What the Shadow Reveals

A Psychotherapist on this Moment in Time as it Unravels

12-15 Minute Read

Where I'm Coming From

I have an unusual background for a therapist. I studied Psychology and Political Science as an undergraduate before completing my Master's in Clinical Social Work. At the time, I wasn't sure how those fields would fit together. Now I think of them as inseparable.

Psychology taught me how individuals develop, attach, defend, and heal. Political science educated me on how systems of power operate: how they're built and maintained, and how they collapse. Social Work brought them together: the understanding that we cannot separate the person from their environment, that individual suffering is often a symptom of systemic harm, and that healing happens in relationship.

And then there's the piece that might seem unrelated but actually ties it all together: I have been teaching and practicing Yoga for close to fifteen years.

Yoga gave me so much. Namely, a felt understanding of something I'd only known intellectually: that the body and mind are not separate. Our nervous systems are not just along for the ride. They actively shape our thoughts, our perceptions, our capacity to respond rather than react. Breath is not only a metaphor for regulation; it's a mechanism of regulation. And we build our capacity to stay grounded in difficult moments not by avoiding intensity, but by practicing in it. We learn to regulate on the mat so we can regulate off the mat. We train the nervous system like any other skill.

This has shaped how I work as a therapist. I don't see emotional dysregulation as a character flaw or a cognitive error. I see it as a nervous system doing what nervous systems do. And I believe we can build capacity, with practice, to widen our window of tolerance and stay present in moments that tend to overwhelm us.

I say all of this because I want to be transparent about the lens I'm bringing to what I'm about to write.

On Holding This as a Therapist

I've been sitting with a tension that I imagine many clinicians are feeling right now.

On one hand: my consulting room is a space where people across the political spectrum come to be heard. I work with clients who voted for Trump (albeit rare) and clients who are terrified of him. I believe deeply that therapy requires creating a space where people can show up fully, including with beliefs I might not share, without being shamed or pushed toward conclusions that aren't theirs.

That's sacred to me. I protect it.

On the other hand: I am not a blank screen. I am a Social Worker, and Social Work is built on explicit values.
Social justice.
The inherent dignity and worth of every person.
The importance of human relationships.
The obligation to challenge injustice.
These aren't just my personal opinions. They are in our code of ethics and are why the profession exists.

As a clinician, I am trained to recognize harm. Not harm as "things I personally dislike," but harm as the research defines it: what destabilizes attachment and dysregulates nervous systems; what fragments communities; what dehumanizes groups of people and makes violence against them possible. There is a body of literature on authoritarianism, on propaganda, on the psychology of cruelty, on intergenerational trauma, on what happens to societies when accountability structures collapse. This isn't partisan. It's documented and researched.

So here's where I've landed:

I can hold space for nuance and complexity. I can sit with someone who sees things differently than I do, with genuine curiosity about their experience. It always makes sense. I will never shame a client for their beliefs, and I will never use my position to indoctrinate.

And I can name what the research tells us causes harm. Not as an attack on anyone who disagrees, but as information. The same way I might name that chronic invalidation damages a child's development, or that untreated trauma gets passed down through generations. These aren't opinions. They are patterns we've studied and continue to see demonstrated again and again and again.

Both of these things are true. Both are part of my job.

What I'm offering here is not a political argument. It's an attempt to make sense of what's happening, psychologically and systemically and somatically, in a way that might help you understand your own experience right now. You don't have to agree with my conclusions. But I hope the framework is useful.

On the Shadow

Carl Jung wrote about the shadow: the parts of ourselves we disown, repress, deny. The parts we project onto others rather than acknowledge in ourselves. He believed that what we refuse to make conscious doesn't disappear. It gets acted out. It shows up in our relationships, our institutions, our politics.

Nations have shadows, too.

America's shadow includes the racism we encoded into law for centuries and then pretended we'd resolved. It includes the sexism that still shapes whose pain we take seriously, and the xenophobia that has always existed alongside our narrative of being a "nation of immigrants." It includes the capacity for authoritarianism that we prefer to believe belongs to other countries, other eras.

And here's the thing about shadow material: it doesn't just hide. It gets projected. What we can't own in ourselves, we see in others, and then we attack it there. The immigrant becomes the container for everything we fear about scarcity, contamination, loss of control. The "other" carries what we refuse to carry ourselves.

What we're watching right now is not an aberration. It's a revelation.

The current administration didn't create these forces; it gave them permission to stop hiding. The cruelty isn't new; it's newly explicit (to some of us). The disregard for rule of law, the scapegoating, the dehumanization of out-groups, the consolidation of power: these patterns have always been part of American history. They just weren’t always as explicit.

