When the work that defined you can be done by a machine in seconds, something happens that the change-management literature has no language for.

This is the conversation that is not being had inside organisations transforming themselves with AI. The other conversation. The one happening inside the heads and hearts of the people whose roles are being transformed.

Researchers are starting to name it. What they are finding is no longer a soft problem.

The empirical case

In 2022, a paper led by Milad Mirbabaie in Springer’s Electronic Markets established “AI identity threat” as a research construct. Their work made the case that AI was activating something different from previous technological disruptions. The threat operated below the level of skill loss, reaching into professional self-concept itself.

Three years on, the literature has accelerated. In September 2025, Stephanie McNamara and Joseph Thornton of the University of Florida proposed a clinical name for the syndrome they were now seeing in their offices: Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction. Its symptom list reads as a portrait of expert identity in collapse: anxiety, insomnia, paranoia, identity loss, and hopelessness.

Five months later, in February 2026, Anurag Shekhar and Musawenkosi Saurombe published a study in Frontiers in Psychology analysing 1,454 Reddit narratives from workers experiencing AI displacement. They identified seven themes, including identity erosion, expertise devaluation, and organisational betrayal. Their most striking finding was a discordance between what workers were saying and what they were actually communicating. Around 52% of posts read on the surface as positive. Contextual analysis showed roughly 51% were carrying real negativity underneath. Workers were performing adaptability, often through dark humour, while privately reporting something closer to grief.

Around the same time, Futurism led the popular press coverage of the AIRD paper under the headline “It Turns Out That Constantly Telling Workers They’re About to Be Replaced by AI Has Grim Psychological Effects.”

That headline says it all.

The popular conversation

The mainstream business press has begun arriving at the same place from a different direction. In April 2026, Geoff Curtis published a piece in Fortune under the title “AI and job loss: the identity crisis no one is preparing for.” His central image was Catholic-theology-inflected: workers caught in a “professional identity purgatory,” a liminal state between an old self and a new one that has not yet arrived. Curtis was writing from the inside, having lost his own job to restructuring. He puts it cleanly: “I didn’t just lose a job. I lost the scaffolding I’d built my professional identity on.”

Even those at the most optimistic end of the AI conversation are reporting interior disturbance. In May 2025, the economist Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit, Anthropic’s chief of staff, had a published exchange in The Free Press. Balwit wrote that she felt “humbled by how easily [Claude] does what used to make me feel uniquely valuable.” Cowen, in the same piece, asked himself “how I will stay relevant” in the AI age, hitting on the question that many people are asking themselves.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Foresight Network has named the phenomenon institutionally. In an August 2025 piece, they introduced the idea of an “AI precariat” facing “occupational identity loss.” They proposed combined policy interventions covering mental-health care, retraining, and community supports, alongside an “AI Anxiety Index” to measure the phenomenon at scale.

The empirical literature, the clinical literature, the financial press, the leading public intellectuals, and the institutional risk infrastructure are all pointing at the same thing.

Why AI training is not enough

Inside organisations, the dominant response remains at the level of process, policy and training. Reskill, redeploy, restructure. Run another change-management workshop. The assumption is that lack of skill is the problem.

The material underneath the surface is older than skill. It is fear, shame, grief, and anger that nobody has given language for. A workshop on prompt engineering cannot reach those.

Training has its place. The training-room frame assumes the only thing in play is technical capability. The empirical literature is now showing that what is actually in play is identity.

Jeffrey Pfeffer, in his book Dying for a Paycheck, traced how thoroughly Western professional identity has fused with the job itself. For many, the work has become the self. When the work changes faster than the self can adapt, something fractures.

This is most acute for the credentialed expert professions: medicine, law, finance, accounting, engineering, consulting, IT, and research. Professions where decades of training and practice produced an internal sense of competence that became indistinguishable from the person.

When AI compresses what those professions do, the ground on which the self had been standing becomes less solid.

What I bring to this

I should declare an interest. I have spent twenty-five years in financial modelling, mostly in project finance, infrastructure, and energy. I am also one of the people training senior practitioners in how to work with AI in the discipline. And alongside that work, over the past four years, I have trained as a Deep Process Psychotherapist, working with senior leaders and professionals. An unusual combination, to say the least.

