Consider your most undesirable attributes: the feelings, urges or reactions you don’t want to reveal in front of other people. These are traits that you might try to keep hidden, even from yourself. Unless you’re filling out the Shadow Work Journal, a workbook that recently went viral on TikTok and intentionally pushes you to face your dark side.
Joshua Terhune, a licensed mental health counselor from Indiana, encountered the journal on his For You Page. “The first couple of times I just ignored it, but it kept showing up,” Terhune said. There are currently more than 1bn views on Shadow Work Journal videos. In posts with hundreds of thousands of likes, people describe immediately crying while doing the exercises.
The writer Keila Shaheen published the journal in February, which is based on an idea developed by the 20th-century psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Throughout his work, he described a person’s shadow as the qualities they suppress and don’t want to acknowledge.
“It’s those parts that we’ve rejected or split off because we learned that they’re not acceptable by our caregivers or our culture,” said Lisa Marchiano, a therapist, Jungian analyst, and co-host of the podcast This Jungian Life.
The journal’s popularity is significant, though not because it’s the most accurate representation or a renaissance of Jungian ideas. It shows there is a continuing, alluring appeal of the promise that by uncovering a shadow side to yourself, you will find mental relief or meaning-making. More darkly (the Shadow Work Journal’s shadow, if you will), the phenomenon reveals how little access people have to forms of psychotherapy that allow for deeper, meandering interrogations of the self, which leads them to seek out a viral TikTok book instead.
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The contents of the Shadow Work Journal are pretty straightforward. For example, it invites you to identify childhood wounds by circling words like “guilt” or “abandonment” on one page. A fill-in-the-blank section prompts you to remember emotional reactions to getting in trouble or feeling left out when you were young, or asks you to write down what makes your body tense; it’s like a depressing Mad-Libs. There are QR codes directing you to breathwork exercises and a series of lined, essentially blank pages for noticing what comes up when you are “facing your shadow in real time”.
“It’s important to explore our dark side, but this didn’t seem to have a whole lot of information,” Terhune said in a video review. He gave the journal a 2.5 out of 5 star rating.
At best, the book’s contents are loosely connected to Jung. Jung proposed a collective unconscious made of primordial images and stories that influence everyone. The shadow was just one of Jung’s “archetypes”, or universal personalities and behaviors that exist in all people. The journal doesn’t delve into Jung’s other archetypes, like the anima or animus, the masculine and feminine side that exists in the opposing gender, or other archetypal figures like the wise old man, the mother, or the trickster.
The journal does, however, use Jung’s name to bolster its legitimacy. As Caroline Mimbs Nyce reported in the Atlantic, the author of the journal is not a therapist. Shaheen is a 24-year-old with bachelor’s degrees in psychology and marketing who completed an online training course in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), worked in marketing and brand strategy and at TikTok as a creative strategist. The journal’s themes and approach are clearly resonating with readers and its popularity gets a viral boost from being marketed through TikTok Shop, as well as TikTok’s trend-surfacing algorithm.
The decision to focus specifically on the shadow stems from its universal resonance, Shaheen said in an email. “The journal is not a strict interpretation of Jung’s work,” she added. “It is certainly influenced by his ideas and is intended to help individuals explore their own psyches in a way that is informed by Jungian theory. It’s also adapted for contemporary audiences, making shadow work more approachable.”
Its promise of step-by-step revelation is probably the other key to its appeal. “There is a naive fantasy that you could find this poison that’s gotten into you, and that by seeing it you could have almost an exorcism and suddenly be cured,” said Kristian Kemtrup, a licensed marriage and family therapist, and a lecturer in the philosophy of mind at San Francisco State University.
Similar ideas have captured the psychological zeitgeist before. The recovered memory movement from the 1980s and 1990s suggested that people had dark repressions to be uncovered. There’s also conceptual overlap with a current popular therapy, Internal Family Systems, where different “parts” of the self are named, who behave in different ways. Calling uncomfortable aspects of yourself “the shadow” or “parts” can help to externalize them.
“Some people feel this incredible sense of shame or guilt,” Terhune said. “If it feels like it’s something else, you’re able to look at it more objectively, with less judgment and more curiosity.”
This distancing can be helpful. Yet, it can also be confusing to people who understand the shadow too literally. Satanic panic, when people falsely remembered sexual abuse or satanic cults, was a consequence of people oversimplifying what experiences are made unconscious, Kemtrup said.
