How to find a good shadow work facilitator
If you’re interested in doing some shadow work for yourself, you’ll need a good shadow work facilitator. And that raises the question “How do I find a facilitator who is right for me?” There is a register of trained shadow work facilitators below, but there are some important points to consider before you choose one of them.
One way to choose a facilitator is to ask around for a personal recommendation. However, although shadow work can deal with almost any emotional issues, you may find that asking for recommendations from other people isn’t necessarily going to find a facilitator who is a good match for you.
Your next approach could be via Google or another search engine, where you can search for a man or woman to help you in your quest for a competent facilitator. Search terms like “shadow work facilitators uk” and “shadow work facilitators near x” (where you specify your location) can be more helpful.
However, there are a couple of other aspects to consider. The first issue is around training: is your potential facilitator well trained and highly experienced in shadow work? The second is more personal: will you feel relaxed, open, and deeply trusting of your facilitator?
Although these questions are both important, the second one may sometimes matter more. Research has repeatedly shown that one of the most important factors in the effectiveness of any kind of personal growth and development work is the quality of the relationship between practitioner and client.
This applies just as much to your relationship with your shadow work facilitator as it does in any other form of counselling or therapy. What this means in practice is that you need to feel both comfortable with, and confident about, your facilitator. Only then will you be able to explore the deep issues which can arise in shadow work and deal with them effectively.
Register of Qualified Healing the Shadow
Shadow Work Facilitators
You can see a listing of our qualified shadow work practitioners and students below. Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you would like to find out more about working with any of them.
Healing The Shadow Qualified Shadow Work Facilitators & Practitioners
Why Do Shadow Work?
Most likely, because you want to improve the quality of your life. Often, because you want to grow into the fullness of who you know you can be.
Perhaps you’re feeling depressed, unmotivated, even hopeless. Maybe you’re pushing yourself too hard, or driving yourself to high levels of stress. You might feel your life is out of control, or your ability to exercise and express your own power in the world is limited. Many clients express a desire to increase confidence, reduce anxiety, love more freely, and to find solutions to longstanding problems and challenges. And of course our modern era is fraught with all kinds of personal challenges including addictive behaviours, relationship breakdown, confusion, overthinking, anger, anxiety, grief…. and so on and so on.
Shadow work is one of the most powerful approaches for dealing with any and all of this type of emotional work. This approach goes well beyond the traditional counselling approach of meeting once a week for an hour (or 50 minute) long conversation. And it is increasingly popular – because it works! Shadow work as an approach to therapy is based on the specific needs of the client.
As qualified practitioners within the Healing The Shadow organisation, Marianne Hill and I, Rod Boothroyd, have together pioneered a training course which combines the best of conventional therapeutic practice with the power of shadow exploration and facilitation. What’s so special about this approach is the attention given to different parts of the psyche.
We teach our students how to work sensitively with the wounded inner child in each of their clients, where so much of the trauma of the past and the problems and issues of the present are held. We ensure they have the experience and the confidence to sit with the most wounded parts of their clients as they work co-operatively together to find a route to emotional wholeness and the fullest expression of self. This is the healing power of presence, of relationship, and of compassionate understanding at the highest level.
(So you will see that this is NOT a 7 or 10 day course with limited experience and which leads to almost guaranteed “certification”. We know that such approaches can be useful in teaching techniques, but they do not give a practitioner the confidence to establish deep and ongoing relationships with their clients. Nor do they impart the skills and confidence to both work with, and also understand the origins of, trauma in all its forms.)