Hi! Sit down. Let me introduce you to three of my shadows, or as I like to call them: dragons.

Aurelius is the part of me who wants to be virtuous, purposeful, and always growing. Most of the time, Aurelius is great. He's the reason I write articles like these, journal every night, and work toward my True Self.

The trouble starts when he projects that growth-hunger onto everyone around him. Aurelius is one of the main reasons my last ex and I broke up. She was growing at her own pace, in her own direction, and Aurelius found it too slow. Looking back, this was for the better, but a lot of the pain in the relationship could had been navigated if Aurelius wasn't so strict.

Groovy is the part of me that wants to have some fun, vibe, just be. Groovy helps me consciously relax, like playing Slay The Spire 2 with my friend John Mavrick on a Monday night.

Problems come when Groovy goes too groovy and gets horrifically drunk, like during this one party where I had to sleep in my friend's bed because I physically could not walk home. Thankfully I haven't drank in six months. Alcohol at least. Talking about spirituality doesn't keep you from having to drink water to survive, you know.

Curia is the part of me so curious about ideas, frameworks, and meta-models that she'll spend four hours connecting three disciplines together before remembering to eat lunch. She's the one who created Spiral Knowing, The Truth Compass, and The Meta Hexagon.

The problems come when Curia gets overloaded in intellectual games and forgets to embody any of the insights. Or when she overwhelms students I'm teaching because I bias toward big ideas while many simply want to know how to study for their chem exam.

Before I became aware of these shadows/dragons, they quietly (and not so quietly) ran my college life.

And here's the thing: you won't find a shadow work class almost anywhere. I was a psych major at Cornell, and in most of my classes we didn't venture into ourselves. We looked at our psychology the way a person scared of snakes looks at them through a one-foot block of solid glass.

Shadow work is what ensures the valuable stuff we learn throughout college isn't smogged by the parts of ourselves we can't see. Without it, we flow through college pulled by a river we don't even know we're in, much less notice there's a dragon flying above it.

Over my four years at Cornell University, shadow work helped me navigate a productivity addiction, romantic relationships that weren't working, and find my life purpose helping reform education. In this article, I hope to help you do the same.

This summarizes my insights reading 500+ books, writing 1,500+ journal entrees, and talking to 50+ college freshmen about the topic. We'll explore what the shadow is, why it exists, and how we can use journaling as a practice to navigate it.

What Is The Shadow?

We like to think of ourselves as one person. One coherent identity walking around campus with a backpack, a coffee, and the quiet confidence of someone who definitely did the reading. We did not do the reading.

That's a comfortable story. And it's mostly fiction.

As Richard Schwartz explores in his wonderful series of books, particularly No Bad Parts, We're made of many parts, each with their own ways of helping us navigate life (like Aurelius, Groovy, and Curia). Some of these parts we know well: the high achiever, the loyal friend, the nervous test-taker. Others work deep in our subconscious, a backdrop hum we didn't even know existed.

The shadow is made of parts of our self we've attached to through addiction or allergy, often without realizing it.

A shadow addiction means we're so fused with a part of ourselves we can't see how it's running the show. Think about someone who stays constantly stimulated: earbuds in before they're even out the door while sipping caffeine to punch down the bad sleep of a crazy party. On the surface it looks like productivity. Underneath, there's a fear that stillness will surface grief or loneliness or the creeping sense that life isn't actually aligned. The stimulation is helping them avoid that. It's doing its job. The problem is that its job description was written during a crisis that may have ended years ago.

A shadow allergy is the opposite: we're so avoidant of a part of ourselves the avoidance itself starts shaping our choices. Maybe we're allergic to Donald Trump. We talk about how terrible he is with family and friends, bond over shared outrage, feel righteous and connected in the process. The allergy is helping us feel like good people, spread a message we believe in. Don't get me wrong, I've joined in this game. What it's hiding is the uncomfortable possibility that Trump's selfishness, attention-seeking, or need for control might be a projection of something we haven't looked at in ourselves.

This next point is essential: come to the shadow with extreme compassion and love.

It is not good or bad. It's parts of ourselves trying to help in the ways they know how, profoundly affecting our lives in the process. These shadows don't just create emotions. They shape our motivations, what we find true, what we notice, and what we literally cannot perceive. They shape our entire judgment of reality.

Here's the analogy I keep coming back to: the shadow is a dragon protecting a treasure.

I like this analogy for three reasons.

• First, IT'S A FRICKING DRAGON. I MEAN HOW COOL IS THAT? I'm good at coming up with analogies aren't I?
• Second, we tend to see our shadows as inherently bad. Oh no, the big bad dragon is doing its bad things. But that's not the relationship we want with ourselves. We should befriend our dragons.
• And third, the dragon is rarely the deepest layer. The dragon's carnage, its burnt towns, its scorched forests: all of that comes from protecting something deeper. A treasure it can't let anyone touch. In my experience, the more we dive into a shadow, the more we realize how far down the roots go, all the way to something tender and ancient about being spiritual beings in human bodies.

