The hashtag #shadowwork has more than 2.3 billion views on TikTok. Most of it has nothing to do with anything Carl Jung wrote, and quite a lot of it is built around a journal he had no part in: The Shadow Work Journal, a self-help book by a 24-year-old author that, at its peak, outsold Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk on Amazon — nearly half of those sales traced directly back to TikTok.
That is not a criticism of the trend. It is a reason to separate two things that get sold as one: the term “shadow,” which has a specific, traceable origin in Jung’s own published work, and “shadow work” as a self-help practice, which is mostly a later, popular layer built on top of it. The prompts below are organised by which layer they actually come from.
Who said what, and when
| Who | When | What they actually added |
|---|---|---|
| C. G. Jung | 1951 (Aion) / 1953 (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology) | Named and defined the shadow: the parts of the personality the ego does not acknowledge, held in the personal unconscious. |
| Robert Bly | 1988, A Little Book on the Human Shadow | Popularised “shadow work” for general readers — the image of an invisible bag each of us drags behind us, filled with everything we were told, as children, not to be. |
| Robert A. Johnson | 1991, Owning Your Own Shadow | Developed the “golden shadow” — positive, valuable qualities we also disown and project onto others, not just negative ones. |
| Keila Shaheen | 2020s, The Shadow Work Journal | Repackaged shadow-work prompts as a mass-market, TikTok-marketed self-help journal — a real book, but a different kind of object from the three above. |
What Jung actually wrote
Jung’s clearest single statement of the concept opens the chapter called “The Shadow” in Aion (1951): “Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be.” The shadow, in his account, is not a metaphor for evil. It is whatever the conscious personality has excluded in order to hold together a coherent self-image — and it does not go away for being excluded. It shows up instead in projection: qualities we cannot see in ourselves, seen instead, and reacted to, in other people.
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (the 1953 English volume, collecting essays originally published in 1928 and 1943) places the shadow inside the personal unconscious specifically, as distinct from the collective unconscious — the layer of the mind Jung considered shared across all people, holding archetypes rather than repressed personal material.
Prompts drawn directly from that idea
These follow Jung’s own framing: the shadow is found through projection, not through free-form journalling about “trauma” in the abstract.
- Think of someone who irritates you disproportionately. What quality in them, named plainly, is doing the irritating?
- Is that quality one you have ever been accused of yourself — by a parent, a teacher, an ex? Write down the accusation as you remember it being said.
- What would it cost you, in how you see yourself, to admit you sometimes have that quality too?
- Name a group of people (a profession, a type, a generation) you dismiss as a category rather than as individuals. What does the category let you avoid looking at in yourself?
- Describe the version of yourself your family expected you to be. What did that version have to leave out?
Prompts from Bly’s “bag we drag behind us”
Bly’s image is of childhood: everything we were told not to be gets stuffed into an invisible bag, dragged behind us into adulthood.
- What were you praised for as a child, specifically, and what were you corrected for at the same age?
- What is something you wanted badly as a child that you were told was inappropriate, embarrassing, or “too much”?
- If your childhood bag were opened today, what is the first thing you expect would fall out?
- What behaviour do you find almost unbearable to watch in your own children, or in children generally — and is it familiar?
Prompts from Johnson’s “golden shadow”
Johnson’s addition: the bag holds disowned strengths as well as disowned faults. Envy is the usual signal.
- Name someone whose success or confidence genuinely bothers you — not someone you simply dislike. What, specifically, do they have?
- Is it possible you were once discouraged, directly or by example, from wanting that same thing?
- What compliment do you deflect fastest, and reflexively? What would it mean to just let it be true?
- What did you want to become, early on, that you quietly filed under “not realistic” before anyone else told you so?
Where this site draws the line
This is a literary and historical account of where these ideas came from, meant for private reading and writing. It is not therapy, and it is not a substitute for it. If shadow-work journalling brings up material that feels bigger than a notebook can hold — and for some people, genuinely, it will — that is a reason to talk to a professional, not a reason to write faster.
Where to check this for yourself
- The Conversation, on why to be cautious about the TikTok shadow-work trend specifically, from an academic psychology perspective.
- MM+M’s reporting on how “shadow work” became a TikTok phenomenon, including the Shaheen journal’s sales figures.
What is still unclear
How much of “shadow work” as a structured practice with prompts — rather than shadow as a concept — can be traced to a specific named source between Bly (1988) and the current wave of journals is not cleanly documented in the sources this article draws on; the lineage in the table above reflects the clearest attributions found, not a complete chain.
Where this site cannot verify something, it says so rather than filling the gap.
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