the person through these periods, maintaining the conditions of safety that make the work possible and providing the containment that makes the distress manageable rather than overwhelming.

• Qualified & registered therapists
• LGBTQIA+ affirming support
• NCPS organisational member
• Online nationwide
• Face-to-face across England
• Established 2014

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian Stockbridge

• MBACP (Senior Accredited)

Founder & Clinical Director — Hope Therapy & Counselling Services

Founder of Hope Therapy, published author, clinical supervisor, and co-presenter of The Talk Room Podcast. Practising therapist with 25+ years of senior leadership experience.

Before Ian Stockbridge was a therapist, he was a leader. For more than 25 years he worked in senior management and directorial roles across commercial organisations — at times managing teams of more than 200 people. He was effective at it. But the longer he did it, the harder something became to ignore. The people around him were struggling. Capable, committed, often high-achieving people carrying invisible weight that had nowhere to go. Stress accumulated quietly across months and years. Anxiety managed behind professionalism. Relationships and mental health dealt with in the margins of a working life that left little room for either.

• SCoPEd Band C
• SNCPS (Acc)
• BSc (Hons) CBT
• PGCert Clinical Supervision
• Diploma — Person-Centred Counselling
• Diploma — Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy
• Certificate — Acceptance & Commitment Therapy
• Certificate — Trauma
• Certificate — CBT for Insomnia
• 25+ Years Leadership
• Clinical Supervisor
• Published Author
• Podcast Co-Host
• LGBTQIA+ Affirming

View Ian’s Full Profile →