The true Jungian shadow isn’t only made up of negative aspects of the self: it’s any part of yourself you haven’t made space for. If you grew up in a family that steered you toward being a scientist, and you let your love of poetry languish – that becomes part of your shadow, according to this model. “It can be tremendously renewing and vivifying to get back in touch with those shadow potentials later in life,” Marchiano said.
Importantly, Jung’s ideas were not without controversy. The historian Richard Noll wrote in his book, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, that the collective unconscious veered too much into religious and occult territory to be considered purely psychologically descriptive. (Noll also argued that Jung falsified the documentation of his patient that gave rise to the theory of the collective unconscious. In response, Jung’s family barred his access to the papers in the Library of Congress that Noll said would prove his case.)
We do hide things from ourselves, Kemtrup said. It’s mostly feelings that we don’t like to think about, not actual shadow selves. Psychoanalysis is for coming to know yourself over time, not a rush of revelation where something that’s hidden will transform you. “We make things unconscious in a more ordinary way,” Kemtrup said. “I don’t think we make demonic parts of ourselves totally invisible.”
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The popularity of Shadow Work Journal can also be seen as an effect of the lack of access to certain forms of mental healthcare. Many people can’t afford or can’t find psychotherapists, who could help them to subtly explore aspects of themselves they might be avoiding. “It’s hard finding a therapist, and even when you do find a therapist, sometimes it’s not a good fit,” Terhune said. “It is attractive to try a $20 book instead.”
Mental health is often talked about in a medicalized and categorical way, especially on social media, Terhune said. In videos, people rattle off behaviors, then declare they are hallmarks of ADHD or autism. Psychoanalytic concepts offer the glimmer of something else, another way of understanding. Yet, that’s not really what the journal provides.
“That the Shadow Work Journal is, well, a workbook, is interesting to me,” said Hannah Zeavin, a historian of mind and media at the University of California, Berkeley and founding editor of Parapraxis, a new magazine for psychoanalysis. That format is not usually associated with psychoanalysis, but with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), or with self-help. “The Shadow Work Journal then is drawing on these forms of self-help and even ‘#selfcare’ traditions rather than something proper to analysis itself,” she said.
People might reveal to themselves only what they feel safe enough to reveal. “Trying to make a workbook out of confronting the darkest parts of your psyche, you’re likely to engage in a kind of self-deception,” Kemtrup said. Someone could get into a loop of analyzing themself, “but never get out of that to where they put the understanding into action and convert it into behaviors,” said Terhune. The journal is also lacking any resources for someone who might be suicidal, dissociative, or need more support than the journal can provide, he said.
“The journal is intended to be a tool for individuals to explore their own psyches and is not meant to be a replacement for formal analysis,” Shaheen said. “However, the journal can be used – and is currently being used by many therapists – in their practice to help their clients delve deeper into their shadow selves. It is essential to remember that the journal is a tool, not a replacement, for comprehensive therapeutic engagement.”
As a tool for basic introspection, the Shadow Work Journal can be a starting point. “It gets people thinking about themselves not only in this toxically positive way,” Kemtrup said. “The popularity of it shows people are interested in knowing themselves more fully.” Zeavin even went to a party recently where people were doing shadow work as a party activity.
Shadows dominate our stories as effective metaphors for exploring emotions, traits or reactions that we can’t see or are avoiding. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave used shadows to represent what we don’t know about reality. In the 1813 novella, Peter Schlemihl, The Man Who Sold His Shadow, a man trades his shadow to the devil for unlimited wealth. He thinks no one will notice until he goes on a stroll and people pelt mud at him. His fiance leaves him, in disgust at his shadowlessness. In a fairytale from 1847 by Hans Christian Andersen, one night, a man’s shadow gets up and walks away, taking on a life of his own. By the end of the fable, the man and his shadow compete over who is the man and who is the shadow. Only one of them survives – you can probably guess who.
Terhune advised that people get clear on what it is they want to get out of the Shadow Work Journal before buying it. There can be genuine self-reflection to be gained through reading or workbooks, but for some people, the method may have its limits. This includes taking the shadow self too literally.
“That seems to be concretizing something that really is meant to be metaphoric,” Marchiano said.
