The shadow at work
Work would be easy if it were just about the work.
But work isn’t just about work. Work is about people. And people carry things they’d rather not look at.
This substack, and my forthcoming book are organised around one simple idea:
The emotions and qualities we learned to hide are the very things causing us the most trouble at work.
Not our lack of skills, or our need for another framework or productivity hack.
The hidden parts of ourselves.
The ones we buried in childhood because they weren’t welcome. The ones that now run the show from backstage, disguised as “personality,” “culture,” or “just the way things are.”
Psychologist Richard Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems therapy, puts it this way:
We don’t show up as one unified self. We show up as a collection of parts - protectors, critics, pleasers, perfectionists, rebels, and frightened children - all competing for control.
We’ll start with how the shadow forms: the predictable sequence from secrecy to shame to projection that shapes every human psyche. We’ll meet the archetypes that live inside us and see how they inflate or collapse under workplace pressure.
Then we’ll go step by step through all of the emotions that drive so much workplace behaviour, but that we rarely talk about:
Fear: the master emotion of the modern workplace. The engine behind imposter syndrome, people-pleasing, and perfectionism.
Shame: the belief that “I am wrong,” and the reason feedback can feel like an attack. Brené Brown’s research showed that shame is the most primitive human emotion - and the one we are least willing to talk about.
Anger: the most exiled emotion in most organisations. Hiding behind passive aggression, micromanagement, and the slow burn of resentment. Harriet Lerner called anger “a signal worth listening to.” Most workplaces have made it something we have to hide.
Grief: for what we never had, not just what we lost. The unacknowledged sadness inside every career transition, restructure, and redundancy.
Control and power: the shadow of leadership. Why some people grip authority while others give it away. And why both responses come from the same wound.
The shadow doesn’t only contain our pain. It also holds our unlived brightness.
Jung called this the “golden shadow” - the parts of ourselves we exiled not because they were too dark, but because they were too bright:
Ambition and desire: the parts we suppressed because wanting felt dangerous.
Joy: which paradoxically returns only when we stop exiling the painful emotions.
Love and connection: the bonding instinct that doesn’t switch off at the office door, no matter how many times we’re told “it’s not personal, it’s business.”
Visibility and voice: the courage to be seen, which requires us to reclaim the parts we hid.
Robert Bly described it beautifully:
We spend the first half of our lives stuffing everything into a long bag we drag behind us. The second half is about retrieving what we put in there.
I write about how to retrieve it.
I believe that what happens in the workplace is rich, fertile ground for understanding what’s happening inside each of us. And that’s what I’ll be exploring in this substack.
I hope you’ll stick around.
