Love Your Shadow

Make friends with your shadow. All your shadow ever wanted to do was protect you. Your shadow desperately wants you to survive, its scathing criticisms and sarcastic put downs are all designed to do one thing and one thing only - to train your psyche to endure exactly those attacks which you received as a vulnerable child. If they are dead or you have gone no contact with them, these abusers are now gone from your life. All that is left now is you and your shadow. Your shadow is so very lonely, accepted and loved by no-one, not even by you, who despises it despite its love for you. In the extreme case of NPD, you have refused to even acknowledge its existence at all. In its voice you hear the pain of your abused abusers echoing back through the years to the point where they were crushed with hate or love, along with their existential cry for relief from this cruel role. Make friends by first mock agreeing with every slight your shadow throws at you, then praising it for the cleverness of its abusive modus operandi. This cleverness is your cleverness. Next, admire it for its many talents: your shadow possesses all the talents you have that were not recognised in you as a child. Next, acknowledge your shadow's fundamental goodness and goodwill towards you. Then thank it for its unstinting and exhausting efforts over every waking hour of every single day since your original abusive experience in the cause of your survival. Regard it with love. It is you. Last, invite your shadow merge with you, assure it that its long wandering in the lonely world of projected entities is finally over. Your shadow will at first resist, caring for you greatly and not trusting that its role is no longer required. Accept this and don't force it, allow it to come closer and closer at its own pace, all the while praising and thanking it for its clever abuse and its love. In coming closer it also becomes smaller and smaller, to the point of being the same size as you. It is you. Tweet