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Cliff Barry
Cliff is President of Shadow Work® Seminars and lives in Boulder, Colorado, northwest of Denver, where he enjoys hunting and fishing.
"Cliff is amazingly insightful! His ability to see issues on multi-levels allowed him to guide me to the core of my wounds. His gentle, non-shaming, accepting approach gave me the safety and courage to look at what I was able to change. I experienced life-changing insights and have enjoyed more peace than ever before."— Linda Tonnesen, president of a property management company and mother of four teenagers
Shadow Work® is a personal growth methodology designed to help us understand and balance aspects of our own natures. It offers a uniquely compassionate view of personality development and an effective technology for working towards balanced awareness. It includes a set of facilitated processes that allow individuals to explore behavior patterns that they want to understand or change. Shadow Work® is especially devoted to providing a setting that allows people to learn and evolve slowly, safely, without confrontation or pressure and with full choice.
Shadow Work® is based partially on the premise first posited by psychologist Carl G. Jung that human nature is not random but predictable and classifiable. That in fact, we all exhibit patterns of instincts — commonly known as "archetypes" — that are normal and not indicative of psychological sickness or abnormality. Jung further concluded that, when these normal instincts are disowned, they inhabit what he termed "the shadow," the hidden region of the psyche that begins to control our behavior if left unexamined.
Shadow Work® is a way to explore this inner landscape and discover the gold hidden in these shadows. Unlike some other approaches to growth and healing, Shadow Work® is not designed to eliminate or destroy certain character traits or behaviors. Rather, it seeks to bring them out of shadow and into the light so as to transform them, thereby balancing our personalities into a more integrated whole.
Shadow Work® has been developed over the last 20 years by Cliff Barry and Mary Ellen Whalen (née Blandford). They have integrated and correlated their work with other disciplines such as Gestalt, Voice Dialogue, Accelerated Learning, Grovian Metaphor Work, Bio-Energetics, family systems theory, addiction recovery and personality typing systems such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® and the Enneagram. They are indebted to the pioneering work of Robert Bly, Robert Moore and Doug Gillette, David Grove, Ron Hering, Hal and Sidra Stone, and John Bradshaw.
