Why Your Dark Side Isn’t the Enemy—It’s What Can Save You | (#054) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

In the last few episodes, we’ve explored how morality can be defined by virtues, but if morality is about cultivating virtue, what do we do with the parts of us that don’t want to be virtuous, the parts that want revenge or to lie, or to take the shortcut, the parts that would rather hide in the dark than face the cost of being honest?

Most people don’t talk about these parts. They cover them up. They smile, perform and say the right words, but inside they know they’re wrestling with envy, lust, pettiness, even cruelty, and because they’re ashamed of that, they bury it deeper. But here’s the paradox—the more you hide those parts, the more power they gain over you. They don’t disappear. They go underground, and they come back as compulsions, addictions, duplicity, deceit. They come back in ways that sabotage your relationships, your leadership, and your sense of self-worth and self-respect. [01:10.5]

I’ve seen this play out in dating. A client tells himself he’s the nice guy, the one who always treats women well, but underneath, he’s bitter about rejection, resentful when things don’t go his way, and jealous of the men who seem to succeed without trying. He doesn’t admit any of that, even to himself, of course, and so it leaks out sideways through manipulation, passive-aggression or secret double lives.

I’ve seen the same in leadership. An executive insists he values collaboration, but deep down, he can’t stand the idea of anyone else outshining him, so he hoards credit, undermines rivals and creates a toxic team environment. On the surface, he’s saying all the right words about teamwork and shared vision, but his Shadow betrays him. [01:53.1]

So, what do we do with these parts? The answer isn’t denial and it’s not shame. In this episode, I’m going to show you why admitting the Shadow isn’t a moral failure. In fact, it’s the very thing that makes real virtue possible, and why embracing this truth is the path to integrity, integration and life fulfillment.

I’m David Tian, a Brown University–certified leadership and performance coach, and a certified IFS therapy practitioner. For almost the past two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find fulfillment, meaning and success in their personal and professional lives.

As we dive into this episode, let’s first define the terms. When Carl Jung talked about the Shadow, he wasn’t referring to something exotic or rare. He meant the traits, urges and impulses that we repress because they don’t fit the version of ourselves that we want the world to see, or the version that we wish we could be and could believe about ourselves. The Shadow is envy we won’t admit, and it’s cruelty we’d rather deny, or selfishness or self-centeredness that we dress up as virtue, and it’s there in everyone, including me. [03:01.0]

Now, one way I found especially helpful to understand this is through Internal Family Systems therapy or IFS therapy. IFS shows us that we’re not a single, monolithic, unified block of personality. We’re a lot more like a system of parts.

Managers are the parts that keep us in line, push us to perform and try to prevent problems before they happen. Firefighter parts jump in when pain breaks through, through numbing or distracting us with sex or food or work, or anything that gets us out of the fire. Exiles are parts that are wounded and vulnerable, carrying the concentration of shame and fear or loneliness, and get buried out of sight, but are actually never gone.

At the core of this is what IFS calls “the Self,” capital “S” Self, the True Self. The Self shows up with calm, clarity, compassion, courage, creativity, confidence, curiosity, and connectedness, what are called the eight Cs. [04:05.1]

When you lead with this Higher Self, your parts relax. They can stop fighting each other and start working together, and that’s when real integration and harmony is possible. But here’s a crucial distinction for our purposes for this episode—there’s a difference between healthy guilt and toxic shame. Healthy guilt says, “I violated one of my values. I did something wrong. I need to repair this.” Toxic shame says, “I am bad. I should hide. I should perform or pretend to be something else, in order to retain the connection.”

