More than 80 years ago Carl Jung, the godfather of psychotherapy, developed his concept of “the shadow”, our unconscious dark side. Jung wrote: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” Not popular? Jung, meet TikTok.
The social media platform has gone crazy for Jung’s “shadow”, which represents a truly bizarre mash-up between the deeply intellectual Swiss psychiatrist and the Chinese micro-attention-span platform. A young generation with rising mental ill health has met a viral marketing campaign, the first to unleash TikTok’s sales power in the West. All this is the work of Keila Shaheen, a quietly spoken 24-year-old from Texas who has written The Shadow Work Journal, a self-published book popularising Jung. It has sold nearly 800,000 copies through the power of TikTok alone.
This despite the detail that must send rival authors into therapy: at least half the pages of The Shadow Work Journal are left blank for the reader to fill in. Over the past few months it has four times been top of amazon.com’s weekly bestselling chart of all non-fiction books, beating Oprah and the biography of Elon Musk. Last week the first and second edition of her book were both in the Amazon Top 20, yet this is a publishing juggernaut that, perhaps appropriately, remains in the shadows, its success invisible to anyone not on TikTok. For users of the social media platform, though, the opposite is true. Videos labelled with the tag “shadow work” have been viewed more than two billion times, with a minority of them complaining about how sick they are of The Shadow Work Journal. Most of them, though, are as devoted as they are perplexing to outsiders: for example, a 54-second video of Shaheen simply reading through a checklist on one page of her book has been viewed 66 million times.
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Melody Walker is a songwriter from Tennessee who posts on her own popular TikTok channel, including videos sceptical about The Shadow Work Journal.
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“What was noticeable was that I was overwhelmingly getting influenced for only one product: The Shadow Work Journal,” Walker told me, about the moment the campaign for the book gathered momentum in late summer. “That got me annoyed and then very curious about who was marketing this book.”
And now we come to a key detail that interests cynics and modern commerce alike. Shaheen is not a Jungian, or even a therapist. Her previous job was at TikTok itself. She had a kind of genius for selling things via TikTok: she was employed for a year as a strategist advising businesses how to make a success of TikTok, while also rising at 4am to write the book before work.
Even though she was so young — in fact, because she was so young — Shaheen analysed and deeply understood this new platform. The Shadow Work Journal came out in 2021 but it took off when TikTok’s new sales arm, TikTok Shop, launched in America last month. Shaheen paid for some advertising on TikTok. She also benefited from readers creating their own videos to promote the book. Many of them earn commission on its sales from TikTok Shop, making for an army of committed publicists. In so doing Shaheen was the first to demonstrate TikTok as a route to shifting stock on an unprecedented scale.
Has “shadow work” touched a nerve among the public, fed up with the 21st century’s endless exhortations to be positive and present an unrealistically perfect face to the world? Or is Shaheen an exceptionally skilled businesswoman, who is now so successful that she runs her own self-publishing company called Zenfulnote, which employs 14 people? Or is it both?
I talked to Shaheen, in a rare interview, as well as Jungian therapists, to explore further. Is she irresponsible in encouraging people with mental health difficulties to revisit their life traumas alone?
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“I think that’s a great question,” she says. She’s talking to me via Zoom from the home she shares with her husband in Austin, Texas. As in her videos, she talks mesmerisingly calmly and clearly.
“I know some therapists have brought it up, and I deeply respect and understand where they’re coming from, but I think it’s important to see and recognise that the world is changing. I see first hand the gaps in the mental health sector, especially in America. And I’ve spoken with therapists myself who have used The Shadow Work Journal and found it helpful . . . the journal starts the conversation and therapy can continue it.
“Don’t judge a book by its cover — literally — because, regardless of my credentials, this journal was created as a tool for myself to self-reflect and heal. It’s been helpful for hundreds of thousands of people, which is insane.” She offers a surprised smile.
Shaheen graduated with a degree in her twin passions, marketing and psychology, from a Texas university in 2020. She had also taken a short online course in cognitive behavioural therapy, but decided against being a therapist as she was “too introverted”. Meanwhile, TikTok took off in America and Shaheen was hooked. She began picking up work with local businesses, including a party supplier, using TikTok videos to drum up sales.
“I thought, OK, let’s try this new TikTok video content thing out,” she says. “That’s how I realised: there’s a big opportunity here. I was very interested in TikTok and how it really meshed authenticity with marketing.”
