The Shadow Effect: a review

The Shadow Effect DVD, photo courtesy Debbieford.com

Debbie Ford’s documentary, The Shadow Effect, is an adjunct to her workshops taught worldwide called The Shadow Process. Based upon the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s groundbreaking work in analytical psychology, the film explores the idea that we all have aspects of ourselves that are hidden in shadow. We unconsciously suppress unresolved painful emotions through either self-sabotage, or by projecting these denied aspects on others. How many times have we criticized another person? The shadow process tells us that this is a mirror of the unhealed parts of ourselves.

As in the highly successful book and video, The Secret, best-selling author Ford includes in her documentary New Age luminaries such as Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, Mark Victor Hansen, and James Van Praagh. We also see examples of popular celebrities and politicians including Britney Spears and Former New York Governor, Eliot Spitzer, whom have had public displays of their shadows inappropriately acting out.

Debbie Ford, photo courtesy Debbieford.com

Individuals whom have attended Ms. Ford’s workshops, share stories of how they rose above child abuse, racism, the Holocaust, war, and wounded childhoods. They poignantly share their painful experiences, and their arrival at a more healed perspective.

There are many ways to address these deep, wounded shadows. Lorelynn Mirage Cardo, Ph.D., Director of Arise, a counseling, healing and enrichment center in Beaverton, Oregon, has a slightly different approach. “I work with people from a soul level, from their inner landscape.”

Cardo, who has over 25 years experience as a counselor, healer and educator, begins “with the understanding that everyone is a hero in their own journey, to see if we can start discerning overall patterns that have been set down from a soul level.”

Lorelynn Cardo of Arise Counseling

Cardo, also a Reiki Master Teacher, does not use the term shadow. She describes it as working with “all the different aspects of whom we are, to integrate parts that are not so clear, or might be in survival mode.”

She explains that sometimes we carry over the unhealed parts of our self through our Ancestral Line that have come through our DNA.

The Shadow Effect DVD, available in either standard or interactive versions, is an introduction to Ford’s Shadow process workshops. Dramatic usage of music and gloomy lighting, with almost all participants garbed in black, makes its’ point. Maybe a little too much. Yes, there is plenty of shadow collectively and individually within us all. I was hoping for just a little more lightness, literally.

As Lorelynn Cardo, explains, “There is a way to bring love, compassion, and forgiveness to others, but mostly for yourself. Then, to help integrate that in a gentler, lighter way.”