Shadow Work® is a personal growth methodology designed to help us understand and balance aspects of our own natures.
It offers a uniquely compassionate view of personality development and an effective technology for working towards balanced awareness. It includes a set of facilitated processes that allow individuals to explore behavior patterns that they want to understand or change. Shadow Work® is especially devoted to providing a setting that allows people to learn and evolve slowly, safely, without confrontation or pressure and with full choice.
Shadow Work® is based partially on the premise first posited by psychologist Carl G. Jung that human nature is not random but predictable and classifiable. That in fact, we all exhibit patterns of instincts — commonly known as “archetypes” — that are normal and not indicative of psychological sickness or abnormality. Jung further concluded that, when these normal instincts are disowned, they inhabit what he termed “the shadow,” the hidden region of the psyche that begins to control our behavior if left unexamined.
Shadow Work® is a way to explore this inner landscape and discover the gold hidden in these shadows. Unlike some other approaches to growth and healing, Shadow Work® is not designed to eliminate or destroy certain character traits or behaviors. Rather, it seeks to bring them out of shadow and into the light so as to transform them, thereby balancing our personalities into a more integrated whole.
Shadow Work® has been developed over the last 20 years by Cliff Barry and Mary Ellen Whalen (née Blandford). They have integrated and correlated their work with other disciplines such as Gestalt, Voice Dialogue, Accelerated Learning, Grovian Metaphor Work, Bio-Energetics, family systems theory, addiction recovery and personality typing systems such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® and the Enneagram. They are indebted to the pioneering work of Robert Bly, Robert Moore and Doug Gillette, David Grove, Ron Hering, Hal and Sidra Stone, and John Bradshaw.
Shadow Work® is available both in group seminars and in coaching for individuals and couples and is currently offered in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia. Shadow Work® Seminars trains and certifies facilitators and coaches in the Shadow Work® methodology and has developed some of its tenets to be applied in larger corporate and organizational systems.
For more information, please contact Shadow Work® Seminars at (303) 530-2840, or by email at [email protected] or [email protected]