Understand These 3 Psychology Elements For Greater Self-Love

Dear Friend,

I hope your new year is off to a great start. 

One practice that all of us can benefit from in the new year is showing ourselves more self-love.

I talked about self-love pretty extensively a few issues ago, but wanted to dive deeper into this crucial topic today.

To truly love ourselves, we must have awareness and self-acceptance of all parts of ourselves. There’s nothing about us we need to hate or despise. We can let go of any feelings of unworthiness, self-hatred, and despair.

Over the last several months, I’ve grown increasingly intrigued by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s teachings.

While you might not be familiar with Jung, you’ve likely heard of several concepts he developed. Jung introduced the world to the idea of the ego, the shadow, the personal and collective unconscious, and introversion and extroversion. 

I’ve found that I resonate with several of Jung’s views, particularly around the idea of individuation. 

Jung defines individuation as the process of growing beyond the ego to become your true self. 

Through individuation, we can find our life’s meaning and purpose. 

We can choose who and what we want to become.

In Jung’s view (as well as the view of many Eastern religions), our true nature emerges from birth. Only our conditioning and life experiences form the ego that keeps us safe.

While that has its purpose, the ego limits us in life. It’s hard to truly love and accept ourselves when we keep our shadow elements hidden.

Today, I want to explore some of these Jungian concepts with you so that you may see you are so much more than the ego. 

You can love and accept every part of yourself. Even the parts you think are ugly.

You are not the ego

When you hear the word “ego,” what comes to mind?

Many of us might think that it means someone who has a “big” ego. Perhaps someone entitled, arrogant, or conceited.

But in a psychological context, the ego is actually our sense of self that we develop in response to the world around us. 

Our ego has two main jobs:

• Survival

• Fitting in

While Ryan Holiday has a very popular book called Ego Is The Enemy, we actually need the ego in order to accomplish anything in our first phase of life. 

We wouldn’t be able to succeed in school, form relationships with our family and friends, get a job, make a living, or fall in love without having an ego. 

But my guess is, you probably don’t love every aspect of your upbringing. There are certain qualities you’ve adopted in order to survive and fit in that don’t represent who you really are. 

According to Jung, you would be right. He summarizes the process of ego development as necessary, but limiting:

“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”

This ego is the initial “I” that we form in life. Anything outside of “I” is considered being other, or separate from us.

But as I hinted at when discussing how you can create your best life in 2024, we are not actually separate from others. Just like a spark from fire, we are all united as one entity, one being.

We may appear as individuals, but we can always come back to our collective power we originate from (the fire).

As part of individuation, we see that while our ego served us well growing up, we need to move past it to become that true self we each are. 

The ego isn’t necessarily an enemy to be defeated, rather, it’s a part of us we should aim to transcend.

What mask are you putting on for the world?

The ego not only helps us survive and fit in, but it causes us to develop a separate persona.

Our persona is the mask we put on in order to appear a certain way to the world. It’s a false personality we’ve developed that we believe is who we really are. 

I’ve shared before how I’ve presented myself to the world as a polished and perfect person. 

This started from when I was very young, and was largely in response to the fear that I would be abandoned by my family, friends, and society. 

Because of that fear of abandonment, the persona I developed was that of a good boy, a people pleaser. I strove to get the best grades possible, achieve superior ratings at piano recitals, and be the most pious Catholic boy I could.

But beneath this mask, I was covering up some of the darker, or more repressed parts of myself. 

I hid my attraction to men for years (not that this is dark, but it is part of myself that I pushed into my shadow).

I aimed to hide any imperfections I had, like my tendency to judge others, be rude, ‌inconsiderate, or even ignorant.

Much like the ego from which it originates, our persona also serves two key purposes:

• As the desired impression we leave on others

• The way to hide our true emotions and feelings

While I value the driven persona I developed to achieve career success, publish novels, and form relationships, I recognize my persona has limitations (like people pleasing and not valuing my own needs).