Jung might say: the shadow doesn't go away because we deny it. It goes underground and gains power. And eventually, it erupts.

This, to me, feels like a very big eruption.

The question isn't "how did we become this?" The question is: "What do we do now that we can see it?"

The Facts

Before I go further, I want to ground this in what has actually happened. Because part of what makes this moment so disorienting is the gap between what we've witnessed and what we're being told.

Renee Nicole Good, 37. U.S. citizen. Mother of three. Unarmed. Not a target of any ICE investigation. On January 7, 2026, she was shot by a federal agent in Minneapolis. Video shows that seconds before she was killed, she said to an agent: "That's fine, dude. I'm not mad at you." Then another agent screamed at her to get out of the car. She tried to drive away. She was shot in the head, chest, and arm. After she was killed, a voice on video said: "Fucking bitch."

Alex Pretti, 37. U.S. citizen. ICU nurse who cared for veterans. Legal gun owner with a permit to carry. On January 24, 2026, seventeen days later, he was shot by federal agents in Minneapolis. Video verified by the New York Times shows him holding a phone, not a gun, filming agents and directing traffic. When agents shoved a woman to the ground, he moved to help her. He was pepper-sprayed, tackled by six to eight agents, and pinned face-down on the pavement. Video analysis from the Washington Post shows that an agent removed his gun from his waistband. Less than one second later, another agent shot him in the back. At least ten shots were fired in five seconds while he was pinned to the ground.

Within hours of each death, before any investigation, administration officials labeled both of them terrorists.

Governor Walz said of the Pretti killing: "Thank God we have video, because according to DHS, these seven heroic guys took an onslaught of a battalion against them or something. It's nonsense, people. It is nonsense, and it's lies."

Two U.S. citizens. Seventeen days. Both on video. Both described by officials in ways that directly contradict what we can see.

On Whose Deaths We Grieve

I want to name something I've noticed, and I want to hold it carefully because I'm not sure how much of this is objective and how much is my own perception.

It feels like Alex's death has generated more widespread outrage than Renee's. But I'm aware I could be wrong about that. Maybe it's the circles I'm in. Maybe it's algorithmic. Maybe grief doesn't move the way I think it does.

What I can say with more certainty: his death was the second. And there's something about a pattern that hits differently than a single event. The first death can be dismissed as an aberration. The second makes it a pattern. By the time Alex was killed, we'd already spent seventeen days watching officials lie about Renee. We were primed to see it clearly.

So maybe that's all it is. The compounding effect of horror.

But I find myself also wondering: does who they were shape how their deaths land?

Alex was a white man. A nurse. Someone who cared for veterans. A legal gun owner exercising his Second Amendment rights. Does he fit a template of "real American" that makes his death intolerable in a way that Renee's- a lesbian woman, unarmed, driving away- somehow doesn't?

I'm not making an accusation. I'm genuinely pondering in real time. I don't have a tidy answer, and I'm aware I'm articulating this messily as it all unfolds.

But I think the question is worth sitting with. Because part of the shadow work we need to do as a culture involves examining whose humanity we instinctively recognize, and whose we have to be convinced of. Whose deaths stop us in our tracks, and whose we scroll past. What questions we are willing to ask and which we aren’t.

This isn't about blame. It's about awareness- the kind that might, eventually, let us grieve all of it.

On "Self-Defense"

Let me speak to this as a woman.

Armed men in tactical gear, with badges and backup, claim they "feared for their lives." One when an unarmed woman tried to drive away. Another when a nurse was pinned face-down by half a dozen agents, his gun already removed from his body.

This fear justified lethal force.

If women shot a man every time we felt afraid, walking to our cars at night, on dates that turned threatening, in our own homes with partners who rage, the streets would run red.

Women live with fear as a baseline. We are taught to de-escalate, to freeze, to make ourselves smaller, to survive. We are not handed weapons and told our fear justifies killing.

The asymmetry is the point.

On What Our Bodies Know

Let me speak from the lens of interpersonal neurobiology: the science of how our nervous systems are shaped by, and respond to, our relational and social environments.

Your nervous system is not a machine that processes information neutrally. It is an anticipation organ. It is constantly scanning the environment, often below conscious awareness, asking: Am I safe? Is this person a threat? Can I rest here? Will you hurt me?

Stephen Porges calls this neuroception: the way our bodies detect safety or danger before our thinking minds catch up. It's why you can walk into a room and feel something is "off" before anyone says a word. It's why a certain tone of voice can make your stomach clench. Your body knows things your mind hasn't yet named.

