Individual shadow work sessions
Individual shadow work sessions
What issues can I bring?
What issues can I bring?
Alasdair Kirk
Shadow Work, Counselling &
Experiential Psychotherapeutic Process
Shadow Work Coaching
The life you want is possible
Is something getting in the way of you achieving your potential and living life fully?
Employing the therapeutic tools and framework of the individual 'deep dive' Shadow Work sessions that I offer, these coaching sessions go beyond a solely conversation-based approach to personal development. We will explore your experience and your emotional and behavioural patterns over a collection of shorter sessions, pinpointing why they exist and facilitating transformational change for you. This is about you maturing and emerging into a stronger version of you, graduating from the burdens and conditioning you don't need anymore, and incorporating and integrating new ways of being.​
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My job in these sessions together is to listen out for what is happening for you below your level of awareness, in the patterns you experience, the behaviours you employ, the beliefs underpinning your choices, and the dynamics that repeat in your life. I will help you to see your blindspots, sticking points and pain patterns (this can be based on many things, such as shame, attachment styles, fight or flight responses, personality type, etc). In this way we will focus our work together on the exact processes that will resolve your unique emotional & behavioural challenges and barriers to growth.
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I provide an accepting and compassionate holding that is highly supportive as well as, when needed, challenging: The challenge coming with a kindness to gently encourage your deeper unfolding. Together we will create the field where you are able to find within yourself what is needed for you to move forward in your life.
What will you gain from Shadow Work coaching?
You will experience resolutions to the questions that brought you to coaching in the first place. You will learn to notice the triggers for your old patterns and experience new ways of responding and put in place new ways of being in the world. In doing so you will be in greater connection with your inner experience, a participant in the unfolding of your story, with a freedom to explore and experiment around the edges of your life.
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The initial session will focus on what is currently alive for you, what you are wanting from our work together. If you are unsure where to begin we will have a deep and broad discussion about how you live your life: what works really well and what doesn’t, what areas of life flow and which ones are stuck, what is the focus in the foreground and what is neglected in the background?
We may draw on the lens of the Archetypes as a map to explore your psyche. In this way we will be able to draw awareness to how you may be influenced by the parts of you that are held in shadow. The parts of us in shadow have considerable influence over us and they are often the unconscious driver behind our barriers to growth and joyful living.
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As we identify the parts of you at play, the opportunity arises to work with these parts individually.
Underneath reactive or destructive patterns and behaviours is often a vulnerability that is being protected. Often these destructive patterns or behaviours have a protective intention and were adopted early in life for very good reason. Without conscious work in later life, these patterns continue to play out even when the threat to the individual no longer exists. It is these old reactive patterns that become problems for us, making life challenging, complicated and difficult.
I often find that once we are able to identify, build relationship and work with these vulnerable, often younger parts of ourselves, the problematic unconscious proactive or reactive management patterns are no longer necessary and they rapidly reduce in frequency and ultimately disappear.
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As we work together with your inner family of parts you will find yourself moving from a place of reaction to a place of responding as a space develops within your inner world where awareness can emerge and where our innate Inner Leader, Self or Sovereign has space to dwell and influence our lives in a cascade of support.
I believe we all have access to an inner leader who is inherently whole and can move us through life with confidence, clarity and calm. It is the parts of us held in shadow and those parts of us carrying unnecessary emotional burdens that occlude our access to this presence, a presence which is our birthright.
Many of us find ourselves growing up in societies which encourage the formation of shadows and do not support the maintenance of our inherent wholeness. That said, we all have the capacity to reclaim our wholeness and in our work together we will uncover and facilitate what needs expression, what needs healing and what needs to shift.
What do you want to focus on?
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Coaching sessions are free-flowing and tailored to your specific concerns and level of integration. You are the guiding force, so the conversation and the work goes as deep as you are comfortable with. I provide an accepting and compassionate holding that is highly supportive as well as, when needed, challenging: The challenge coming with a kindness to gently encourage your deeper unfolding.
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Do you want to build your self-esteem and your ability to be authentic?
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Building greater inner confidence to carry into your relationships and your life.
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Identify, clarify and work with your personal needs and desires.
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Forming and holding good boundaries.
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Integrating healthy anger for authentic assertiveness.
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Stepping in to more clarity and presence in your everyday life.
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Accessing your innate well of inner power, allowing you to confidently pursue and achieve what is important for you and your life.
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Are you suffering from burnout or do issues with your ability to build healthy relationship stop you from taking steps forward?
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Exploring feelings of hopelessness or incapacitating vulnerability.
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Opening into greater intimacy in your life through exploring barriers to intimacy and how this leads to patterns of avoidance.
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Accessing the spontaneous, playful and creative parts of you through working with your Inner Child.