For example, I’d love to integrate more fun and joyful parts into my personality. But because I never thought it was a good thing to be joyful (I was too focused on others’ joy), I repressed joy into my shadow.

I can still love and appreciate elements of my persona for what they’ve given me, just as I can with my ego, but therapy and coaching taught me these parts don’t represent all of who I am. 

I love the drive I’ve developed, but I can transcend this persona to integrate my shadow elements.

Shine the light on your shadow

“The cave you fear to enter contains the treasure that you seek.” - Joseph Campbell

The third psychological element of our personality is the one we consciously know the least about: the shadow.

While we can easily uncover how our ego affects our lives and the persona we’ve built to survive and fit in, we often aren’t aware of the qualities inside our shadow. 

For me, I’ve only uncovered the pieces of my shadow through therapy and coaching.

Jung described the shadow as the traits you have that get repressed into your unconscious.

While you try to present the persona to the world, the side that you don’t want others to see is the shadow. 

Even though we aren’t consciously aware of our shadow, we often project the qualities of our shadow onto others. 

For example, I play in an LGBTQ+ kickball league. It’s a lot of fun and I’ve made some very good friendships from it. But I used to get very triggered by certain members of my team.

They would be loud, proud, and joyful as the fierce individuals that they are. It was something that I envied, and wished I had the courage to express all of my joy in a way that they do. 

It wasn’t until a recent shadow session I did with the coach I work with as part of my coach training program that I realized that joy and being a fierce individual are two elements of my shadow. 

What triggered me in my teammates were qualities that I also possessed. 

Even though joy and a fierce individuality are good qualities, they’re still in my shadow. Jung ascribed these qualities to our “golden shadow.”

“The shadow is ninety percent pure gold.” - Carl Jung

I also uncovered other qualities of my shadow with other students in my coaching program, like ignorance, rudeness, and being inconsiderate. All of this was from a shadow coaching session, where my partner asked me about a person who triggered me recently.

When we are aware of what triggers us, we can often begin to uncover the repressed parts of ourselves. The parts we keep in our shadow.

When we understand the shadow, we can move closer to becoming our true self. 

We won’t have to hide certain parts of our personality, but can instead integrate them into the rest of our life and even embrace them. 

I can’t wait for the day when I’ve fully integrated more joy into my life. I’m willing to accept moments where I am rude or inconsiderate (not that I plan to be that way all the time, of course).

A call to accept and love your full self

In order to love all parts of ourselves, we must come to know and understand the ego, persona, and our shadow. 

We can appreciate the work our ego has done for us to create the life we have now. Though we can also understand that if we aren’t happy with the way our lives have turned out, we have the power to change it by embracing our shadow qualities.

We can integrate the shadow into our life and love everything we offer the world.

There’s one big problem with our shadow, though.

It’s that we can’t access it consciously.

We need help from others to access those shadow qualities and work with them so that we can achieve self-love for our entire self.

Much in the way that I’ve uncovered the aspects of the golden shadow and the darker parts of my shadow through shadow coaching sessions, I am pleased to offer you, my dear reader, with these insights.

That’s why at the end of January, I will offer a limited number of free shadow coaching sessions to Waking Up readers. 

The session will be about 45 minutes. We’ll go through the shadow process to help you uncover a recent trigger in your life and how that emotion plays out for you. Then, I’ll help you see these shadow qualities and help you be less afraid of them. 

By the end of our session, you’ll have a better understanding of how to work with this shadow quality we identified.

Afterward, we can discuss whether we’d like to keep working together.

Just reply to this email if you’re interested in a shadow coaching session.

By integrating the ego, persona, and shadow, you can achieve greater self-love and move toward the grandest possible version of yourself.

Much love,

Spenser

P.S. I’d love to know more about you, my dear reader. Let me know what you’re struggling with in life or what you hope to get out of reading this newsletter by taking a short survey (I know, surveys suck, but I promise it won’t take more than 2 minutes; you can skip any question you want).

Or, better yet, just respond to this email and let me know :)