Here's what makes it messier: the shadow is rarely one dragon. Most of our suffering comes from multiple dragons fighting each other, each protecting a different treasure. Each one believes: "If I stop, you won't survive." Aurelius and Groovy are at war constantly. One screams grow while the other whispers rest, and I'm the battlefield where their fire meets.

So we know what dragons are. But why do they exist in the first place? Because if we can understand why they're there, we might be able to greet them with something warmer than a sword.

Why Do Dragons Exist?

The short answer: dragons exist to survive the self.

The false self is the finite character we attach to throughout college to help us survive, physically and mentally. We build it from our body, our achievements, our interests, our relationships, and we call it "me." Everything else becomes "other." When mistaken for our True Self, the false self creates a foundation for success, happiness, and love built from toothpicks.

Self-survival is the process through which that false self keeps re-creating itself. And here's the thing most people miss: we don't just survive physically anymore. We survive psychologically.

Think about it: Debating conservatives about abortion to survive a liberal identity. Buying jewelry or a video game for a friends to survive a kindness identity. Watching Pursuit of Wonder, Healthy Gamer GG, Exurb1a, Kurzgesagt or even reading from me to survive an identity.

Your entire personality might be a survival strategy.

Sit with that for a second. Let it land in the chest, not just the head.

It's essential you don't see this as an attack on yourself. Surviving your false self isn't inherently bad. So much of it helps us do wonderful things like grow relationships, pursue a purposeful career, and work on spirituality. It's when you mistake it for what Stephen Cope calls the True Self that you create all sorts of suffering across your life.

Shadows don't just live inside individuals. They live in friend groups, Greek life, department cultures, entire campus climates. This is collective self-survival and it's a major exploration of developmental theories like Spiral Dynamics, Integral Theory, and Susan Cook Greuter's 9 stages of Ego Development.

The mycelium of collective shadow runs underneath every institution we walk through. One student's anxiety about grades sends a signal through the network, and suddenly everyone in the study group is tense without knowing why. We see it when humanities students sit at the other end of the dining hall from STEM students like rival medieval kingdoms. When a country survives its culture through laws and holidays that calcify what was once living tradition into something no one's allowed to question.

It's not 100% our fault for having the shadows we do. We inherited some of them the way we inherited our eye color: before we had any say in the matter.

Again: our dragons are trying to help us. Even the ones breathing fire in directions we wish they wouldn't. Come at them with compassion and love, because what we're about to explore is how they got there in the first place.

How Are Dragons Created?

Dragons form through difficult experience, especially experience without reflection. The pain happens, and because no one helps us process it (or we don't have the tools yet), a branch coldly breaks off our tree instead of bending in the warmth. It becomes an addiction or allergy. Often this starts early, in response to primary caregivers. But college is a dragon factory too.

Sometimes the dragon's strategy is appropriate for the current context. A shadow that biases against trusting people could be genuinely useful in an untrustworthy environment. The problem arrives when we leave that context and the dragon doesn't get the memo. It keeps breathing fire in rooms that are perfectly safe, scorching relationships and opportunities that could have nourished us.

Dragon creation happens across all our stages of development, and the dragons look different depending on where we are.

A Cosmic Climber's shadow might be a relentless achievement drive, valuing of meritocracy, and discipline, masking a fear of worthlessness. A Cosmic Weaver's shadow might be a well meaning but over emphasis on LGBTQ+ politics and emotional intelligence. (Check out my article on college freshman ego development to learn more.)

In classes and studies, a dragon might show up as resistance to an entire field. Maybe we had one terrible humanities teacher in high school who humiliated us for a wrong answer, and now the sight of an English syllabus makes our stomach tighten like a fist. We tell ourselves we're "just not a humanities person." The discipline didn't hurt us. One person did. But the dragon doesn't do nuance. It's eyes see in black and white.

In health, a dragon might look like obsessive body monitoring or the complete opposite: total disconnection from the body. I was overweight growing up. Women didn't find me attractive, and I carried that dragon with me through scanning mirrors, eating countless salads, and touching my stomach hoping it would feel harder than the weights I lift at the gym.

In play and joy, a dragon might make it impossible to consciously relax. If our parents and friends were always pushing us to achieve, if love felt conditional on performance, rest starts to taste like failure. We hear the menu screen music of Minecraft and your Aurelius equivalent whispers: you should be doing something virtuous or productive. We close the laptop and open a textbook, and the dragon is satisfied. Until tomorrow night.

A rich lens for thinking about shadow creation is attachment theory, which maps how our bonds with primary caregivers shape our relational patterns into secure, avoidant, anxious, or disorganized styles. How we learned to love at age three echoes in how we love at twenty. But that's outside the scope of this article.

The point is this: our dragons didn't come from nowhere. They were forged in specific moments, with specific people, under specific pressures. Knowing that doesn't make them disappear. But it does make it easier to look them in the eye.

How To Navigate Your Dragons

I've created a three step process for navigating your dragons. It's a bizarre combination of Internal Family Systems, shadow work, integral practice, and so much more. At this point, I've accepted when Curia comes across frameworks she molds them into a Frankenstein and then adds a little pretentiousness and a few radiant stars.

