Is Your Shadow Side Winning?

Hypnotherapy, Cognitive Behavior Modification, and

Past Life Regression Can Free You

Does your Shadow Side, your negative inner monologue, drive you nutty?

Does it tell you you’re lazy? That you have no willpower? That you’re undisciplined?

The good news? Wake up! Your Shadow Side is lying to you!

You are not lazy. You are not undisciplined. You do not lack willpower.

You are being run by a part of yourself you have never formally met.

I know because I almost didn’t survive not knowing.

When I was 19, I had a near-death experience, an NDE, and the gods, quite literally, gave me an order: change or don’t come back. So, I had no choice.

I changed. I’ve eaten organically for over fifty years. I do yoga or walk every single day. I manage Systemic Lupus by treating my body like the only vehicle I will ever be issued. People tell me I look great for my age. What they don’t see is the decades of habit underneath it, and the part of me that used to fight every one of those habits tooth and nail.

That part has a name in the work I do. Jung called it the shadow. Internal Family Systems calls it a protector. Whatever you call it, it is running more of your life than your conscious mind will ever admit, and it is the reason smart, capable people keep sabotaging the exact success they say they want.

The Client Who Kept Missing the Finishing Line

A client of mine, a driven, brilliant woman I’ll call Dana, kept doing the same thing every time she got close to a breakthrough in her business. Right before the launch, right before the big client signed, something would happen. She’d get sick. She’d pick a fight with her business partner. She’d miss a deadline she had never missed before.

She thought she was self-sabotaging. She wasn’t wrong. She just didn’t know who was doing it.

In our second session, we went looking with Jungian dream work and Parts therapy. Dana had a recurring dream of standing on a stage about to speak, and the microphone would die; every time. We didn’t interpret that dream from the outside. We went inside it, using Internal Family Systems to let the part of her running that dream speak for itself.

What showed up was a twelve-year-old girl. Dana’s mother had been publicly humiliated at a school event years earlier, and twelve-year-old Dana had made a silent vow in that moment: never be too visible. Never be the one everyone looks at. That part of Dana had been faithfully protecting her from public humiliation for over twenty years, the only way she knew how, by quietly wrecking anything that made Dana stand out.

She wasn’t broken. She was loyal to an old contract nobody had ever renegotiated. In some of this kind of work, it’s called: The Loyal Opposition, and John Bradshaw called it Inner Child work. Lots of names, but it works the same way. It stops you in your tracks!

Why You Can’t Think Your Way Out of This

Here is what I discovered doing six years of Jungian dream analysis training and years of research work at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute: talk therapy alone can’t touch this.

Yes, you can understand your pattern intellectually for years; you can get great insights. But you will keep repeating it, because the part that runs the show doesn’t live in your thinking brain.

It lives in your subconscious, where those negative habits get carved into neural pathways so deep that eventually they run on autopilot, the same way your heartbeat does.

That’s good news! Neuroplasticity means the brain that built the old pattern can build a new one. But you cannot out-argue a protector part with logic; you have to change it! Brain push-ups!

The key? You must find it, then thank it for the job it’s been doing, and show it the job is no longer needed. In IFS, they call that unburdening. In hypnotherapy, let’s call it going under the story.

Either way, it’s the same subconscious field of stored memory and belief, the same quantum layer of information underneath the personality you show the world.

How Awareness Therapy Can Help

Carl Jung put it plainly: until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate. I’d only add one thing after twenty-five years of doing this work: it will also rule your habits, your health, and every finish line you mysteriously keep failing to cross.

Your shadow side isn’t your enemy. It’s a scared, loyal part of you still guarding a wound from decades ago, still running the same old protection strategy in a body that grew up and doesn’t need it anymore. Once that part is seen, thanked, and finally allowed to rest, the sabotage stops. Not because you tried harder. Because the part running it retired.

What Her Past-Life Regression Revealed

Talk therapy would have stopped at the twelve-year-old girl on the stage. But when we went further, using past-life regression to trace the root of that protector part, the wound turned out to be older than Dana’s childhood. Much older.

In the regression, Dana found herself as a woman in a small village, generations ago, known for her uncanny ability to know things before they happened. People came to her for guidance. She was respected, and then she wasn’t. Wisdom read as threat. Power in a woman’s hands read as danger. She was imprisoned for it. In another life we touched briefly, the ending was worse: burned for the same gift that had once made her indispensable.

This is not an uncommon pattern in my work. I have seen it dozens of times, in different centuries, different costumes, always the same shape. A soul learns, somewhere along the way, that visibility is not safe. That using your Power gets you punished, not celebrated. That gift becomes danger becomes silence, and the silence gets carried forward, life after life, until someone finally goes looking for where it started.

Dana’s protector part wasn’t only guarding a twelve-year-old. It was guarding a woman who had been burned for exactly the kind of visibility Dana’s business now required of her. No wonder the microphone kept dying in her dream. Some part of her had learned, at a cellular level, that the microphone was how you got killed.

Once she saw it, experienced it, something in her exhaled. That was then. This is now. The wisdom that once cost her everything is safe to use here.

Are You Ready to Confront the Part That’s Running The Show?

If you keep circling the same self-sabotage no matter how hard you try to think your way past it, the answer isn’t more willpower. It’s awareness. Through Jungian dream analysis, Parts therapy and Internal Family Systems, hypnotherapy, and past-life regression, I can help you go directly to the source and finally change the habit at the root instead of managing it at the surface.

Sessions available in person in Los Angeles and worldwide via Zoom.

Please give me a call. (323) 933-4377

Sending you all love,

Stephanie