background.
“Your emotions are valid. Your reactions however, might not be.”
Humans are complicated beings, and as such, many of their traits during outbursts tend to stem from factors unrelated to any given incident by itself. This could be bursts of anger due to feeling incompetent – or irritation due to feeling lost. I can’t talk about everyone but personally, I tend to focus on the first emotion that shows up and show/broadcast it.
For a long time, I thought authenticity meant showing the first emotion one feels immediately. Over time though, the definition has evolved in my mind. It’s not just about showing the visible part of our feelings, like the tip of an iceberg. Genuine authenticity comes from acknowledging and sharing the deeper, often hidden emotions below the surface. If we only show the tip, we risk hiding important parts of ourselves, which can feel less like honesty and more like manipulation. Too many times, however, we rarely get to know this darker side of ourselves that we’ve unconsciously hidden from the world. And that’s where shadow work comes into play.
I have been reading up on a subset of analytical psychology called shadow work. It was created by Carl Jung, a Swizz psychiatrist where he defines the “Shadow” of a person as one of the main archetypes of a person’s psychology.
the shadow.
The shadow, are the unconscious parts of a person that are usually repressed or denied expression by the person. This might be due to the nature of the feeling/expression being deemed unacceptable by their society or environment or by it being an uncomfortable process for the person.
From what I’ve taken down, the shadow could incorporate components such as:
- Emotions
- Unacknowledged desires
- Negative traits
- Hidden Strengths
- Fear of Judgement
- Unconscious Reactions
But I doubt this list is comprehensive.
shadow work.
Shadow work is the process of understanding these repressed emotions (shadow) so that a person can confront his unresolved inner conflicts and hopefully, get a semblance of emotional balance.
While there are many methods to get there, what works for me is usually a series of questions / a framework to ask myself to hopefully uncover the answers. Broadly, I’ve split the steps up into 3 main sections: Recognize, Reflect, and Integrate.
the framework.
recognize
What was the feeling closest to?
What was the situation that triggered it?
Did I try to suppress my emotions?
reflect
What physical sensation did I notice?
Was my reaction proportionate to the situation?
Was this reaction covering up for another emotion?
integrate
Am I ashamed to fully show this shadow emotion?
How do I force myself to feel this emotion?
What would happen if I felt this shadow completely?
the issue with journaling.
The way to proceed with this is to sit down and find some space to write down thoughts as they flow out. Unfortunately, what I’ve come to realize is that staring at a blank page and starting to write, has always been a hurdle for me. A big enough hurdle to just make me skip writing altogether – and instead go binge Emily in Paris.
So instead of having to process everything while I’m already down in the dumps, what if we could get an assistant to help us process the emotions instead?
processing emotions with ChatGPT.
Disclaimer: This is just an experiment — one that works well enough for me to integrate it into my journaling process.
Oi i thought this was a creative tech blog, what with this psychology shit?
Yes yes I hear you. The twist in this comes with using ChatGPT’s custom GPT as our journaling assistant instead. After a couple of revisions and flopping around, I managed to end up with Shadow Sage, a custom GPT that uses the questions above to guide users to potentially uncover their repressed emotions.
the pros
ChatGPT is great for this. When a detailed enough instruction is set, and with a trigger event described by the user, it almost becomes a sage that can guide the user with follow-up questions. And GenAI is great at this – divergent thinking. It can take the emotions and situations given by the user and is still able to poke out possible different answers from the user. This just wouldn’t be possible if we were to just journal with a pen and paper.
At the same time, I don’t know if this feels fully like introspection. To me at least, it feels somewhere in the middle of talking to a stranger about your problems. Sometimes they might be bang on in terms of understanding, but other times, they can just go on, on a tangent. I guess having this GPT is somewhere in the middle of that, where additionally, now there’s a safe space for users to talk and uncover their mindset, without the fear of judgment.
the cons
Yeah but like using AI to console yourself when things are down just feels too damn dystopian to me. Which is why this should never be used by itself. It should be a subsidiary to journaling and reflection – but it shouldn’t be an AI girlfriend sorta situation. That would be a mess on a catastrophic level. But at the current state, I don’t think this GPT is gonna replace human connection, so we are all good – at least for now.
Shadow-sage-v2 GPT
Linked below is the custom GPT for you to try out yourself. See if it helps or not, and drop me a message or a comment! Kinda interesting to see how this goes. I’m also having an inkling that we can make more frameworks into GPTs to help more people.
Seems like a good use of GenAi.
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