But it does give me a particular perspective:

I am writing about this from inside two different rooms: the room where the AI compression of expert work is happening in real time, and the room where the people experiencing that compression are starting to find words for what it is doing to them.

The patterns the empirical literature is now describing closely track what shows up in the second room when there is space and time to look at it.

What depth psychology brings

Carl Jung, working in the early twentieth century, gave us a word for the parts of ourselves we have learned to keep out of sight. He called it the shadow: the parts of ourselves that, at some point in childhood, were not safe to show. The professional self gets built on top of those buried parts. They do not vanish; they wait.

The depth-psychology tradition has spent a hundred years learning what to do when those parts start to surface. That is what is happening now, at scale, in expert professions. The AI transition is doing more than shifting jobs. It is compressing the professional self that those jobs used to hold. As that compression happens, the material the professional self had been holding underground comes up for air.

What depth psychology offers is a different stance toward the material that is rising: meeting it instead of managing it, turning toward what was previously turned away from.

This is the stance the AI training rooms cannot offer. The corporate world is not set up to support the kind of relationship with one’s own difficulty that the work requires. Which is part of why the empirical literature is reaching for clinical names like AIRD: when the inner work cannot happen at work, it shows up as difficulties outside of work, and often as symptoms in the doctor’s office.

Two conversations, not yet talking

Two conversations are happening about AI and expert work right now, and they are not talking to each other.

The first is the empirical and clinical conversation: psychologists, organisational researchers, mental-health practitioners producing increasingly precise descriptions of what is happening. The vocabulary is sharpening fast: identity threat, algorithmic anxiety, replacement dysfunction, algorithmic paranoia.

The second is the depth-psychology conversation. A few writers, mostly in the Jungian and post-Jungian tradition, are theorising AI as a mythic event. Jason Batt and Jonathan Erickson edited a substantial volume in October 2025 called Depth Psychology, Myth and Artificial Intelligence: Soul and the Machine. It reads as the most serious recent attempt to bring the depth-psychology lineage into contact with the AI question. Its register is theoretical, and its focus is largely on AI itself as a cultural artefact rather than on what AI is doing to the working professional whose expertise is in the compression zone.

Neither conversation is meeting the senior practitioner where they actually live: at the desk, on a Wednesday afternoon, watching a tool produce in seconds what took them ten years to learn.

This is the gap The Shadow at Work is writing into.

What the path through looks like

If you are in this territory, the most useful thing this piece can offer is a different stance toward what you are experiencing.

The flat affect, the dread, the working-harder-rather-than-less, the questions you do not quite let yourself ask: they are signs that something old in you is being touched by something new in the world. You are experiencing it accurately. But perhaps through the lens of a professional self that has been trained to ignore its own experience.

The depth-psychology tradition would call this an opportunity, in a specific sense: material that has been buried for decades is now available to be met. The parts of the self that were exiled in order to function professionally are coming up for air. This is what the depth-psychology tradition has been preparing the ground for, for a hundred years.

What the work of meeting them looks like in practice is a longer subject than this piece can hold. It draws on shadow work in the Jung, Bly, Ford and Richo lineage, parts work from the Internal Family Systems tradition, and somatic approaches that listen to the body. All of it requires turning toward what the professional self has spent decades turning away from.

This is uncomfortable work in the short term and generative work in the longer term, particularly when the structures that previously contained the self are loosening.

Closing

We are at the beginning of a transition that the surface conversation about AI is not capable of holding. The technical, institutional, and clinical conversations all need to continue. The conversation that is missing is the one about what is happening inside expert workers’ actual psyches as the ground moves under their feet.

That is the conversation I’m pursuing in The Shadow at Work .

What the moment requires is three things meeting each other: the practical tools the depth-psychology tradition has been developing for a century, the language the empirical literature is now producing for what is happening, and the lived experience of the people inside the compression. None of the three on its own is enough.

The ground is open. The work is the same as it has always been: meeting what is rising rather than managing it.

Many of us have tried to find joy by seeking out “good things”. Gratitude lists. Positive thinking. Morning routines. For a while, things feel better, but it rarely lasts.

We need to consider the possibility that joy does not live where we have been looking.

