Understanding the Shadow Persona Trap

I'm going to tell you about the relationship between anxiety and depression. And a lot of the videos I'm going to be making here are all about what mindset you're in. Now if you can know what mindset you're in really well, you'll be able to kind of choose a different mindset. Mindset is basically everything. Depression has a mindset, anxiety has a slightly different mindset. In order to get out of either of these conditions, we need to get out of those mindsets into a different mindset. Now I'm going to show you something here to begin with, right? It is just a picture. You can see it there now and you can see that it has basically three different levels to it. What I'm showing you here are three different mindsets, three levels. Now the very top one there, you'll notice that it's a complete mindset. Okay, now in that mindset, that's basically the mindset that everybody who's doing self-development, psychotherapy, psychology, spirituality, self-improvement, you name it. That's the mindset that people are describing when they're talking about healthy mindset, the mindset that everyone's trying to get into and live from. The problem is how do we get there? And what I'm going to show you is the approach I would take in this. That's the one that I advocate. Because people can describe that mindset all day long, this top mindset that we're all aiming for, and describing it's one thing, knowing about it intellectually is one thing, but how do we actually practically go about getting there? What I'm going to suggest here is that you completely forget about that mindset entirely, unless you're in it, and if you're in it, you're probably not going to be watching my video anyway. That mindset is too far from where we probably currently are, if we're experiencing either depression or anxiety, right? So there are steps we take, we go through, really where we are for anxious or depressed is we're in that lower mindset, and you'll notice it's divided into two halves, and I'm going to really focus on that now in a second. But we need to get to the second mindset, the second level from that. That's where really our healing takes place, that's where we start to move out of depression and anxiety, and really your only purpose in this is to get to that level, get to that mindset, okay? So what am I talking about on this lower mindset we're talking about here? You'll notice it has two parts. I'm really just going to focus in on that right here, right now. So if we look at it, what I refer to this mindset as, whether we be depressed or anxious, which is, I mean, it's so common nowadays to have anxiety or depression, I refer to this as the distressed mind. It's a mind that is at conflict with itself. There's two parts, and the first part here we're all pretty familiar with. It's feelings of worthlessness, feelings of weakness, feeling like there's something wrong with you, feeling like you're bad. In terms of psychodynamics and things like that, that's one half of the picture. And when we're talking about mindsets here, really, when we're depressed or anxious, we're in the middle of those, and we fluctuate back and forth between them, right? We're making choices to be in one mindset or the other, and we'll notice, I mean, in a moment what these mindsets really embody and what they lead to. But if we're choosing between these two mindsets, those are the mindsets we're fluctuating back and forth between, it's not really much of a choice. You know, anxiety or depression, I mean, choose your poison, which one do you want? Neither of those are really where we want to stay. Now, in terms of, as I said, psychodynamics, the one there, the worthlessness, the weakness, the bad mindset, when we're in that mindset, we're going to experience depression. This is also referred to as the shadow. Carl Jung would have talked about the shadow mind. It's the part of ourselves we don't want to acknowledge, we don't want to look at it, okay? Certainly, when we're in the other mindset there, the more anxious mindset, that certainly doesn't want to deal with the depression. So if we put that out of awareness, we don't like to think about that too often. So that's our shadow. Really, the shadow is cultivated from our past. It's all about the past. It's really all about the future is going to be like my past. That's really one of the aspects of this depressed mind, in the distressed mindset here. Other people have referred to this as, there's emotional pain there, of course, but there's, Eckhart Tolle refers to the pain body when you're in the shadow. Now, there is, when we're in that mindset, a person is depressed, or is moving into depression, or something like that, there is a huge degree of pain and suffering, and it's very, very intense, that experience. It's very overwhelming, as opposed to the other one we're going to look at now, which is, again, if you're going to Jungian psychotherapy, or psychoanalysis, he talks about the persona. Now, most of us in the world, really, identify more with the persona. Most of us are anxious, rather than depressed. And this is really the reason why we're in this persona mindset, we're going to experience anxiety. This is all about the future, future danger, future threat that we could potentially face, right? And it's really just our nervous system trying to prepare us and protect us from that as best as it can. But something we'll notice when we're in the persona, we're out there, we're trying to become successful, we're trying to find love, we're trying to be a good person. It's kind of exhausting, and it's not really that authentic, because we have to wear all these different masks, depending on the context or situation that we're in. And it leads to this feeling of emptiness. Sure, there's a lot of anxiety there, but there's also a lot of emptiness or dissociation, because we're not living authentically. Now, the problem with this distress mindset is, it thinks that to come out of the persona is to go into the shadow, right? To live authentically is to be depressed, which is not true at all. There's something entirely different outside of this entire mindset, which is your authentic personality, which is really where we want to be, which is more of the second level I talked about in terms of mindset, okay, up to that unified mindset that we're all trying to reach. It's much more about authenticity. But in this video, I really just want to keep it short, and I want you to become aware of this kind of dance and balance between anxiety and depression, right? For most of us, a lot of us anyway, I mean, depression and anxiety, as I said, is so common, it's almost as if those are our two choices. And if those are our two choices, we know we're in this mindset. Now, people have called this mindset different things. Some people have referred to this mindset as ego, okay? And that's fine, I have no problem with that. The only problem I have with it really, if I do have a problem with it, is that that term is overused. And sometimes people are, you know, they're trying to get rid of their ego and drop the ego and all this sort of stuff and transcend the ego. Really, what I'm advocating here is understanding the ego. And certainly what I'm advocating is not to see this mindset or the ego, this mysterious ego, as something to be afraid of, or to see as a bad thing, right? Because that's going to set up the dynamic where you feel like there's this kind of problem you have to face, right? And it's not about that at all. Really, this mindset comes from, many of this comes from past trauma, it comes from really the experiences we had earlier in life, where we felt disconnected, we felt like we were defective, like there's something wrong with me, or we felt like I'm very vulnerable now because of that. Those are the three primary beliefs that really keep us in this mindset. But before we start to even talk about transcending this mindset or letting it go, we need to understand, we need to understand that it's actually a way we're trying to keep ourselves safe. And the way out of this mindset is to feel safe, to feel like we can let go of this mindset. There is an alternative that isn't going to be depression if we're coming out of the persona, for instance, right? So this is kind of a mind that's at war with itself. Many people will say things like, I feel like I have two people inside me, you know? And really, it's two aspects of the same mindset is what you're describing there, persona and shadow. Persona wants to get rid of the shadow, and the shadow doesn't really like the persona either. They're kind of at war with each other. So what we're going to do is understand this, and most of us, as I said, are identified with the persona. We're stuck in the persona. And it's so important that we realize that because if you realize, you see, people do shadow work. They try to get rid of their shadow, and rightly so. And I advocate doing that. You know, you question those beliefs of, I'm worthless, I'm weak, I'm a bad person. All that stuff should indeed be challenged. You can use inquiry, CBT, anything like that that will challenge any of those beliefs. The problem is we're so identified with the persona of becoming a better person, becoming successful, becoming more lovable, that every time we attach ourselves to those ideas within the persona, we're actually feeding into the shadow. So ultimately, what we're going to talk about here in future videos is how to challenge every aspect of this mindset. Yes, the shadow, but also the persona. To have to drop both of them. To question everything in that mindset. And that's what we're going to do in future videos. I'll leave it there for today, guys. Thanks so much for joining me, and I hope this was helpful, and I'll talk again soon. Bye.