The Golden Shadow
May. 4th, 2026 06:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingswordSo in psychotherapy circles where Shadow work is a thing, one of the ways you get people to buy in on the difficult work is by identifying the “good”/adaptive/healthy parts of the self that got relegated to the unconscious and using them as, basically, bait. They are the carrot to the rest of the Shadow’s stick, the parts that people want and that keep them invested in the process. And by them I now, of course, mean us. Bc I am going to name all of the traits I had as a kid that I want back, damn it, and I’m going to try to integrate one of those traits every time I blog about Shadow work.
When I was a kid, I was unconstrained by what others thought my actions meant. I was real, genuine, I had no sense of pretense because I didn’t have to have any to receive care (such as it was). I used to be loud, confident, exuberant, free. I was imaginative, centered, desirous of new sensory experiences that weren’t actively unpleasant, enthusiastic, relatively unharmed, always trying to be scrupulously fair, and when I was confused that was okay, because I didn’t expect myself to be perfectly knowledgeable. My caregivers only started treating me like an imperfect copy of a grownup after I read the dictionary (and started casually using words like prejudiced, hyperbole, plagiarism). Why they disrespected me for acting like A Child when I was, in fact, A Child, I am still not sure about.
Maybe it has something to do with be socialized as a girl? Maybe it’s a binarist thinking thing that says that once you can use SAT words your brain is basically done cooking and you can be tried as an adult now for things people never explained were crimes which you have no context for? I still don’t get why people treat children as both subhuman while at the same time perfectly cognizant of the context of their actions. Pick one, guys.
When I was a kid, I was unconstrained by what others thought my actions meant. I was real, genuine, I had no sense of pretense because I didn’t have to have any to receive care (such as it was). I used to be loud, confident, exuberant, free. I was imaginative, centered, desirous of new sensory experiences that weren’t actively unpleasant, enthusiastic, relatively unharmed, always trying to be scrupulously fair, and when I was confused that was okay, because I didn’t expect myself to be perfectly knowledgeable. My caregivers only started treating me like an imperfect copy of a grownup after I read the dictionary (and started casually using words like prejudiced, hyperbole, plagiarism). Why they disrespected me for acting like A Child when I was, in fact, A Child, I am still not sure about.
Maybe it has something to do with be socialized as a girl? Maybe it’s a binarist thinking thing that says that once you can use SAT words your brain is basically done cooking and you can be tried as an adult now for things people never explained were crimes which you have no context for? I still don’t get why people treat children as both subhuman while at the same time perfectly cognizant of the context of their actions. Pick one, guys.