The Spiritual Dangers of SHADOW WORK No One Tells You | Occult to Orthodoxy Series (Part 13) | Ep. 127
Shadow work is everywhere right now.
Your Instagram feed is full of journaling prompts. Your favorite podcast has done an episode on it. Your therapist might have even mentioned it. And the messaging is consistent: integrate your darkness, own your shadow self, and you will finally become whole.
It sounds like healing. It sounds like exactly what so many of us are searching for.
But the Orthodox Church has a two-thousand-year-old answer to that same longing — and it looks nothing like Carl Jung's path to wholeness. It doesn't ask you to integrate your darkness. It asks you to bring your darkness to Christ, and trust Him to transform it into something you never could on your own.
What Is Shadow Work?
According to shadowwork.com, the term "shadow" was first used by Carl Jung to describe the repressed or denied parts of the Self. Shadow work is defined as a personal growth process of identifying, exploring, and integrating that shadow so that we can be our "whole selves."
Shadow work aims to:
Help people accept all parts of themselves, including the dark side
Heal hidden or suppressed trauma so it no longer dictates current behavior
Increase self-awareness of one's triggers and motivations
Break repetitive, self-sabotaging patterns through that increased self-awareness
You might also hear it described as shadow integration, Jungian psychology, or deep soul work.
Though shadow exploration began in a clinical psychiatric and psychological setting, and still exists there for those who subscribe to Jungian methods of therapy, it has also evolved to include all kinds of shadow work coaches and influencers who follow whatever program or lack thereof they have decided on.
Common techniques include a form of talk therapy and deep psyche analysis based on one's triggers and vulnerabilities, journaling, inner child healing, dream analysis, a variety of New Age meditations, and somatic practices like yoga, dance, or even animal pretend play.
On the surface, the goals of shadow work are understandable and draw in people who have experienced deep traumas and are looking to heal and make sense of their pain. But the framework behind shadow work, the methods it uses, and the hope it points toward reveal an incomplete picture of healing—and at times, a spiritually dangerous one.
Where Did Shadow Work Come From?
Shadow work traces primarily to Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung in the early 1900s.
Jung never actually used the exact phrase "shadow work," but he pioneered the concept of the "shadow self" — the hidden, repressed parts of our personality that the conscious ego finds unacceptable or shameful. He believed that making these unconscious elements conscious was essential to becoming a whole, authentic person, a process he called individuation.
While rooted in Jungian theory, formal "Shadow Work®" was actually founded in the late 1980s by Cliff Barry, who designed the formal Shadow Work® Process, founded Shadow Work® Seminars, and co-authored the manuals for all Shadow Work® training. Cliff Barry was formerly a Christian minister who seemed to veer from the faith as he got older, began reading more Jungian books, started leading shadow work workshops, and got divorced from his wife amidst all of this — which I mention just to highlight some common themes and fruits of this ideology.
It reminds me of modern New Age influencer Danny Morel, and a workshop my husband got invited to through real estate. While there, I recognized all the New Age modalities, from self-reflection to ayahuasca, and at the end of the weekend, Danny and his divorced wife shared a stage where you could feel the pain of their broken family and the bad fruits of their occult spirituality and me-focused healing ideology. But just like most people who come into this kind of work, it appears Cliff had genuine intentions of personal growth and positive impact. He simply anchored himself in a faulty and incomplete system.
Over time, Jung's ideas were pulled further out of their clinical context and blended with New Age beliefs, Eastern philosophy, and modern self-help culture. The shadow work circulating on social media today is often quite distant from Jung's original clinical framework, now carrying all the dangers of the Jungian worldview while offering even less of its clinical discipline, since just about anyone can call themselves a shadow work coach.
My Thoughts
At first glance, shadow work sounds like therapy and inner healing: becoming more self-aware so you can be a better person. And honestly, the longing to understand yourself, to stop repeating destructive patterns, to find peace with your past — those are good and Godly desires.
But I see serious red flags in the specific methods shadow work uses to get there.
Orthodox Christians know we shouldn't be practicing yoga, New Age meditation, or placing spiritual significance on our dreams because the Church Fathers warn us clearly about the demonic nature of these practices. Nor should we be embracing our inner demons or darker traits, regardless of the trauma that brought them in, but denying and overcoming them by striving to live like Christ instead.
I can remember so vividly being in these New Age retreats where we were coached to remember everyone who ever hurt us and let the anger rise and release while beating pillows. I remember crawling around like animals, growling and meowing to transcend the limited ego. I remember getting undressed in a circle full of strangers while recounting my deepest childhood wounds as a perceived path to being fully seen and healed. And I remember embracing my dark side's desires as exactly what led me into strip clubs, adultery, and some of the darkest moments of my life.
The rituals almost always involved bringing up the pain of the past, letting yourself be re-emotionalized by it, while depending on a demonically inspired coach as your source of inspiration for what to do with that pain.
