What is the Human Shadow? Your is ego is your self-concept. Your ego is the part of the internal you that forms as a kind of separte identity. When you are born, your ego is not yet fully formed. But as you grow up and mature, your ego is formed through your relationship to others. Therefore, the majority of your ego develops during the process of socialization.
While you are being socialized within your family and your community, you learn the concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. You learn about the aspects of yourself hat are acceptable and unacceptable. Young children understand that you will get love and praised for being good and abandoned or punished when being bad. So as a child you naturally develop a survival strategy. When you reject yourself in order to survive, it causes a split within your consciousness.
This is how the subconscious mind is born, the so called ‘shadow’. Your subconscious is everything that you don’t see in yourself, that which is suppressed. Your conscious mind holds what you can see, what you are aware of. Living with internal separation and division is not a natural state for humans. It’s an unhealed state because the shadow aspect of our inner selves wants to be integrated, no matter how much we wish that it would go away.
To work with the human shadow is to make the unconscious ‘conscious’ and make the unacceptable ‘acceptable. The integration of your unconsciousness leads to complete and total awareness.