The Shadow Work Framework I Use Before Every Big Decision
A four-stage process for identifying which childhood pattern is running a current choice — available to paid subscribers of The Elysian Press.
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This week on The Elysian Press, paid subscribers receive the full Shadow Work Framework — the applied practice behind this week's free posts on how childhood patterns run business decisions and why the Saturn Return surfaces them.
What Is Inside This Week's Paid Post
The framework moves through four stages:
Stage 1 — Name It: Precisely identifying what pattern is running the current decision — not a general description ("I tend to undercharge") but the specific expression in this specific choice, what the pattern is actively doing and actively preventing.
Stage 2 — Locate It: Finding where the pattern lives in the body. Three prompts for going from the cognitive identification of the pattern to its physical location — the sensation, its quality, its age, what it would say if it could speak.
Stage 3 — Trace It: Connecting the current pattern to its origin. Three prompts for following the body sensation backward through time to its earliest context — the environment in which this exact response first made sense as a survival strategy.
Stage 4 — Decide From Now: Making the current decision from present reality rather than from the pattern. Three prompts and a specific somatic practice — a two-minute body preparation to use before any high-stakes decision that activates the pattern.
The paid post also includes the specific script I use before pricing a proposal, before publishing content I feel resistant to making visible, and before any client conversation that would previously have defaulted to yes when the genuine answer is no.
This Builds on This Week's Free Posts
The free posts this week laid the psychological foundation:
→ What Your Business Decisions Are Actually Telling You About Your Childhood — why undercharging, visibility resistance, and over-service trace to childhood worth and attachment conditioning, and where the pattern lives in the body before it becomes a behavior
→ Saturn Return Is a Nervous System Event — why the late twenties is a documented identity consolidation period, and why it surfaces the patterns that have been running the first act of adult life
The paid post is where the understanding in those articles becomes a working practice — specific, repeatable, and applied to actual decisions you are facing now.
Subscribe to The Elysian Press
Paid subscribers receive one framework post each week — The Atelier series, published every Thursday — with complete prompts, somatic practices, and the specific tools for applying the week's psychology to real decisions.
Subscribe to The Elysian Press →
Monthly: $7 / Year: $70 / Founding Member: $55 per year (first 100 spots)
This post connects to Healing the People-Pleaser Wound — on the unconscious patterns that drive the specific decisions this framework is designed to interrupt — and You Are Not Fine — on seeing what is running your choices before it runs them without your awareness.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is shadow work and how does it apply to business decisions?
- Shadow work, a term derived from Carl Jung's concept of the psychological shadow — the repository of everything the conscious mind has rejected, suppressed, or not yet integrated — refers to the process of identifying and working with unconscious material that is running behavior. In a business context, shadow work applies to the gap between the conscious decision a person believes they are making (I am pricing this at market rate) and the actual decision that emerges (I am pricing it 30% below market rate, for reasons I cannot fully explain). The unconscious pattern running the actual decision is the shadow content. Making that pattern visible — identifying where it came from, what it is protecting, and what it costs in the present — is the work.
- What does the Shadow Work Framework cover?
- The Shadow Work Framework is a four-stage process. Stage 1 (Name It): identifying the specific pattern that is running a current decision — what the pattern is doing, what it is preventing, and what it is protecting. Stage 2 (Locate It): finding where the pattern lives in the body, following the physical sensation back through associated memories, and identifying the earliest context in which this exact pattern made sense. Stage 3 (Trace It): connecting the pattern to its original relational learning — what the early environment taught about what was safe to want, say, or do — and distinguishing between the conditions of that environment and the conditions of the present. Stage 4 (Decide From Now): using the awareness from stages 1-3 to make the current decision from present-day reality rather than from the pattern — with a specific somatic practice for holding the new choice in the body.
- Is this framework based on psychological research?
- The framework draws on Carl Jung's shadow psychology (collected works volumes 7, 8, and 9, on the unconscious and integration), research on implicit memory and unconscious pattern activation from neuropsychologist Allan Schore at UCLA, somatic experiencing principles from Peter Levine's work at the Esalen Institute (on the role of the body in pattern storage and release), and cognitive behavioral research on the gap between stated intentions and actual behavior in high-stakes decisions. The framework integrates these research traditions into a structured four-stage practice rather than presenting them as separate approaches.
Recommended resources
A few relevant resources I would actually recommend for this topic.
- Healing the People-Pleaser Wound — Nikita Datar — On the unconscious patterns that drive over-service, undercharging, and the loss of self
- You Are Not Fine — Nikita Datar — On seeing the patterns running your decisions before they run you
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you click a link and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you click a link and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
I wrote more about this in Healing the People-Pleaser Wound — A Somatic Guide to the Fawn Response, Nervous System Regulation, and the Return to the Authentic Self.
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