I didn’t love my body when I was a child, and I barely existed during my teens and early twenties. I was depressed and chronically dissociative.

Nothing felt real, everything felt distant.

Subjectively speaking, it felt like I was always floating somewhere above and behind my head, always living my life in third-person.

I felt lost in my shadow, and there was a heavy sludge wrapped around my heart. I didn’t want to exist in my own body and couldn’t break the cycle of making the same mistakes over and over.

I spent years paralysed by depression and avoidant-escapist compulsions between the ages of ten and twenty-two.

Facing my own darkness was the turning point: getting started with my own shadow work was disturbing, but it was the foundation for my personal healing.

Shadow work, somatic therapy and holistic psychology have taught me to challenge myself and watch out for the ‘hidden benefits’ of certain behaviours which I consciously rejected, but nevertheless continue to choose unconsciously.

“Okay, Jordan. Where’s the unmet need?”

Self love isn’t apathetic acceptance: we care for ourselves by learning from our mistakes and striving for that fine blend between self-compassionate acceptance and conditional self-respect.

I’m currently five years sober, but nonetheless continue to wrestle with my own screen addiction and technological escapism via social media.

I’ve got a grounded lifestyle, but the social media shadow is always there - even the YouTube feed can be a slippery slope into apathy and disembodiment if we don’t pay attention to our unconscious scrolling habits.

To be honest, I’m still very much figuring out how to work online without getting dissociative, and it’s something which I’m often discussing with people who work from home or have their own online business.

I take four days offline each week, but even those hard boundaries get tested when I plug back into the speed and intensity of social media - how do we balance ourselves in an unbalanced digital world?

But there is hope for self integration, and I personally find comfort knowing that my shadows and shadow aspects will always respond if I open the dialogue with parts work or active imagination - there’s gold in the darkness, but we need to keep searching.

If you want to explore deeper into the complexity of your own psyche, then tap the link in the comments and join me inside the library.

Jordan