Marianne Hill, the British Deep Process Psychotherapist and author of Healing the Shadow, puts it this way:

A core belief that I hold when working with the shadow is that true joy comes from knowing, accepting, loving and blessing all parts of ourselves. This means knowing and accepting the parts of us that are in deep grief, or filled with rage, frightened, hesitant, hateful or full of shame or guilt. It means welcoming these parts of ourselves into our sacred realm and tenderly caring for them and listening to their needs and the powerful emotions that they carry. As we come to know and accept more and more of ourselves we find we are more able to sit back, relaxed in our own skin, knowing there is nothing in us that we fear, nothing we need to hide. Sitting in this place colours all our life experiences. It gives us a deep confidence whatever is happening around us and allows joy to arise even in the midst of life’s most difficult challenges. We lead ourselves through life from a foundation of joy. Throughout our life we can find joy bubbling up from this place in us, unforced and unbidden. When it comes there is no reaching, no trying, joy simply flows.

The work is to stop banishing the rest of ourselves. Joy then arrives as a by-product.

Why the reaching doesn’t work

If some part of us is being held outside the door, a small part of us is always holding the door. The effort is continuous and silent. We experience this effort as a low-grade tiredness we cannot quite trace.

Joy cannot settle in a house that is still being defended.

Marianne’s image for this is the hollow smile. The smile is real. So is the work required to keep it there. In her phrase, behind the smile, parts of us are being gagged and silenced. That can be exhausting.

What happens when the holding stops

The Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, writing in Owning Your Own Shadow, puts it clearly:

To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.

When we can sit in our own skin with nothing to fear, and nothing to hide, joy arises unforced and unbidden. It bubbles up from a place in us that no longer has to be guarded. Even in difficulty.

Small children have the capacity for great joy precisely because they have the capacity to feel the full range of their anger, fear, and frustration.

The thing we hid from ourselves and the world carried a kernel of our life force with it.
Hiding our anger buried the capacity to hold a boundary.
Hiding our sadness buried the capacity to feel deeply.
Hiding our sexuality buried our capacity to be fully in our body.
Hiding our confidence buries the capacity to take up space.

Reclaim the part, and the life force comes back with it.

Forced positivity at work

The workplace stages this same dynamic collectively. From the all-hands that opens with the upbeat video to the mission statement that insists we thrive.

Everyone is forced to pretend that everything’s just great around here, thank you very much. And everyone can feel themselves and everybody else pretending too.

Relentless positivity comes from a place of fear. Fear of powerful emotions and the energy they contain. The organisational version is the same fear, scaled up. Fear of what might be said, wanted, or grieved if the room were actually allowed to feel what is in it.

What this asks of leaders

We cannot manufacture joy for a team in the same way we cannot manufacture it for ourselves. However, as a leader, you can be the first person in the room whose full range is allowed to show. A leader who says “I’m worried about this” is a leader whose team stops performing. A leader who can be tired, frustrated, or sad without hiding it changes what everyone else has to carry.

The air changes quickly. The energy that had been going into performance becomes available for the work. Ideas move more easily. People laugh in a way that sounds different.

Joy, which had no surface to land on in the hollow version, finds one.

Joy arrives when the hiding stops.

That is true in our own lives, and it is true at the scale of a team.

A good friend of mine sent me a message recently that I keep coming back to.

She’d been away on a work trip, stuck in back-to-back meetings with a boss she found herself constantly triggered by, and who she could tell was equally triggered by her. Every conversation required careful navigation. She was exhausted by the end of each day.

She went for a walk, found a bookshop, and found “The Let Them Theory” by Mel Robbins. She’s not the type of person who usually goes in for self-help books, but, in her own words, times were desperate.

She got the audiobook and listened to it over the next two days. It gave her, she said, a toolkit to get through the week. A sense of empowerment when she felt she had very little. It was, she said, a life raft.

Having read the book and felt the immediate relief that those two simple words can bring, I connect with her story. I’m sharing it with her permission.

“The Let Them Theory” sold nine million copies in its first eleven months. Number one on the New York Times, Amazon, Audible, and the Sunday Times bestseller lists simultaneously. Named book of the year by Goodreads, Barnes and Noble, Publishers Weekly, and Amazon.

