Discover Balance Blog

Have you ever stood in front of a painting and felt something shift without knowing why?
Not a thought. Not an opinion about whether it was beautiful or whether you understood it.
Something quieter than that. A recognition. As if the painting knew something about you that you hadn't quite put into words yet.

Wassily Kandinsky believed this was not accidental.
He spent his life arguing that colour and form speak directly to the inner life bypassing the analytical mind entirely and making contact with something deeper. Something that already knows. Something that was there before the words were.

He called it the inner necessity. The idea that art, at its most honest, doesn't decorate the world. It reaches into us. He laid this out in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) a book worth reading.

I think about this often in my clinical work.

Because so many of the people I sit with have learned usually early, usually under circumstances that gave them no choice to distrust that inner knowing. To treat their own felt sense of things as unreliable. To look outward for confirmation of what is real rather than inward.
When you have spent years being told, directly or indirectly, that your perceptions are wrong or your feelings are too much or your needs are inconvenient you learn to go quiet. You learn to mistrust the very part of you that knows.

The inner life doesn't disappear when we stop trusting it.
It goes quiet. It waits.
And it speaks when it speaks at all not in sentences but in the language Kandinsky was reaching for. In colour. In sensation. In the quality of heaviness in the chest on certain mornings, or the particular way light looks on a day when something has shifted without your knowing what.

A client once described it to me as feeling like there was a room inside herself that she had never been allowed to enter. Not because it was locked. Simply because no one had ever told her it was there.

That room is what I think of when I think of Kandinsky's inner necessity. The place in us that already knows. The place that speaks in colour and image and sensation long before it can speak in words.

This is why I use colour, image and landscape in my work with clients.
Not as decoration. Not as metaphor alone. As a direct language one the psyche already speaks for making contact with what is already there. The inner knowing that learned to be silent. The sense of self that went underground when it became safer to disappear.

You don't have to understand it for it to work.
You don't have to believe it will work.

You simply have to be willing to let something in the way you might let a painting find you at exactly the right moment.

​That is where we begin.

There is a moment in almost every clinical session where something else enters the room.
Not the presenting problem. Not the story the client has rehearsed on the way over. Something older, quieter. A flatness behind the eyes when a particular word is spoken. A breath that changes when the conversation touches a certain territory. A part of the person that arrives without being invited and without a name.

Carl Jung called this the shadow. Not a pathology. Not a disorder. A dimension of the psyche that contains everything we learned usually early, usually under pressure was not acceptable to express. The anger that wasn't safe. The grief that had no space. The need that was too much. The self that didn't fit.
It goes underground. But it does not go away.

What the shadow costs our clients
The presenting complaints we see most often in clinic the repeating patterns, the persistent anxiety, the sense of a life unlived — rarely sit at the surface. They are the pressure of shadow material looking for an exit.

The client who cannot stop overworking. The one who keeps choosing relationships where they do all the emotional labour. The one who makes progress week after week and then quietly dismantles it. These are not failures of insight or willpower. They are the shadow doing exactly what it evolved to do: protect a vulnerable part by organising the whole personality around never being exposed again.

The shadow is not the enemy
This is where the Jungian framing changes everything.
The shadow is not malevolent. Every pattern, however destructive its consequences, has a protective intention. The rage that looks like a problem is guarding something tender. The numbness is holding a grief that had nowhere to go. The compulsive caretaking is keeping an exile safely hidden.

The work is not to eliminate what is shadowed. It is to turn toward it with the curiosity and steadiness of a practitioner who has done their own reckoning.

Why this matters for how we work

Jung wrote about the wounded healer. The practitioner whose unexamined shadow quietly steers sessions away from material they cannot yet face. We all have it. The client presentation that makes us slightly more directive than we need to be. The theme we reframe before it has fully landed. The depth we stop just short of.

I have noticed this in my own practice. The clients I found most difficult to accompany were almost always pointing at something in my own shadow, not theirs.

Shadow work both as a clinical tool and as a practitioner practice is the work underneath the work. Clients feel the difference immediately. The practitioner who has turned toward their own darkness has a quality of accompaniment that cannot be faked. They do not flinch. And clients know, without being told, that they are safe to go further.

What turning toward looks like in practice
In the therapy room, working with shadow is rarely dramatic. It is often quiet.
It is asking a slightly different question. Following the image that arrived rather than the explanation. Noticing what the body does when the conversation approaches certain territory, and being curious about that instead of moving on.

And it is this is where somatic and hypnotherapeutic approaches offer something words alone cannot meeting the shadow in the place it actually lives in. Not the cognitive account of the emotion. The felt sense of it. The landscape of it. The colour of it.
Because the shadow rarely speaks in sentences. It speaks in images, in the body, in what the client is drawn toward without knowing why.

What turning toward looks like in life
And perhaps you are reading this not as a practitioner, but as someone who recognises something in these words.
The pattern that keeps returning. The feeling that a part of you has never quite been allowed into the room. The sense  hard to name, easy to dismiss that there is more of you than the life you are currently living.
If that is what brought you here, you are in the right place.

Shadow work in a personal context is not about excavating the past or dwelling in difficulty. It is about making contact  gently, at whatever pace is right with the parts of yourself that went underground because they had to, and discovering that they were never as frightening as the distance from them.

People come to this work carrying all kinds of things. A grief that never fully landed. A life that looks right from the outside and feels hollow from within. An anger they don't know what to do with. A tenderness they have never quite trusted. A question about who they are beneath everything they have learned to perform.
There is no single shape this takes. There is only the willingness to begin.

If something in this is speaking to you even quietly, even tentatively that is enough. You don't need to have it worked out. You don't need to know exactly what you are looking for. The shadow has already been showing you the way. You simply need a safe space to start paying attention.

You are welcome!

This July
If you are a hypnotherapist looking to extend your capacity in this territory — to understand the Jungian framework and bring it alongside the somatic and Ericksonian tools you already have this is the work I am building the July workshop around.
Two days online, 18–19 July. Four techniques grounded in many years of clinical practice. Small group. Theory, case material, demonstration, and supervised practice.
Book here:
https://www.discover-balance.com/workshops.html