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She kept re-applying to TikTok headquarters. “I actually applied to TikTok three or four times without any luck — it was my dream job at the time. I love this platform, I thought it was doing great things and helping people connect, especially during Covid.”
She finally got the role of creative strategist, helping businesses become more effective at selling on TikTok, which she held for a year (until she left in May 2022). Covid restrictions meant she worked from home, and her mental health worsened. She studied yoga, meditation and books by Jung, often relying on diary-writing as the most helpful technique. Her first self-published book was a journal about “manifesting”, another TikTok craze — one example of an exercise in that book is to write “My net worth is $2 million” several times a day.
“At the time I was really struggling with anxiety and depression,” Shaheen says. “I had what I thought was my dream job. TikTok is amazing and they have an amazing culture, but I was struggling with a lot of things personally, including that shift to working in the corporate environment.”
She was about to start therapy but the arrangement fell through.
“That’s when I hit rock bottom. And that’s when I started writing The Shadow Work Journal,” she says. “I loved the concept of shadow work. It was initially a tool for myself, to bring clarity.”
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Does she think that her skills as a marketer are a large part of the book’s success?
“People have a powerful experience with The Shadow Work Journal,” she says. “All these genuine reviews speak to its true value, so the proof is really in the pudding there.”
It would be easy to mock this book. For instance, in its section on a concept scientists call the “Dunning-Kruger effect”, about ignorant people overestimating their skills, “Kruger” is misspelt. This is both a neat joke and an understandable flaw of self-publishing. But she is right: there are many thousands of videos on TikTok of people who are sincerely grateful for the book, and many do not link to the TikTok Shop. But I press harder: could it be that Shaheen, knowing TikTok from the inside, is cynically exploiting its customers’ cravings?
“That’s not how it happened,” she says. “That was not the intention of this book at all. I didn’t spot a trend and decide to sell it. I started this journal two years back when I was going through mental health challenges myself, and I left TikTok to do my own thing and do what I’m passionate about. I’ve been creating content for a long time and the fact that I was able to share a work of my own and have that resonate with others is amazing.”
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The book has a short introduction to Jung’s idea of the shadow, then a pot pourri of exercises such as a “gratitude list”, “a letter to your past self” and guided meditations. The third part is mostly empty pages with writing prompts such as “Why am I sometimes seduced into a victim mentality?” or “Is the reason for your sadness as a child connected to the reasons I experience sadness as an adult?”. Some of these questions I find basic, some thought-provoking.
Joy Schaverien is a British Jungian psychoanalyst and author. She doesn’t see much in the book that relates to Jung, and says “it is shallow, and the shadow, in the Jungian sense, is about depth. So I don’t imagine it will do much harm but I am unimpressed.”
Christopher Perry is a Jungian psychoanalyst in London who this year co-edited a book on the shadow called Jung’s Shadow Concept. He says that there is a little echo of Jung in the idea of a journal.
“When Jung started analysing people, they would stay in Zurich for a number of weeks, and he encouraged them to write everything down,” he says. “He very much believed that it was important. I also think it can be useful.
“She’s obviously hit on something, but I’d advise young people to be a little cautious. The uncontained process of exploring the shadow can pose serious difficulties. This is maybe where the book falls down. When you get into a bit of trouble — for example, if you are overwhelmed by difficult memories — there’s no one there to help you. You don’t necessarily need professional help, but you do need to find a close friend to start sharing these things with.”
Does Perry have thoughts as to why both his book and The Shadow Work Journal have found resonance this year? It seems like the opposite of the “snowflake” mentality to come to terms with your flaws. In addition, teenage bullying has moved to shaming others online, and debate in general has become less nuanced. Perry says we could benefit from this “shadow” concept now more than ever, to stop projecting our fears onto others and to integrate opposing views.
“Exploring the shadow helps us become more compassionate to oneself and other people,” Perry says. “And to stop this terrible culture of blaming, scapegoating and excluding.”
Finally, I do the “mirror-gazing” exercise as prescribed by The Shadow Work Journal. I initially thought it had something to do with Jung’s fascination with mirrors, but Shaheen says it was an idea she came up with herself. I set the timer for ten minutes and stare into my own eyes. I have a shadowy insight about The Shadow Work Journal and its young creator: I think I may be jealous.
