Have you ever been furious at someone for doing something you actually wish you could do?
Someone sets a boundary clearly and unapologetically. Someone says ‘no’ without overexplaining. Someone is blunt, direct, takes up space without apologising for it. Someone gets a promotion and you know they’re not more qualified – just louder, more self-assured. And something in you bristles. Gets irritated. Judges them as too much, too aggressive, too self-centred.
But underneath that judgement, if you’re honest, there’s something else. A flicker of recognition. A quiet, uncomfortable “I wish I could do that.” “I wish I was so brave.” I wish I was that grounded, that confident, that unapologetically myself. [Insert whatever it is that bothers you, you’ll know it when you feel it.]
That’s not a coincidence. Got hidden so you can survive when we were young…
What the shadow actually is
And this is exactly where those childhood experiences go underground – into what we call the shadow.
The shadow isn’t the dark, scary thing it sounds like. It’s simply the collection of parts of ourselves we’ve learned to hide like qualities, feelings, impulses that at some point got the message they weren’t welcome.
Assertiveness. Ambition. Saying ‘no’. Expressing your joy. Showing your emotions – anger, sadness, excitement. These are not negative qualities. But if showing them once cost you something – love, safety, belonging, self-respect – your system learned to associate them with danger. And so you buried them. As children we are exquisitely attuned to what keeps us safe and what we need to do, say, to be loved. If a quality threatened that, it got hidden.
But hidden doesn’t mean gone. That younger self is still there, still carrying those exiled parts. We can’t get rid of them. Even as we grow up, become adults, behave maturely (most of the time) – the part of us that got the message it wasn’t safe to be fully expressed never quite goes away. It chips away a little piece of us every time. And then – reliably, predictably – they show up when we see someone else expressing them freely or we cannot do so.
I still have such moments. Some people describe me as ‘too intense’. Others use the word ‘charismatic’. The difference is their background and upbringing, not me. When I’m excited about something, my voice rises, my hands move, my face can’t stay still. That’s just what aliveness looks like for me. Somewhere along the way I learned that not everyone reads it that way. And so, like most of us, I’m still learning not to dial it down – to stop making myself more palatable just to belong, just to survive.
But the fury you feel when someone else does it freely? That’s the exile recognising what it lost.
The question worth sitting with
When someone else’s behaviour makes you disproportionately angry – angrier than the situation seems to warrant – try asking:
Where have I not been allowed to do that?
Not “why are they so awful”, but what is it about what they’re doing that feels both infuriating and, somewhere underneath, familiar? What quality are they expressing that you once had to exile?
That’s usually where the thread leads back. Not to them. To you. To something you gave up that you might be ready to reclaim.
Where Reiki comes in
This kind of work – shadow work, inner child work – isn’t always comfortable. It asks you to look at parts of yourself you’ve spent years not looking at. And the looking itself can stir things up. It can feel like an emotional rollercoaster.
What Reiki offers in those moments is space. Not answers but space. A quiet hour where the nervous system settles enough that something can surface. Because those buried parts can only resurface when there’s space and a sense of safety. Reiki helps hold that space for the body and mind to quieten, for memories to surface, for the parts of you that have been waiting to finally be seen.
Sometimes I’ll find myself seeing a younger version of myself in a situation I thought I’d long moved past – the same feeling, different circumstances, decades earlier. And from that space, something becomes possible that isn’t possible when the anger is at full volume: compassion. For the younger self who learned to hide. For the current self still carrying it. And sometimes – eventually – even for the person who triggered it, because they’re probably carrying their own exiled parts too.
This is the deeper work. It doesn’t happen in one session. But it starts with noticing.
The principle that helps
Just for today, I will meet my anger with compassion.
Not “I will not be angry.” Compassion. For what the anger is protecting. For the parts of you that learned hiding was safer than being seen.
‘Just for today’ is manageable.
And sometimes, ‘just for today’ is enough to start uncovering something lighter on the other side.