Guilt can motivate repair, but shame drives us deeper underground, and that’s the seed of the argument in this episode—shame fuels hiding and hiding fuels vice, but compassionate awareness turning toward our shadows with curiosity instead of condemnation, that opens the door to more empowering, fulfilling choices, and that’s where growth begins. That’s where the path to real virtue can begin. [05:08.2]

Next, let’s get into why we hide in the first place. From a young age, we learn which feelings and desires are socially acceptable and which ones are not. Culture, family, religion, each has its own purity codes. They tell us that good people don’t feel envy, or good people don’t get aroused outside of marriage, or good people don’t feel rage or cruelty, so when those impulses inevitably show up in us, because we’re human, we end up exiling them. We bury them deep in the shadows and tell ourselves that they don’t exist, but repression doesn’t make them disappear. It only drives them further underground, where they start shaping our behavior in ways that we can’t see or control. [05:53.4]

One of the most common ways this happens is through projection. This is when we condemn in others what we can’t admit in ourselves. The colleague who rants about other people being lazy might be terrified of their own tendency to procrastinate. The partner who constantly accuses you of dishonesty may be hiding secrets of their own.

Projection is like a mirror that we can’t stand to look at, so we smash it by accusing someone else, and it creates a vicious loop. The more we project, the less honest we are with ourselves. The less honest we are with ourselves, the more shame builds in us, and the more shame builds in us, the more our Shadow takes control.

That’s how you end up with leaders preaching family values who actually live double lives, or partners demanding loyalty while actually cheating on the side. The problem isn’t that they have those impulses. Everybody does. The real problem is that they’ve split themselves so far and so deeply into two that they can’t tell the difference between performance and reality, or the front they put up and the truth inside. [07:02.0]

This cost of repression is so high it breeds compulsions, like habits you can’t control because they’re driven by disowned parts of you and your unconscious screaming for attention. It breeds image management, where you’re trying to fake it, always polishing how you look so that no one notices the cracks. It makes relationships brittle because the real you never shows up. You’re always just performing, always calculating how to keep the mask in place so no one sees the truth.

Maybe worst of all, suppression traps you in constant self-surveillance. You start policing your own mind. Every thought, every urge, becomes a threat. You have to keep the lie going. Instead of living, you’re constantly monitoring, and that takes so much mental energy and creates so much stress. Instead of building trust, you’re building a cage for yourself. [07:55.0]

Maybe even worse, constant suppression eventually leads to repression. Suppression is the conscious pushing down, and if you do that long enough, it eventually becomes unconscious repression. Because it’s unconscious, you’re not even aware of it, and therefore, you can have no control over it.

Here’s the irony. The parts of ourselves that we most want to deny are the ones that, if faced with compassion and courage, can unlock the deepest growth and most powerful breakthroughs, but the more you hide them, the more power they hold over you. That’s why confronting the Shadow isn’t just some luxury for philosophers or therapists. It’s a moral necessity for anyone who wants to live a life of trust, fulfillment, and lasting happiness and harmony.

So, what’s the solution? This is where virtue ethics meets psychotherapy. Aristotle once said that we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. Confucius taught something very similar 2,000 years ago that the noble person is not born perfect, but made so through daily cultivation. [09:08.2]

Both traditions understood morality not as some flawless compliance with rules, but as a practice. You don’t master a craft by avoiding the workshop. You pick up the hammer, the chisel, the brush, and you begin to get to work. You start shaping. That’s the same with your character.

Growth requires honest contact with the material you’re working with, and what’s the raw material here? It’s your impulses, your emotions, your parts, including the ones that you’d rather not claim. You can’t refine what you refuse to touch. If you exile envy or lust or anger, then you’re abandoning the very material that could be shaped into your greatest strengths. [09:53.6]

This is where psychotherapy, especially Internal Family Systems therapy, adds something profound. When your Higher Self relates to your Shadow parts with calm, clarity, compassion, courage, creativity, confidence, curiosity and connectedness, those parts change. They stop sabotaging, and they start contributing. They start harmonizing. What once looked like an enemy becomes a very powerful ally.

Take ambition, for example. Left unchecked, ambition can drive you to exploit others or burn yourself out, or hollow out your relationships. But when ambition is integrated, when the Higher Self brings fairness and compassion into the mix, then this ambition turns into vision or leadership, an energy that lifts everyone else up around you.

