Glass House X Carl Jung: Shadow Realm

Glass House is entering a new phase.

Starting this month, our clinical environment will take on a more immersive and intentional shape—built around themed months that explore the most influential, transformative theorists in the history of psychology. These aren't academic exercises—they're tools for real growth. Each month, we'll take the ideas of one major thinker and bring them into direct conversation with recovery, creativity, identity, and change.

To that end, we're incredibly excited to begin with the visionary Carl Jung.

Welcome to Glass House, where we take academic psychology and plug it into a distortion pedal.

This week, we begin with one of Jung's most personal and piercing concepts: the Shadow Self. These are the parts of us that have been buried—rejected, ignored, or reshaped for survival. Often, it's not the worst in us that ends up in the shadow—it's the most vulnerable, the most potent, the most misunderstood.

And the Shadow doesn't stay buried quietly. It leaks. It performs. It sabotages. It lashes out or shuts down.

That's why we're putting a mic in its hand.

Battle Rap as Shadow Work

We're opening the week with a battle rap exercise—not as a performance, but as a way to uncover internal narratives. Battle rap sharpens language. It shows us how words can cut, how rhythm and tone can reveal, distort, or defend. It's not just lyrical—it's psychological.

Most of us have internalized attacks that come disguised as truth. These voices don't sound loud—they sound familiar. They tell us who we are, what we're not, and what we'll never be.

Battle rap lets us hear them clearly. It gives us a framework to externalize those voices, to identify their tone, their vocabulary, their tactics. Writing from the Shadow doesn't make it stronger—it makes it visible. And from there, it becomes manageable.

This exercise isn't about performance—it's about exposure.

It's a way to name the voice before it names you.

As Jung wrote:

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

This week is about doing just that—stepping out of unconscious narrative and into intention.

The Hero's Journey & the Individuation Process

As we face the Shadow, we also begin something larger: the journey inward.

Jung's concept of individuation—becoming your full, integrated self—aligns powerfully with Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, a narrative framework found across cultures and centuries. The Hero's Journey begins in the "Ordinary World"—a life defined by routine, roles, and survival—and fractures when something unexpected pulls the hero into deeper territory.

That pull is the Call to Adventure—a moment of disruption that demands a response.

For many of us, that call has already happened. It may have come through pain, loss, exhaustion, relapse, or simply the quiet sense that the life we were living doesn't fit anymore. It's not always dramatic. But it's always significant.

This week, we'll explore that threshold—when the story begins to shift.

When something inside us starts asking: "What else?"

Group conversations will help us reflect on that call—not just the moment it happened, but the resistance that came with it. The refusal. The denial. The delay. That's part of the process, too. And it's worth examining.

Mapping the Psyche

To support all of this exploration, we'll also introduce Jung's model of the psyche. This is the structural foundation for the rest of the month. We'll break down:

• The Ego – the conscious "I"
• The Persona – the mask we wear to function socially
• The Shadow – what's repressed or disowned
• The Self – the deeper, integrated wholeness we move toward
• Anima/Animus – the inner feminine/masculine aspects we contain
• The Collective Unconscious – universal patterns and archetypes that shape human experience

This isn't about memorizing terms. It's about building a map of the inner world so we can stop moving through it blind. To integrate these concepts, we will use a Jungian art therapy approach to create an image of our own psyches.

Personality Typing & Visual Integration

Later in the week, we'll take a Jung-based personality assessment—not to define ourselves, but to notice tendencies. What's been dominant? What's been underdeveloped? What traits have we led with, and what parts of us have been left out?

This isn't about boxing anyone in. It's about reflecting, honestly and without judgment.

We'll close the week with a response art session—a chance to represent what's been uncovered in visual form. This could be a depiction of your Shadow, a scene from your Hero's Journey, a new awareness of your type, or simply an image that holds something unspoken.

These pieces will form the beginning of a collective mural—a visual thread we'll keep adding to as the month unfolds.