When the environment becomes genuinely threatening, when state violence is broadcast on video and official narratives contradict what we witnessed and accountability structures crumble, our nervous systems respond. Not because we're weak or dramatic or "too political." Because that's what nervous systems do.

You might be experiencing:

Hypervigilance and anxiety. Your sympathetic nervous system is activated: fight or flight. You're scanning for threat, having trouble relaxing, sleeping poorly, startling easily. This is your system trying to protect you.

Rage. Hot, mobilizing, looking for a target. Anger is not dysfunction. It's an evolved response that tells us a boundary has been crossed, something we value is under threat, action is required. Your anger is information.

Freeze, numbness, or shutdown. When the threat feels too overwhelming, the nervous system moves into dorsal vagal shutdown. You might feel detached, foggy, unable to care. This is protective. It's how mammals survive the unsurvivable.

Fragmentation and confusion. When what you see and what you're told don't match, your brain works overtime to reconcile the dissonance. This is cognitively exhausting. It can make you feel like you're losing your grip on reality. You're not. The dissonance is real.

Grief. For the people killed. For the country you thought you lived in. For relationships strained by division. For a future that feels uncertain. Grief is not weakness. It is the cost of loving things that can be lost.

None of these responses are pathology. They are physiology.

You are a mammal in an environment that has become genuinely destabilizing. Your body is doing exactly what it evolved to do.

On Gaslighting at Scale

Here's what I want to say about this:

When we witness an event on video and then hear official accounts that directly contradict what we saw, when a woman driving away is called a "terrorist" and a man pinned and disarmed is described as an "attacker," we are not just being lied to.

We are being destabilized.

The psychological term for this in relationships is gaslighting: when someone denies your reality until you begin to doubt your own perception. It's one of the most destructive things you can do to a person's psyche because it attacks the foundation of their ability to trust themselves.

Gaslighting attacks the ego's reality-testing function, the part of us that says I know what I saw, I know what happened. When that's destabilized, we lose our footing. We become dependent on external authorities to tell us what's real. That dependency is the point.

This can happen at a societal level too.

The function is the same: if you can't trust what you see, you can't act on it. If reality itself feels unstable, you become easier to control. You stop resisting, not because you've been convinced, but because you've been exhausted.

The dissonance you feel is not a bug. It's the mechanism.

This is how authoritarianism works. And I want to be precise about that word, because it gets thrown around loosely: authoritarianism is a system in which power concentrates in a leader or small group, accountability structures are dismantled, and dissent is punished. It doesn't require a dictator in a military uniform. It requires the slow erosion of the checks that keep power from becoming absolute.

Authoritarian systems don't just want compliance. They want fragmentation. Of communities, of families, of your own internal coherence. They want you too exhausted to fight, too numb to feel, too isolated to organize, too confused to know what's true anymore.

If you feel like you're going crazy, that's not a sign something is wrong with you. It's a sign the system is working as designed.

On the System

This is not about one man. One man in power, or one man killed.

It's about what one man has revealed: how fragile our institutions actually were. How easily Congress can be bypassed. How quickly norms collapse when someone simply refuses to follow them. How thin the line was between democracy and something else.

The racism was already in the system. The misogyny was already there. None of it is new. What's new is the permission to stop pretending.

When Trump was asked by the New York Times if there are any limits to his power, he said:

"Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that could stop me. I don't need international law."

This is what authoritarianism sounds like when it stops pretending.

Since January 20, 2025:

• Nearly 30 shootings by federal immigration agents, with 8 deaths

• 2025 was the deadliest year in ICE custody in over two decades: over 30 deaths, with allegations of torture

• Stephen Miller has told agents they have "federal immunity" that no city, state, or individual can override

• 66 international treaties and organizations have been abandoned by executive order, including climate agreements the Senate ratified unanimously, bypassing Congress entirely

It's worth noting who these numbers represent. The eight people killed by federal agents, the thirty-plus who died in custody - most were immigrants and people of color. Renee and Alex became national news in part because they were citizens, because "this isn't supposed to happen to people like them." That framing itself is part of the shadow. No ICE agents have been killed. Over thirty people in their custody have.

So what do we do with this? How do we metabolize it without being destroyed by it?

