I'm going to be an idiot and seriously answer a question that was (most likely) only half-serious https://twitter.com/selentelechia/status/1326184680538873857

actually there are two questions here and I'll try to answer both of them.

1. why do I have to eat my shadow?

2. why can't we just be civil roommates who don't particularly like one another?

my answers here are informed by Robert Bly, who was mentored by Jungian psychologists, and wrote a book on the Shadow from the Jungian perspective https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/685656.A_Little_Book_on_the_Human_Shadow

I'm going to answer the second question first, because it will help understand the answer to the first question.

One of two conditions is true: you are either already "civil roommates" with your shadow, or you aren't. I suspect the vast majority of people already are.

and what's wrong with this? if you're a stable, high-functioning adult who is not overly impaired by your Shadow then what's the purpose of doing shadow work? (and why does shadow work involve "eating" it?)

what's wrong with it is that your shadow is behind you where you can't see it. it may be manageable 99.9% of your days, but it only takes one bad day to do a lot of damage. If you haven't done the work, you probably won't see it coming when it does.

that shadow self you think of as just an off-putting roommate, well, there's more to it than that and unless you do go diving into it and investigate the depths of it you'll be living under a mistaken impression of who you're dealing with.

perhaps it's just the case that your daily life routine is not particularly innervating to your shadow. doesn't trigger it. doesn't cause it to assert itself, and it stays in passive-aggressive-but-tolerable roommate mode.

but it won't always be like this. life contains many surprises. stress tests will come up and if your "main" self fails a stress test, guess who gets to step in and give it a go instead?

so for high functioning, mostly healthy people, Shadow work is about fortifying and future-proofing. It's a kind of disaster planning exercise. It can have numerous other benefits too though.

the second question is where I'm drawing more directly from Bly.

"why do we need to eat the Shadow?"

In his book he proposes a visual metaphor which he calls "the bag", and the bag is filled with your shadowstuff. it's all the components of your memories and personality and relationships that you would rather not look it. you stuff it in a bag and drag the bag around behind you.

he furthers the visual metaphor by suggesting that there is a shape, texture, and substance to the things in the bag. they are shards of broken glass. each shard came from a mosaic that got shattered. a beautiful pane of thoughtstuff that was sundered by a trauma.

what's this? not only do you have to eat the Shadow but it's broken glass shards? you have to eat broken glass shards?

well yes, and you can't eat broken glass shards without killing yourself so they stay in the bag and you won't look at them because they're sharp and painful.

clearly one cannot eat something in that form. Shadow work is about taking things out of the bag and looking at them, holding them, considering them in a new light until they are no longer broken glass shards. you can eat them when they turn into wholesome nuggets.

this is called "integration" in a lot of modern discourse. Jung called it "individuation", with approximately but not exactly, the same meaning.

it's a psychological developmental model that asserts that the individual is a construct of many components, and the integrity of that individual is based on the relationship between the components. an unintegrated component, a glass shard in the shadow bag, is a missing piece.

so that's why you have to eat them. if you discard them you haven't integrated them. you're missing pieces of yourself. created a dissociative self-contruct rather than a wholesome one. that's cope, not progress.

when you eat something, that is when you ingest it, integrate it into yourself, you become a more complete person with greater capacities, more resilience, more depth, and greater adaptability.

allowing your shadow stuff to be an unwanted-but-tolerated roommate is a less intense form of rejection or dissociation. it's not as fiery and destructive as an outright war waged across the Ego, but it's still a vulnerable spot, a way you're not being your whole self.

and the fruits of integration are not just being fitter-happier-more-productive, in fact you might be less productive if it's done properly.

the fruits of integration are being able to thrive in novel situations that would have otherwise broken you.

your resilience to the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" is a direct consequence of having survived past misfortune and then integrated the lessons of it properly. this is Shadow work, in a nutshell. Eat up.