Or take desire. Repressed desire can twist into addiction or secrecy, or betrayal. Indulged recklessly, desire can destroy trust and leave you lonely. But when desire is guided by care for yourself and compassion for the other person, then this desire fuels intimacy, honesty and deeper connection. [11:10.0]

Anger also has this potential. If you suppress anger, or worse, repress it, it festers. If you unleash it blindly, it wounds and harms, but if you meet it with clarity, anger becomes the energy for you to set boundaries, to confront injustice, to protect what matters most.

This is the work of integration. The Higher Self does not exile parts, does not wage war on them. Instead, it listens, it learns, it leads, and over time, these parts that once seemed destructive transform into great sources of wisdom and strength. [11:52.4]

In practical terms, this is the difference between a leader who preaches values while secretly unraveling, and a leader who admits their flaws, works with them and builds trust, because people sense they’re not hiding. It’s the difference between someone in a relationship who plays a role in order to keep their partner’s approval and someone who is courageous enough to risk honesty, even when it’s messy, and creates real, true intimacy.

Virtue ethics and psychotherapy converge here. Morality is not repression and fulfillment doesn’t come from pretending to be flawless. It comes from cultivating your character through contact with the very impulses that you’ve been taught to hide or exile—and that means facing your Shadows, not to condemn them, but to shape them into something that serves your life and the lives of those you care about. [12:50.0]

Okay, let’s bring this to life with a case study. One client came to me looking polished on the outside, well-dressed, polite, a professional who knew how to play the part of being nice, but underneath, he was battling a secret porn compulsion and carried a constant undercurrent of envy. He avoided difficult conversations with his partner and with pretty much everybody else, because he believed keeping the peace was the same as being good.

What he didn’t realize was that this performance of goodness was actually eroding his integrity and his intimacy. When we mapped out His parts, the story became a lot clearer. There was an exiled part, a lonely adolescent boy, still terrified of abandonment, carrying memories of being overlooked and left behind, and that part was desperate for connection, but too ashamed to ask for it directly.

Then, he had a manager part, the perfectionist image keeper, whose mission was “Never upset anyone,” and that manager kept him polished, agreeable and superficially kind, but also emotionally unavailable and not fully truthful. When loneliness spiked late at night, a firefighter part in him took over, diving into compulsive porn use to numb this pain and anxiety. [14:13.4]

So, he didn’t need more willpower to stop the porn. He didn’t need another productivity hack. He needed to relate to his own parts differently through his Higher Self, with curiosity instead of judgment. Approaching them with curiosity instead of judgment, He began to notice what these parts were protecting him from. He saw how the perfectionist manager was trying to prevent his rejection. He realized how the firefighter part in him was trying to soothe what felt like unbearable isolation. When he finally turned toward the lonely adolescent exile with compassion instead of judgment, he finally understood that secrecy was making the loneliness worse. [15:00.4]

From there, the real work began for him. He practiced naming his needs instead of hiding them. He built the courage to disclose his struggle to his partner, not as a confession for pity, but as an honest invitation to rebuild trust, and together, they co-created boundaries that respected both of their needs and were healthy. They developed small repair rituals so that when conflict or distance emerged, they had a way to reconnect instead of retreating from each other.

