Below is an excerpt from Universo Ulises’ Ann Shulgin’s Legacy: Radical Honesty.
_
The Shadow
Carl Jung called it “the shadow.” Ann described the practice of knowing it, understanding it, and integrating it without running away.
The shadow is not evil, nor is it a dark entity separate from us. It is the collection of parts of ourselves that we have learned to reject, what we were once told was unacceptable, unworthy of love. Sometimes these are aggressive impulses or desires that shame us. Other times they are things that are not inherently negative: repressed creativity, unexpressed emotional needs, ways of being that at some point didn’t fit in with our environment. We don’t just repress what is wrong. We repress what doesn’t fit.
And everything that is repressed doesn’t disappear. It shifts, accumulates, and remains in a primitive, untransformed state because it hasn’t had the opportunity to grow in contact with consciousness. It gains power in the darkness. And when something triggers it—alcohol, a crisis, certain altered states—it erupts without warning.
The kind man who has a few drinks and turns into a monster. The good guy, whom no one suspected, who one day does the unthinkable and says, genuinely bewildered: “I don’t know what happened to me. It wasn’t me.” And it’s true. He doesn’t know. Because he never looked at that part of himself.
Jungian psychology proposes confronting the shadow: going down into it, seeing it, recognizing it, understanding how it got there. It’s a valuable process. But Ann and the hypnotherapist with whom she developed her method—whom she calls Ruth in the books—went a step further. They designed a method in which the patient entered a trance state and Ruth guided them down the stairs, as many floors as necessary, until they reached the basement where the monster was. They didn’t make the person stand in front of the beast. They made them enter it. Turn around. See it through its eyes.
The shadow always appeared in animal form—a large feline, a wolf, an ape—and the terror it generated had a very precise reason: approaching it isn’t contemplating something external. It’s risking becoming it. The shadowy part of oneself believes it is the true self, the hidden truth about who one really is. That’s why approaching it is so frightening. And that’s why, when one truly enters it, what happens is completely unexpected: the fear disappears. Only power remains. Years of repression transformed into energy, into a force that had nowhere else to go.
Once this is done, the shadow begins to transform. It doesn’t become kind or tame. But it stops operating as an unconscious force and becomes an ally. As Ann said: it will never have good table manners, but it will be with you like a tough, fearless friend.