Shadow Working with Stuck Points
During one of the brief stints where I could easily access therapy, a tool I was introduced to was the Stuck Point log. And while I never got to see it through with that therapist thanks to the US’s healthcare system making therapy prohibitively expensive even with insurance, it’s a format that I’ve continued to try to utilize on my own. While I learned it in therapy, I consider it a part of my spiritual practice, my shadow work, because that’s how I situate it. But others might find it useful even with out a spiritual practice to pair it with.
Insert standard disclaimer about not being a therapist and take my advice at your own risk here. I’m just describing my personal practice here so keep that in mind. If it makes you feel worse and isn’t helpful, please don’t use it. I don’t know enough about it to give warnings beyond that.
Stuck points are beliefs we’ve collected in order to keep us safe, ones that likely did keep us safe, but now are causing problems. The key part of a stuck point is that it’s something we truly believe and treat as truth, often without being fully aware of it.
I’m going to be using one of mine as an example through this piece: “Blond men are dangerous.”
I dated exactly one blond man in my entire life and avoided even having blond men as friends for a long time. I didn’t even realize I was doing this until a friend pointed out that I had been avoiding certain people in our friend group for seemingly no reason.
That’s what having a stuck point is like. A firm belief, a limiting belief, that just becomes a part of your operating system. Like some terrible automatic update.
What is a Stuck Point Log
So how do we get rid of stuck points. The answer is: very slowly. Some people are blessed to have powerful experiences that blast through them but for the rest of us it’s something that shifts over time. For a lot of people those shifts happen naturally in the course of their daily life. They have experiences that challenge those beliefs and have to loosen them in order to make sense of the world.
But for the rest of us, for those of us who’ve not gotten better on our own and who aren’t about to have their stuck points blasted away by some flying oil induced initiation, we have the stuck point log.
I keep mine in my phone so I can write everything down in one place. My therapist at the time was absolutely adamant that it had to be handwritten but I just couldn’t make that work for my life. But what I do is when I notice those stuck points, I immediately write them down. I don’t worry about the wording too much. It’ll look more like what I wrote above: “Blond men are dangerous.”
Later, when I’m doing a shadow work session, I’ll pull it out and try to flesh out what’s actually underlying that belief.
“Blond men will hurt me.”
“Blond men don’t care if they hurt me.”
“Blond men will exploit me if they can.”
“Blond men will make me feel small.”
“Blond men will turn people against me.”
So one stuck point will often actually be several. Try to make them specific. It’s important not to over intellectualize as well. Check in with yourself if your gut feels they’re true.
Once I’ve got the list, I’ll then work to loosen them up. I’ll try to recall memories that challenge them – “well, my friend’s boyfriend is blond and he’s been very good to her” or “that one guy hangs out in our group sometimes and he’s always made me feel good about myself.”
In the course of that, I try to open them up by editing them:
“Most blond men will hurt me.”
“Some blond men don’t care if they hurt me.”
“I’ve known blond men who exploited me.”
“It’s likely but not a given that blond men will make me feel small.”
“Most blond men won’t turn people against me.”
And that process continues. Expanding the simplified ones and trying to edit the specific ones in the ways that I can. Slowly but surely they start to be less certain and more cautious. Then, even more slowly, they disappear altogether.
How to Use It in Shadow Work
I use a stuck point log in my shadow work because it gives me some structure to work with. So much of shadow work is freeform, it’s more an orientation of a practice than a complete practice in of itself. So a stuck point log allows me to keep track of my pain points without them having to be a very special issue. It keeps whatever I’m working on in the forefront of my mind rather than letting it hide out in the shadow. Just the act of writing it down in the log can help reclaim it.
I do this review roughly seasonally though I’ve considered making it a new moon activity. It’s an easy one to ritualize with an offering to open and a prayer to close.
It really just provides a hook on which to hang other shadow work practices. Straightforward, simple to implement, ultimately beneficial – it’s a good basis for building something regular.
For those who like incorporating tarot, here’s a spread that I’ve used in a few different iterations for this work. Feel free to tweak as you go along. It can be helpful in knowing how much you can shift a belief in a given session.
What the belief is rooted in: This card represents the situation or fear the belief is rooted in, this helps expand the simplified initial stuck point into more specific ones to work with.
How to shift it: This card represents what you need in order to believe differently. I’ve had this card be as simple as conveying that I need to sit silently with the belief for a minute to confronting the person the belief is rooted in.
How to release it: Similar to the last card, this card speaks to whether it’s reasonable to actually release a belief in the next few months. The message I most often get here is that it will take more life experience before I can fully let a belief go.
Outcome: I usually treat this as outcome for the session I’m working on. It helps let me know whether it’s worth pushing myself to work on the belief or whether I need to just accept it for a while.
I’ve found this tool immensely helpful but as always use it with caution. It can really be hard to pick through old memories to figure out what you believe and why. I’m sure it’s much more helpful with a trained therapist if you have access to it. But for those who are reasonably stale and used to dealing with their shadow selves, a stuck point log can give structure to an otherwise loose and mystifying practice.
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