Now, the outcome wasn’t perfection, especially right away. He still had moments of temptation, but the secrecy shrank. The compulsions loosened to their grip on him and true intimacy grew. Because he was no longer trying to present a mask, his partner trusted him more, not because he had become flawless on the outside, but because he was actually becoming more honest—and this is what integration looks like in practice. The Shadow isn’t eliminated. It’s engaged, understood, and led by the True Self. [16:07.5]

Virtue, in his case, didn’t come from denying desire or repressing natural urges like envy. It came from weaving these impulses into an honest, compassionate, courageous life—and the result wasn’t just fewer compulsions. It was a calmer nervous system, a more connected relationship, and a man who no longer feared being seen or who he truly was. [16:33.4]

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Another case study. I once worked with an executive who couldn’t understand why his career had stalled. On paper, he had everything, the MBA from Harvard, tons of experience at a high level, even a reputation for being collaborative. But year after year, he kept hitting what he called “the same invisible ceiling.” No matter how hard he pushed, he never got tapped for the bigger roles. [17:55.0]

As we dug deeper, the pattern revealed itself. In public, he spoke the language of teamwork. He praised joint projects, highlighted the value of unity, but privately, he constantly felt threatened. Whenever a peer started shining too brightly, he then found subtle ways to undermine them, grabbing credit for shared wins, planting little rumors that cast doubt or nitpicking their ideas in side conversations. It wasn’t malicious and open in the way he thought of evil. It was more fear-driven and protective, and over time, colleagues could feel it and they couldn’t fully trust him.

When we mapped out his parts, things got a lot clearer for him. At the root was an exiled part, a younger Self humiliated after a public failure early in his life, and that part carried the shame of being laughed at and dismissed and forgotten, and to protect that exiled part, a manager part in him took over. [18:59.8]

This manager part pushed him into chronic over preparation, hyper-polished presentations and strict image control. It kept him safe but brittle inside, and whenever fear spiked, when he sensed someone else’s success as a threat, then a firefighter extreme part leapt in, and that firefighter parted him whispered, “If you don’t grab the credit, you’ll disappear again,” and so came the underhanded credit stealing, the rumor seeding, and the quiet sabotage.

Their turning point came when his True Self met that exile who felt humiliated. For the first time in his life, instead of pushing it away, he stayed in the pocket and listened. He let that exiled part know it didn’t have to carry the shame alone anymore, and with that compassion and the courage and the strength, this manager part loosened its grip and the firefighter part relaxed, and from there, we were able to design new practices for him. [20:00.0]

He made it a rule to name others in meetings when they contributed. He pre-committed to framing big wins as team efforts. He even brought in an accountability buddy, someone who could call him out when his old instincts crept back, and the result over time was that his peers stopped watching their backs around him.

Trust began to grow in his teams and around the office, and his promotions followed, not because he mastered office politics, but because people finally saw him as truthful, reliable, and honest, and maybe most importantly, the pressure that he had been carrying for years, for most of his life, the constant vigilance, the silent competition, all of that lifted. He could finally truly breathe deeply.

That’s the paradox of the Shadow. When we try to bury it or cast it out, it drives us in ways that we can no longer control, but when we face it with compassion and courage, those same parts transform into allies, and leadership, just like relationships, shifts from being about hiding and now being about integrity. [21:11.2]

So, here’s the core argument, step by step.

First, everyone has Shadows. If you have parts that can envy, lie, hoard, lust, quit or crush a rival, welcome to being a human being. Those parts don’t make you a monster. They make you a person. The trouble starts when we pretend they’re not there.

Second, repression leads to splitting off. When you exile those parts, they don’t retire. They restructure. They come back as symptoms and sabotage. In dating, that might look like a nice persona on the surface with secret resentment and late-night numbing underneath. At work, it can show up as polished collaboration in public, but quiet credit grabbing in private. Image management or faking it replaces integrity. You start performing a Self instead of living and being one. [22:01.0]

Third, meeting your Shadows with compassion and courage softens them and starts the healing process. When your Higher Self shows up, calm, clear, caring and courageous, and turns toward a jealous or frightened part with curiosity, the breakthroughs start to happen. The inner alarms quiet, triggers lose their bite on you. That lonely adolescent part stops screaming for relief late at night. The humiliated younger Self no longer needs to yank praise away from someone else. Light appears at the end of a very dark tunnel, not because the impulse vanished, but because it now has someone to lead you to the light. [22:43.3]