No, I'm not sponsored by Dreamworks How To Train Your Dragon, though, ahem, if you're reading this and from Dreamworks, I'm always fine with a little extra cash. Anyways, the three steps are:

• Step 1: Finding Your Dragons
• Step 2: Understanding Your Dragons
• Step 3: Befriending Your Dragons

Step 1: Finding Your Dragons

If this were a fantasy novel (would love to write one some day), we'd know a dragon was nearby by the signs: burnt villages, scorched forests, terrified folk fleeing in the opposite direction.

In our college lives, the trails are subtler and probably for good because I prefer my apartment not on fire. They show up in recurring challenges, strong emotional reactions, and patterns we can't seem to break. All three of these are connected to common dragon defenses: things our dragons do to protect the treasure they're guarding.

There are many of these defenses (enough for a whole article), but here are three I find most frequently in my conversations with college freshmen:

• Projection: When something we're attached to or deny internally gets subconsciously projected onto others. Maybe we're addicted to work, so we look at a student lounging in a hammock on the quad, and consider unlinking one of the sides. Or maybe we deny our own jealousy, so we fixate on how jealous a friend seems.
• Displacement: Taking strong feelings from one situation and expressing them in a safer one. Getting furious about politics at the dinner table when the real anger is toward a professor who assigned our exam the day after break.
• Transference: Carrying patterns from past relationships or experiences into current ones. A fear of abandonment from childhood leads us to be extra clingy with a new partner.

To find your dragons, journal on these questions:

• Where does life feel heavy, avoidant, or compulsive?
• What can't you stop doing even though you know it's hurting you?
• What are you avoiding even though you know it deserves your attention?
• What dragon defenses do you see coming up throughout your days?

Step 2: Understanding Your Dragons

Often, awareness alone lessens a dragon's grip. Dragons just want to be seen and loved like the rest of us.

The practice here is self-witnessing: grounding in the awareness behind all our experience, and watching the dragon from that quiet place. Notice, you are not your emotions, thoughts, or defenses. You are the being, which witnesses those emotions, thoughts, and defenses.

Watch them without judgment. Without rushing to fix anything. Like watching rain slide down a window, noticing the paths it takes without needing to redirect them. Feel your jaw unclenching, your shoulders relax, and your breadths expand farther outward.

Don't force understanding if the dragon doesn't want to be known yet. There might be too many other dragons in conflict with it, too much noise in the cave. Accept the resistance. Feel what resistance feels like in the body: the tight jaw, the shallow breath, the heat behind the eyes. Sometimes the resistance itself is the first message.

And sometimes the dragon won't resolve into anything clean. It might be a confusing amalgam of emotions, body signals, half-memories. That's okay. Just try to understand it as well as you can.

To understand your dragons, journal on these questions:

• What is the dragon's name?
• How is it manifesting in the body? (Check out my ANS article for a richer understanding of how something can show up physically.)
• Where does it stem from: what experience, what age, what version of you first needed it?
• What does it look like?
• And most importantly, how is it protecting or trying to help you?

Step 3: Befriending Your Dragons

Our dragons don't have to fight against us. They can join our team, and each other's. We just have to learn how to love them.

What makes a dragon feel loved? Much the same things that make us feel loved. Understanding of why it exists and how it affects our life. Appreciation of how it's trying to help, even when the help creates its own kind of damage. And patience. Some dragons need months of being loved before they'll lower their wings. Some need years. The timeline isn't up to us.

To befriend your dragon, journal on these questions:

• How is this dragon trying to help you?
• Can you find anything to appreciate about its strategy, even the messy parts?
• Is this dragon ready to grow, or does it need more time getting accustomed to being seen?
• And if it is ready: what new role might it adopt in your inner world?

Befriending My Dragons (Conclusion)

Aurelius, the part of me bent on virtue, purpose and growth, spent years running my life as a productivity tyrant. When I finally sat with him long enough to feel what he was protecting, I found a kid terrified of falling back into the video game addiction of his childhood. He was crunched on the bed, clinging to our favorite childhood series, Deltora's Quest, like it was a chain keeping him from the computer. I held him with warmth and Aurelius softened.

He still pushes me to write, to teach, to build. But the edge is different now. He fly's alongside my other dragons rather then, well, shooting them with blazing fire.

I won't pretend this process is quick or clean. Some mornings I wake up and Aurelius is already at the controls, planning how to optimize a day that hasn't started yet, while Groovy is trying to pull me to play Slay The Spire 2. Curia, meanwhile, has opened fourteen browser tabs about attachment theory before breakfast.

You have your own Aureliuse's, Groovy's, and Curia's each with their own unique personalities and defenses. Like I did, you might have seen them like the monstrous dragons they are. I hope this article has shown you there is a different way to treat our dragons. One that doesn't involve a sword, a hero complex, or reading fourteen more self-help articles.

Although if you want to read fourteen more, I do have a website.