Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
Carl Jung
I grew up following my intuitions, feelings and emotions. I loved poetry, art, dancing, music, films, and novels. My most beautiful memories were running in the countryside with my dad, going fishing with him, sitting under starlight and listening to my childhood friends’ stories about the fantômes they saw. In a nutshell, I am a right-brained kid who grew up in a society that largely rewards left-brained traits. In my education, I was never taught to contemplate the feelings I had.
Until years later in my adulthood, I was always, always submerged with emotions, or mood, or feelings, whatever you name it. I was confused and felt like I was in a cage, a volcano that will explode someday, I just needed a trigger. Never did I reach this conscious level that being ignorant about all the messy feelings I had could lead to a tornado that wiped me out of order.
My life was covered under a veil for two years.
Intentionally or accidentally, someone would approach me and try to “help me” or “give me advice” when I was not intending to consult anything. I was not sure about myself and this inner voice would come and pounder me, knock me into a shadow. Dark Chaos, helpless, or if I use the sentence I wrote back then : I hate to feel so much.
What could go wrong, I told myself, or what is wrong?
One day, things started to change.
I experienced an event that completely knocked me out of the illusion I was living in, the illusion that the information lies in my emotions counted less than anything visible. I started to realize that there’s scientific terms to define the differences between mood, emotion and feelings. And there's the body, mind, heart network that contributes to our sensations.
When we feel something at a certain circonstance, most often it is a combination of things rather than us. It is important to raise this at a cognitive level so that we stop self blaming how we feel, and develop an unhealthy self reference thinking pattern, or “me me me” network. Being able to recognize and articulate when we feel discomfort is the start to release it.
How we felt is related to the culture/social background that shaped our perception of the world, individually it is also related to our caregivers, our peers and the various personal paths that each one of us has been through. Now I put those of my dark moments into light and I recognize them with names : imposter syndrome of feeling not enough and pretending, insecure due to the traumatic drama in the past. Being able to recognize them, I felt an immense release and granted myself to cultivate compassion for myself. I am just a human, like everyone else. I learned that there are tools to overcome them, or build new neural pathways, or what we call “mental shift”.
Just like Elisabeth Wiklander who identified herself to be autistic at 28 and started to navigate the concepts in Neurodiversity, I developed an intense curiosity in neuroscience. One day I was at the airport, listening to podcasts, and I discovered an episode of Stefanie Faye, a brilliant neuroscientist who talked about thinking in system. This was a mind blower to me, since I realized then how much we are the product of a greater system, how much our feelings and conception, our approach to process our feelings is related to a greater picture.
I strongly recommend you to read Stefanie’s writings about “Super regulators” where she talked about how we can help each other to grow and regulate our emotions and help to regulate other people’s emotions.
Everyone experiences good and bad days in life, we all need support soon or later, if we don’t find anyone, we get ourselves back. At times of confusion and turbulence, I learned to ask myself essential questions and try to reframe them. I'd rather be reasonably happy than happily ignorant.
I met myself in the dark, and brought myself back into light.