Fourth, integration enables consistent virtue. As the parts feel led instead of shamed, they take on new roles aligned with your values. Ambition becomes drive in service of fairness. Desire becomes energy guided by care. Anger becomes the backbone for boundaries. Choices get easier and more natural, because they’re no longer in an internal civil war. They’re now a coordinated, harmonious effort. This is how good character gets cultivated, rep by rep, conversation by conversation, repair by repair. [23:18.6]

Fifth, the social dividends are real. Integrated people are more trustworthy because they don’t need a mask. They don’t need to lie and keep track of the lies. They can also spot integrity in others more quickly and more reliably, because their radar is cleaner. Partners relax. Teams feel safer, and you get compounding returns in this, fewer politics, more collaboration, fewer mind games, more creativity, and over time, that stability translates into flourishing that you can actually feel, like better sleep, stronger relationships and a life that doesn’t require constant self-protection. [23:58.1]

None of this demands perfection. What it demands is leadership of yourself first. So, name the part. Welcome it. Learn what it’s afraid will happen if it stops doing its job. Offer it a better job that serves your values. Then keep practicing this. The goal is not to never feel envy or fear or anger again. The goal is to be so well-led inside that when those parts show up, they join the mission instead of hijacking it. That’s how virtue stops being performative and becomes your default character.

Now let me suggest a few practical things you can practice. I’ll give you one that I call the “LIGHT Protocol.” L-I-G-H-T, light. It’s a way to work with your Shadow parts without collapsing into shame or just doubling down on suppression. It’s a workflow that you can use in real time and it gets easier the more you practice. [24:53.0]

Okay, L-I-G-H-T, light, the “L” is for “locate.” Start by finding the part in your body. Where does he or it sit, or she sit? In your chest? In your gut? Your jaw? Don’t overanalyze. Just notice. What’s the impulse, the fear, the urge that it’s carrying? Give it a simple label, like “the perfectionist” or
“the rebel,” or “the critic,” or a name that that part prefers.

Next is “I.” “I” is for “invite.” Invite your Higher Self. Take a few deep breaths. Relax your shoulders. Let your stomach expand. Breathe deeply from your belly. You’re calling up the qualities of the Higher Self, curiosity, compassion, clarity, courage. It doesn’t have to be all of those eight Cs. Even a sliver of curiosity and compassion is enough to get started. [25:51.3]

Then, next is “G.” The “G” is for “get curious.” Ask this part inside your own mind, “What are you afraid would happen if you didn’t do your job? When did you start doing your job? What was going on then? What do you now need from me?” Don’t interrogate. Just get curious, interested, like you’re meeting a kid who’s been misunderstood.

The “H” is for “here and honor.” Every part is trying to protect you somehow. That doesn’t mean the strategy works, but the intent, the positive intent, is real, so thank this part for trying to help. Separate the positive intent from the negative impact.

Finally, the “T” is for “transform.” Transform the role. Once this part feels understood, you can negotiate. Ask this part if it would take on a job that serves your integrity instead of undermining it. The credit hoarder can become a credit spotter or noticing opportunities to lift up teammates, or the numbing part can become a soothing part, helping you calm down before sleep. [27:00.0]

Now, you don’t need to do this for an hour every day. Micro-practices make it more sustainable. Here are a few ways you can do that.

Journal. You can do a Shadow journal. Once a day, jot down, “What did I judge harshly in others today?” That’s often your own Shadow in disguise. Remember projection.

Then, a pause, a projection pause. When you get triggered, ask yourself, “What part of me feels activated here?” That tiny gap opens up choice.

Then there’s the repair loop. When you screw up, and you will as we all do, name the impact on others, own it, take responsibility, and then make specific amends, not vague apologies, but concrete repair.

Then, what I call “somatic settling.” Before a tough conversation, take five deep breaths. Inhale deeply. Hold at the top. Then twice as long, slow-exhale out, and run that five times. This helps to reset your nervous system. [28:03.3]

Then, finally, a mentor mirror. Once a week, check in with a mentor or a coach or a trusted peer. They will see the blind spots you can’t. By definition, you can’t.