On Building Capacity

Here's what I learned from close to fifteen years of teaching Yoga, and what interpersonal neurobiology confirms:

We don't build resilience by avoiding hard things. We build it by practicing in conditions of manageable intensity. Learning to stay present, to breathe, to notice what's happening in the body without being hijacked by it. This is what happens in a challenging yoga class: your heart rate goes up, your muscles shake, your mind wants to quit, and you practice staying. You practice finding your breath. Maybe you go less deep into the posture so you can breathe more deeply without exiting entirely. Or perhaps you do leave the pose and learn to truly rest when a limitation is at hand. Ultimately, you practice choosing your response rather than being swept away by reactivity.

The nervous system learns from this. It learns: I can tolerate discomfort. I can feel activation without being consumed by it. I have tools.

This is called "widening the window of tolerance": expanding the range of arousal you can experience while still remaining regulated, still able to think and connect and choose.

The problem right now is that many of us are being pushed outside that window. Not by a yoga pose, but by a relentless environment of threat and uncertainty and gaslighting. And when we're outside the window, we lose access to our prefrontal cortex. We can't think clearly. We can't plan. We're in survival mode.

So part of what I want to offer here is not just an analysis of what's happening, but a reminder: the skills still apply. The breath still works. Orienting to the present moment still works. Moving the body still works. Co-regulation with safe others still works.

You've been practicing for this, maybe without knowing it. The tools you have are not irrelevant just because the stressor is political instead of strictly personal. Your nervous system doesn't know the difference. It only knows: Am I safe? Can I regulate? Do I have capacity?

We can build that capacity. Even now. Especially now. It's not enough on its own, but it is something. And something is where we start.

On Regulation and Response

If your nervous system is dysregulated right now, here's what I want you to know:

You are not broken. You are not "too sensitive." You are not overreacting. You are having a coherent physiological response to a genuinely threatening environment.

Regulation is not about calming down and accepting things. It's about returning your nervous system to a state where you can think clearly, connect with others, and take effective action.

For the activation (anxiety, rage, restlessness): When your system is mobilized, it needs to move. Walk fast, shake, push against a wall. Let the energy discharge. Make sound if you need to: yell into a pillow, growl. The body wants to complete the action. And when you can, channel it into something. Anger that becomes action creates purpose.

For the shutdown (numbness, fog, collapse): Start with gentle orienting. Feel your feet. Name what you see. You are here. Cold water on your face or wrists can help; strong sensory input brings the system back online. Don't force yourself to feel. Let it come back at its own pace.

For the fragmentation (confusion, overwhelm): Dose your exposure. You don't have to watch every video. Write things down; externalizing helps when your mind can't hold it all. And talk to someone who understands. Co-regulation is real.

For the grief: Let it move. Tears are not weakness. Name what you've lost. Be with others who are grieving.

For the helplessness: Take one small action. Action is the antidote. Focus on what you can control: your body, your home, your immediate community. And remember: authoritarianism wants you to feel helpless. Doing anything is defiance.

On What We Do Now

I'm not here to tell you what to believe. But I'll tell you what I believe:

Power should have limits. When someone says "only my own morality can stop me," that is unchecked power by definition.

Due process matters for everyone. The Constitution says "persons," not "citizens." That principle applies to all of us or none of us.

What we see with our eyes is real. When official narratives contradict video evidence, the appropriate response is not confusion. It's clarity.

Community is resistance. Authoritarianism isolates. Staying connected isn't a luxury. It's survival.

What you can do:

Call Congress: (202) 224-3121. Demand accountability, oversight, and adherence to due process.

Document and bear witness. Your eyes are not lying. Say what you see.

Stay connected. Call a friend. Check on your community. Allow them to check on you. Show up for each other.

Take action. Protest, donate, organize, vote. Anger that has nowhere to go can turn slimy Give it somewhere to go.

Protect your capacity. Rest is not retreat. You cannot sustain this work if you're depleted. Everyone’s capacity is different and that is OK.

"The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort." — Carl Jung

A Final Word

If you're reading this and feeling alone, you're not.

Millions of people are watching the same videos, feeling the same things, asking the same questions. The system wants you disoriented, isolated, and unsure of what you know.

But here's what I keep coming back to, from all the lenses I carry — the political science, the clinical training, the years on the mat:

The shadow doesn't win by being powerful. It wins by staying hidden. What we're living through is painful precisely because it's no longer hidden. That visibility is disorienting, but it's also the precondition for change. You can't integrate what you won't look at.

And your body already knows what's true. The nervous system that's been activating, grieving, raging, shutting down- it's not malfunctioning. It's responding accurately to a destabilizing environment. That response is information. It's also capacity. The same system that registers threat can also regulate, connect, and act.

Trust what you see. Trust what you feel. Take care of yourself so you can keep going.

Stay close to each other. That's how we get through.