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Increasing equanimity and inner peace through working with and bringing healing to your addictions, compulsions or obsessive behaviours, thoughts or feelings.
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Processing stuck emotions to facilitate a lived experience of flow in your life. Accessing and having grief held and witnessed.
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Do you struggle with a harsh inner-critic, fear or anxiety and it's holding you back?
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Exploring the roots of stress, confusion and overwhelm.
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Building inner and outer trust through working with the inner-critic and outer-critic, judgement and toxic shame.
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Working with and healing traumatic patterns.
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Accessing equilibrium and self-regulation through working with states of physical activation (excessive sympathetic nervous system arousal), anxiety, fight or flight patterns.
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Do you want to break through those barriers to progress and forward movement in your life?
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Accessing meaning and purpose in your life.
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Harnessing greater wells of energy through identifying and resolving the unconscious drivers behind unhelpful thought patterns, dynamics, beliefs and behaviours.
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Accessing and making space for your innate your inner leader.
- Internalise authentic support and constant guidance, building resilience to carry you forward.
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In our work together to remove blockages and unlock your potential, your desire to change and your willingness to step in and step up are essential.
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A persons greatest gifts are often hidden behind their greatest fears
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"Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift - your true self - is the most you can do to love and serve the world. And it is all the world needs."
Bill Plotkin
The Archetypes in Shadow Work coaching
By cultivating the four facets of wholeness using the lens of the Archetypes we can approach your personal development through building inner resilience. A person who has cultivated or reclaimed that wholeness sufficiently is able to be in a healthy relationship with all of the aspects of their personality and moreover, such a person has access to their inner leader that can hold all of the parts of the psyche in compassion, and is prepared and ready to lead the individual from the inside in a healthy and powerful way.
The Archetypes
The lens of the Archetypes can be used to represent the whole of human potential, and a gateway through which we can begin to understand and to see how our experiences and wounding might influence our perceptions, thoughts, feelings and actions. We all have access to these archetypes but the extent to which we express them differs and is determined by our experience, background and upbringing. Archetypes can be defined as blueprints for our emotional expression which cause us to react in a typical way to basic human experiences, inner or outer.
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Through dreamwork, psychoanalysis and comprehensive study, Carl Jung identified archetypes as the hidden language of the psyche and a profound tool for psychological insight. The term “archetype” means original pattern in ancient Greek and Jung identified 12 universal mythic characters, archetypes, that reside within our collective unconscious and that represent the range of basic human motivations.
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Later work condensed these 12 mythic characters to four (Moore & Gillette 1990, Boothroyd 2018). The four quadrant Archetypal model views the psyche as being divided into four distinct archetypal energies - areas of personality that can be viewed as sub-personalities or parts of us that stand alone and function almost autonomously as separate entities within us. Each of them carries a particular energy and can act as a semiautonomous part of our psyche with its own motivations, desires, feelings, thoughts, and way of being in the world. There are many different references to many different archetypes which describe different aspects of human experience. The archetypes in the four quadrant model are the Sovereign, Warrior, Magician, and Lover: their respective areas of influence being leading, taking action, thinking, and feeling. Employing this lens, each of these archetypes can be approached, individually explored and balanced as necessary.
Archetypes, Jung wrote in The Structure And Dynamics Of The Psyche, are the living system of reactions and aptitudes that would determine the individuals life in invisible ways. Each archetype has an essence, a particular quality to it, and it also has polarities, light and dark aspects which manifest as optimal and detrimental character qualities. Negative emotional and psychological experiences and impacts can create barriers to the access of these healthy and full ways of inhabiting what it is to be human and fully showing up in the world. When you’re out of alignment with an archetype, you will suffer the shadow aspects of it, the specific limiting beliefs and behaviours. When you’re in balance, you receive the gifts and benefits of it. When we have unencumbered access to these archetypes, we are able to draw on their attributes and qualities and experience that part of us in it’s fullness, harnessing it’s aspects to fully inhabit our lives.
The archetypal lens in personal development
In my work, I draw on the lens of the Archetypes as an extremely helpful way of working with clients. By exploring how these areas of personality show up in your life and identifying and exploring the experiences or wounding that have led to these parts of you closing down, we can work towards the goal of you having full and balanced access to each of these four archetypes, so that you are able to call on the most appropriate archetype at any point to support you and bring you back into alignment.
The aim is to have healthy access to each of these four archetypes and to be able to move freely between them; to move through life with all these energies in balance, allowing you to live life fully.
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The Jungian concept of archetypes is very useful in working with behaviours or feelings you want to change. We can start this process by looking at how you express each of these archetypal energies and we can explore any imbalances. This serves as a framework within which we can examine what is driving unwanted behaviours and more importantly provide strategies to change the unhelpful or unwanted behaviours into something that really supports you in your life.