I recently listened to a homily by Father Moses McPherson called "Why Identifying With Your Past Prevents Your Healing," where he explained that once we are baptized, we become a new man in Christ. Healing in the Church, he said, isn't about endlessly revisiting the past through therapeutic techniques or centering our identity around our wounds. We all went through things. And we are all called to die to ourselves and follow Christ.
I experienced immense childhood abuse and abandonment, and I won't pretend that it didn't deeply shape the way I see myself and the triggers I carry. Reprogramming how I see myself according to who God says I am rather than what I've survived is a real, ongoing process. But my past isn't an excuse to live in my dark side or bear bad fruit. Regardless of what any of us have been through, we share the same calling: to die to ourselves and live as Christ calls us to.
At the same time, a number of Orthodox clergy acknowledge that psychology can observe real things about human behavior and help people overcome inner struggles through awareness and support, even if therapy isn't designed to achieve the full restoration of the human soul. Many Orthodox clergy recommend therapy as a complement to spiritual life, particularly for trauma survivors.
I think it's important to mention that if someone is anchored in Christ, the Church, and the Scriptures, they're better able to practice discernment with whatever they're doing. I went to a secular therapist this year and was able to lean into what she was offering while also staying rooted in my own Christian beliefs. It's such a fine line, and it only takes a tiny pinch of poison in something good for the whole pot to be deadly.
Orthodox Critiques of Carl Jung
Since the shadow began as a Jungian concept, let's talk about Carl Jung a little more.
Orthodox perspectives on Jung are mixed, often appreciating his insights into the human psyche and symbolic thought, while strongly rejecting his reduction of theology to psychology. Many Orthodox thinkers view his ideas as Gnostic, pantheistic, or fundamentally incompatible with Christian ascetical tradition. A few key areas:
Psychology vs. Theology. Jung is criticized for treating God, the soul, and spiritual realities as merely "archetypes" or "psychological constructs" within the human unconscious — rather than objectively real entities. This concern is central to Fr. Seraphim Rose's early writings on Jung.
Shadow Integration vs. Asceticism. Jungian psychology encourages integrating the shadow — embracing one's darkness — for psychological wholeness. This is fundamentally opposed to the Orthodox ascetic practice of mortifying the passions and fleeing from evil to be united with Christ.
The Trinity and Evil. Jung proposed a "Quaternary" — adding a fourth, often dark or feminine element to the Trinity — and viewed evil as a necessary part of God. Orthodox theology rejects this completely. Evil is not a necessary counterpart to good; it is the absence of good.
Gnostic Tendencies. Jung is often understood as a modern Gnostic, focused on inner knowledge and self-divinization rather than salvation through Christ and the Church.
In Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Fr. Seraphim Rose warns that mixing Christian and non-Christian spiritual traditions doesn't build a bridge — it creates a dangerous synthetic religion: a well-intentioned but spiritually hazardous attempt to solve what are fundamentally spiritual problems through self-centered psychological techniques, rather than through repentance, the sacraments, and the ascetic life of the Church.
Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, writing in The Illness and Cure of the Soul, describes the human person as fundamentally sick, not merely psychologically troubled, but spiritually ill at the level of the nous, and argues that the Church functions as a hospital, offering genuine cure rather than symptom management.
Elder Sophrony of Essex, disciple of St. Silouan the Athonite, writes about the soul's encounter with its own inner "abyss": that terrifying moment when a person sees their own darkness clearly. Where Jung viewed this abyss as a reservoir of hidden power to be accepted and integrated, Elder Sophrony saw it as the very place of true repentance, a shattering recognition of the soul's total dependence on God.
What Jung was presenting went beyond secular psychology and attempted to blend Eastern spirituality and Gnostic beliefs with Western psychology. Being purely intellectual while using spiritual language created a lot of confusion because while an Orthodox Christian may clearly understand a dark inner encounter as demonic influence and temptation, Jung portrayed it as a "shadow" within ourselves to be accepted and integrated.
And while modern shadow work may look drastically different from Jung's original vision, it rests on that same foundational belief: that the darkness is merely something inside you, an expression of your own undealt-with traumas and subconscious mind, rather than a real spiritual encounter.
This is exactly what all my New Age friends told me when I started seeing demons, and what I believed too, before I saw them. I used to believe all the darkness was within me, something to be evolved past through mental exercises and occult rituals, until I saw a terrifying demon that I knew existed separate from me, and that I had no ability to fight without the power of Christ. And this is what led me to becoming a Christian.
The Passions
Now that I am an Orthodox Christian, I understand that demons do exist as entities outside of us, but we also most often encounter and fight them within our own minds. And we do this in a very different way than Jungian psychology presents. We do this by denying ourselves and our flesh, and striving to live like Christ and the Saints.
