You have never actually done shadow work therefore you do not know who you are at your core. You may know your favorite color or the way you want your coffee made in the morning down to the ounce, but if I asked you who you learned to be in order to feel worthy or desirable & what parts of yourself did you have to exile to become her?
Well, you’d need to sit down and think about it. Moving past just thinking about it you’d have to be honest about it. And if we got so lucky that you were honest about it then you’d really have to do something about it. That is shadow work.
It’s not “I’m a bitch sometimes”, it’s “I have not found the balance between being crass and communicating effectively because I am still trying to trust that my feelings matter”. You have to get to the real root of the thing in order to pluck it, and in this case to replant that root in fertile ground to cultivate your harvest.
The shadow side of yourself isn’t some dark freak to be ashamed of or put down like a dog. You need her, and more importantly you need to know her.
Because the truth is, most of the things we call our flaws began as adaptations. Somewhere along the way, you learned that being agreeable kept you safe, that being beautiful made you valuable, that being independent meant nobody could disappoint you, that being quiet kept you from becoming a burden, or that being desirable gave you a certain kind of power. You learned which parts of yourself received praise and which parts made people uncomfortable, and then you became very good at feeding one while starving the other. Shadow work asks you to go back and meet those abandoned parts without immediately trying to correct, shame, or spiritualize them.
It asks you to understand where they came from, what they were trying to accomplish for you, and whether they still have a place in the life you are trying to create. Because sometimes the behavior you are calling a character flaw is actually an old survival strategy that has simply outlived its usefulness.
And this is where I think people misunderstand the purpose of shadow work.
The goal is not to become perfectly healed, endlessly self-aware, or so spiritually evolved that you never experience jealousy, anger, insecurity, envy, lust, resentment, or fear again. That sounds exhausting, and less like being human than another performance to maintain. The goal is to become intimate enough with yourself that you can recognize what is happening underneath the reaction. To be able to say, this is my anger, but what is it protecting? This is my jealousy, but what is it revealing?
That kind of honesty gives you a choice. You can keep repeating the pattern, or you can finally tend to the root. You can decide what gets to grow from it. And that, to me, is the real work of shadow work: not destroying the parts of yourself you don't like, but bringing them back into the light long enough to understand what they have been trying to tell you.