Embarrassingly, I started surfing lessons because it’s sexy. My self-esteem was low, and signing up I could already see it: glossy wetsuit half unzipped, salty droplets articulating the curves of my face and bikini top, my fingers raking through sea-tousled hair. But after the first few lessons, as I zoomed into photos, it dawned on me: surfing actually makes me look… kind of chopped. Blots of scarlet on each cheek, aggravated rosacea, and hair in monstrous tangles where once there’d been plaits. Even the wetsuit had betrayed me. But rather than feeling crushed, each time I saw my red face and amorphous neoprene silhouette I felt oddly thrilled. 

I assumed it was the post-surf cocktail of adrenaline, dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin. But the TikTok algorithm has its own theory: by repeatedly seeking out that ugly post-surf high, I had unwittingly stumbled into ‘beauty shadow work’. “You need to accept your ugly,” said one shadow work influencer, as I continued my evening scroll. “You have to work with, sit with, allow your ugly self,” another explained.

I don’t feel ugly all the time, but more often than I’d like – when I’m covertly touching up my make-up, or assessing new creases on my face in an elevator. Usually it’s when I’m near someone I’m convinced is more beautiful than me. But as far as ‘shadowtok’ was concerned, my shadow self had emerged – and it was time to ‘integrate’ her.

Shadow work, or at least BeautyTok’s take on it, is having a moment. But the idea dates back to the early-20th-century when Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Jung argued that we all carry a hidden ‘shadow’ made of the traits we reject or repress. Shadow work means bringing those parts back into consciousness. His ideas resurfaced in the 60s and 70s, and again in the 2000s as the media tried to decode scene kids, emos and other dark subcultures. But can TikTok’s cherry-picked version – the one promising to reunite me with my higher, hotter self – actually fix my self-esteem?

Many shadow work creators suggest affirmations, and so I choose some most relevant to my appearance: I am beautiful. I accept every aspect of myself. They’re momentarily pleasant but feel generally inconsequential. Next, I move onto ‘mirror gazing’ (which is exactly what it sounds like). But as I stare, I feel vain, ashamed and distracted by a world falling apart beyond my mirror.

I try one final prompt: write a letter to your inner child. A painful memory elbows its way up: the first time I felt ugly by comparison. I was ten, my older sister 13, and we’d tried out a sauna at the swimming baths, our lovely dad watching over us from across the pool. As my dad later debriefed my mum, he’d gently joked about how different we’d looked leaving the sauna: my sister – the olive-skinned, blonde-haired angel that she was – had emerged a vision of glowing vitality. “And then Kate came shuffling behind,” he’d continued, “all red, like a lobster”. The comment was innocuous, but humbling to overhear – and now to remember. 

I arranged a conversation with a shadow work coach called Laura Torres Funiestas – a therapist who began practicing shadow work in 2023 to accommodate clients who preferred a less diagnostic, traditional therapist-client relationship. Lauren suggests that my post-surf ugly euphoria could be a ‘correctional emotional experience’. “By doing something different it gives you a new positive response – and if you keep doing that, it’ll eventually replace the negative points.” She points out that shadow selves are often based on insecurities, which in turn “stem from childhood, from the messages we inadvertently hear,” she explains. “Shadow work is about embodying the thing that could have protected the child that was hurt,” she smiles, urging me to speak with my family about the experience – advice I accept, but tellingly panic over.

Maybe out of muscle memory, I reach out to my former therapist to ask his opinion of shadow work. He’s a brilliant psychologist called Jochem Bukman who’s fixed my brain more times than I can count, and I want to know if we’d have reached a similarly satisfying conclusion together with evidence-based techniques. “Maybe!” he says. “It depends on what you believe. If you are a fan of this sort of psychological approach – and I can imagine more people are getting there, because traditional therapy doesn't necessarily always deliver – that will go a long way in getting the internal change you’re hoping for.”

Shadow work is about embodying the thing that could have protected the child that was hurt – Laura Torres Funiestas

He also points out that the notion of a shadow self “can be a very practical, intuitive thing that people can latch onto easily”. Where in my therapy sessions with Jochem I’d identify a negative inner critic and build distance from it, in shadow work I might see that intruder as a ‘shadow’. And as Jochem puts it, “We are in sort of a-rational times, so something more about the actual experience of things, instead of the factual nature of things, may also fit with the time.”

Lauren and Jochem warn against going fully DIY – Lauren explains that an intensive session can bring up repressed memories that benefit from evidence-based therapy. And Jochem suggests to “try other things first before you go digging around in the darker corners of your subconscious”, like learning to better tolerate uncomfortable emotions, and processing them with others. “We’re looking for the source of everything that’s wrong with us in our own past, and discrediting what’s happening right now, in our own context…” he explains. “You don’t have to do all this stuff alone. Go have higher quality conversations with your friends. Share how you’re feeling. See what happens.”

I take Lauren and Jochem’s advice. I voice note my sister. I laugh the lobster story off, overcompensating. My sister’s reply is immediately more helpful than all of the affirmations, the mirror gazing, and journaling. Because she doesn’t laugh back. Instead, she acknowledges the sadness, and something inside me softens. “I didn’t compare us at all,” she replies. “… I never really thought we were supposed to be the same,” and it’s like two decades of secret sadness whooshes from my body like a badly animated cartoon. We talk about the times we’ve been compared, or compared ourselves to others, and the papercuts left over and over in our self-esteem. Before long, the result of my Jungian experiment becomes clear. The conversation I really needed wasn’t one with my ugly shadow. It was one with my beautiful sister.