I see a clear parallel between what the New Age calls the "shadow self" and what Orthodox Christianity calls the passions.
I did a whole series on the passions last year (go back and watch that if you want a deep dive) but essentially, the passions are disordered, uncontrolled desires and habitual sinful impulses that enslave the soul and distort its natural, healthy state. They include gluttony, lust, greed, anger, sadness, spiritual laziness (acedia), vainglory, and pride.
Here's what's important to understand: Orthodoxy teaches that God created human nature with beautiful, God-given faculties: the capacity for love, the drive to survive, the desire for beauty and truth. The Fall twisted these natural desires. The passion of gluttony is misdirected hunger. The passion of lust is misdirected love. The passion of pride is misdirected self-knowledge. In this sense, the passions are very much like what Jung called the shadow — hidden, disordered energies with roots in something real and even originally good.
And yes, many of our passions may have been amplified or distorted by real trauma, by unmet childhood needs, by wounds we've carried for years without naming them. But the demons know our passions. They know our particular weaknesses, the specific places where we are most vulnerable, and they actively work to inflame and exploit them. Our inner struggle is never purely psychological, it is always also spiritual.
Living in the passions, being controlled by them, identifying with them, accepting them as simply "who we are,” destroys our inner peace and distances us from the grace of God. And this is exactly why the enemy of our souls would love for us to integrate our darkness rather than bring it to the light of Christ for healing.
Healing in the Church
My husband and I have been reflecting all year on the role of therapy as Orthodox Christians. Sometimes I feel deeply torn, because in different stages of my life, identifying with different therapeutic models has helped me find relief from real pain. Talking about my trauma has been helpful. Recognizing my dark side has been helpful. Therapy has been helpful.
But something worth reflecting on: just as different Protestant denominations are typically based on one man's interpretation and revision of the faith, therapeutic models are often built on one man's theories about healing.
The Orthodox Church, by contrast, has a 2,000-year-old model for healing that has been proven over the test of time. Most therapists will admit that nobody gets fully healed in therapy, but people do get glimmers of breakthrough, recognition, and realization that keep them coming back. And some of us genuinely need someone to vent to, support us, and help us see patterns we wouldn't otherwise recognize. That's not nothing.
But eventually, you come to the end of what those settings can offer, and you need something greater. You need to be transformed in your heart and soul by the presence of God.
In Orthodox Christianity, you don't simply "own" your darkness or welcome it into your self-concept. You bring it to Christ—through repentance, through confession, through prayer—and you allow the Holy Spirit to transform it into what it was originally meant to be. This is why Psalm 139:23–24 is such a perfect picture of the Orthodox posture: "Search me, O God, and know my heart... see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." We do look inward. We do examine our darkness. But we don't examine it alone, and we don't examine it to integrate it. We bring it before God and ask Him to do what only He can do with it.
True transformation, in Orthodoxy, happens through the Holy Spirit working in and through the sacramental life of the Church. It cannot be accomplished alone. We need confession, not just psychological unburdening but a genuine encounter with God's forgiveness. We need the Eucharist. We need prayer. We need the body of the Church. We need a spiritual father who can see what we cannot see about ourselves, and who holds us accountable with love.
The more we fill our lives with Godly virtue, sacramental grace, and genuine prayer, the more we heal. Not by embracing a dark side, but by letting the Light of Christ into the places we have kept in the dark, and trusting Him to transform what we ourselves never could.
Closing Thoughts
Shadow work and Orthodox Christianity both acknowledge that hidden inner darkness exists and must be honestly confronted. But how you confront it, who you bring it to, and how you overcome it — that is seen completely differently.
My view is this: New Age shadow work is spiritually dangerous. Accepting inner demons as a part of ourselves is spiritually dangerous. Jungian models of therapy blend Gnostic thought and Eastern spirituality in ways that are incompatible with Orthodox Christian anthropology. Recognizing our traumas and destructive patterns in therapy can be a good step, but it is not the full picture of how we fully heal. For that, we must come to Christ and His Church.
This post accompanies Episode 13 of the Occult to Orthodoxy Series on the Raised and Redeemed podcast and YouTube channel. If it was helpful to you, please share it — and drop a comment below if there's a topic you'd like covered in this series.
Watch the Full Episode
🎥 The Spiritual Dangers of SHADOW WORK No One Tells You — Occult to Orthodoxy Part 13
🎙️ Podcast: Raised & Redeemed on Spotify
🎥 YouTube: Michaela Nikolaenko Channel
📌 If this resonates, please:
✅ Subscribe for Part 14 of the Occult to Orthodoxy Series
✅ Share this with someone who’s spiritually searching
✅ Leave a comment with topics you want me to address
✅ Join my membership for specific inquiries and response videos
Coming Up Next
Coming up next: In the next episode, we will be talking about an Orthodox Christian perspective on inner child healing.