This isn’t about erasing Shadows. It’s about leading them. With the LIGHT protocol, L-I-G-H-T, you stop hiding from the parts that you fear and you start turning them into allies, and that’s how character grows, not in denial, but through honest integration.

Okay, let’s also name the traps here, because Shadow work can easily be misused. The first pitfall is treating Shadow work like a hall pass. Just because you’ve owned your envy or lust at some point does not mean you get to act it out. Feelings are data. They’re not directives, so if a part wants to lash out, that’s a signal to slow down. It is not a green light to indulge it. [28:53.4]

Another danger is oversharing. Honesty is not the same thing as dumping everything on whomever happens to be near you. If you flood your partner or your team or your friends with every raw impulse, you’re not actually building trust. You’re just transferring the burden onto them. Honesty works best when it’s well placed. You titrate your self-disclosure to the level of safety in that relationship.

There’s also analysis paralysis, right? Some people love to map their parts and journal endlessly, and draw the diagrams and so on, but they never actually change their behavior in real life. If you’ve mapped it twice, that’s already more than enough. At some point, you need to do something. Make the repair or set that healthy boundary, or ask for what you need. The growth is in the action, not really in the perfect charting or in the theory.

Then there’s spiritual bypassing. This is when you use compassion as an excuse to avoid real consequences. Real compassion includes accountability, so if you or your part has hurt someone else, then you repair what you can. If someone else keeps crossing your line, then you’ve got to set that healthier boundary. Compassion doesn’t erase consequences. It makes them bearable and just. [30:13.3]

So, Shadow work doesn’t mean turning every part loose. It means creating a safe, honest relationship with those parts of you so that you can direct their energy more wisely. It’s not about drowning in the dark. It’s not about pretending the dark isn’t there. It’s about bringing enough light to navigate the path with integrity.

When it comes down to it, moral growth doesn’t mean erasing your shadows or pretending those darker impulses don’t exist. It means befriending them, unburdening them, and then leading them with the qualities of your core, higher, True Self, like calm, clarity, compassion, courage, curiosity, confidence, creativity and connectedness. That’s how you integrate those parts into a larger story of virtue, instead of waging a civil war inside yourself. [31:01.5]

I’ll leave you here with a few reflection questions.

Which trigger reliably brings out your Shadow? And what protective job are those Shadow parts trying to do for you? Is it anger when someone cuts you off in a meeting, or jealousy when your partner gives attention elsewhere? What part of you is stepping in, thinking it’s actually saving you?

Second reflection question—what repair is yours to make this week? Maybe it’s an apology to your partner for snapping at them. Maybe it’s acknowledging a teammate that you undermined. Moral growth isn’t about perfection. It’s about making repairs whenever you fall short.

Third reflection question, which micro-practice will you do daily for the next seven days? It could be a one-minute pause before reacting or a quick journal entry about what triggered you today, or even thanking a part of you for trying to protect you. Small, repeatable actions build the muscle of virtue a lot more than one grand gesture every now and then ever could. [32:11.2]

So, the challenge for you now is to start not by exiling your Shadows, but by turning toward them with curiosity and compassion. That’s how you grow into the kind of person who doesn’t just perform goodness, but actually become someone of good character, someone trustworthy, courageous and free. 

In the next episode, we’ll take one of the most overlooked parts of moral growth, how to repair trust when it’s been broken, not with apologies that beg for pity, but with amends that restore dignity and rebuild relationships and let you trust yourself again.

Thank you so much for listening. If this has helped you in any way, please share it with anyone else that you think could benefit from it. If you liked it, hit a like or give it a good rating on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. If you have any feedback whatsoever, I’d love to get it. Leave a comment or send me a message. I’d love to get your feedback.I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [33:01.1]