On Goodreads, readers describe the experience of reading it in almost identical terms. “I find myself lighter, more compassionate and already feeling the benefits.” Another: “I have learned that it is not my responsibility to manage people’s moods and feelings. It is my responsibility to manage me.”

People finish this book feeling lighter, and that feeling is real. And it is worth taking seriously. Because it points to something true.

The core of Mel Robbins’ argument is this: stop trying to control how other people behave, what they think of you, and what choices they make. When someone disappoints you, criticises you, or behaves in ways you don’t like, say “let them.” The second half is “let me”: redirect your energy to your own choices rather than burning it trying to manage theirs.

The destination she is pointing to is genuine. Although she’s talking about reactions in all areas of life, in the work context, we all want to be in a place where we don’t need our boss to validate us, we stop burning energy managing how colleagues perceive us, and we stop organising our behaviour around other people’s reactions.

The freedom she describes is available.

The problem is what the book says about how we get there.

Robbins treats the compulsion to control other people’s behaviour as a mindset problem. A habit. Something we can override with a two-word phrase.

I see it differently: the need to manage how others see us, behave toward us, or react to us is a wound.

It is what formed when we learned, early enough that we can’t consciously remember learning it, that other people’s moods and reactions determined whether we were safe. Whether we were loved. Whether we had a place.

That learning lives in the body. It runs faster than language. A phrase can’t reach it.

My friend knew this, somewhere. Her message ended with a line that struck me:

“I do really appreciate it as a mantra in the moment. But I think the ‘Let Me’ part is key. Let me get curious about what caused this trigger.”

That sentence is the whole map.

Because what she is describing, without using the language, is the trailhead.

Therapist and writer David Richo puts it this way:

Our goal is not to root out all our triggers but to find a trailhead from them into the psychological and spiritual work that has been so long awaiting us. This is how we turn our triggers into tools.

A lot of what drives our behaviour at work is invisible to us. The defences are too well-built. The patterns are too familiar, and the stories we tell about ourselves are too well rehearsed.

Most of the time, our shadow material stays exactly where it is, doing its work without ever being seen.

The moment I am triggered or feel the need to control somebody, or experience any kind of “outsized reaction” in response to somebody’s behaviour, something hidden has broken through to the surface.

That moment is a gift.

It’s one of the rare occasions when the normally invisible becomes visible, when the wound announces itself clearly enough that it can actually be worked with.

“Let Them” as a mantra gets you through the week. It is a genuine life raft. But a life raft is for survival, not navigation. The moment we feel stable enough to put it down, the more important question is waiting: what was that, and where does it lead?

There is a second, perhaps unexpected, gift hidden inside our reactions.

Sometimes we cannot “let them”, because what they are doing freely is something we have forbidden in ourselves.

I’m going to find it hard to observe my colleague being openly ambitious if, somewhere along the way, I learned that ambition is selfish, unseemly, too much.

I will struggle with my boss being unavailable if I learned that I always had to be available for others.

Jung called this the golden shadow: the disowned strengths, the suppressed qualities, the parts of ourselves we buried alongside the ones we were ashamed of. We project them outward onto the people who seem to have them. And then we resent those people for having what we gave away.

The irritation is pointing directly at something we lost. Inside the frustration is a quality waiting to be reclaimed. Wave the reaction away, and we lose the signpost. Stay with it, and we find our way back to something we didn’t even know we were missing.

My friend also mentioned something else in passing, almost as an aside.

She knew she was triggering her boss, too.

That detail is the mirror thesis in a single sentence. The activation was mutual. Which means the material was mutual. Two people, in a room, each showing the other something neither could see on their own.

“Let Them” helped my dear friend survive the week. That matters. I am not dismissing it.

But the week was also full of information. About her. About what is unfinished. About what has been waiting.

Saying “let them” and moving on costs us that. The discomfort of staying with the reaction is harder to bear, but it shows us something we could not have otherwise easily seen.

The wound was already there. The workplace is where it surfaces. The boss is the mirror. The reaction is the material.

That is where the actual work starts. And it begins by refusing to let the moment go.

If this landed, you might also want to read: Coming Out Sideways - on how the parts of us we have denied some out to the people around us.

A colleague I worked with years ago could not stand enthusiasm. If someone came into a meeting visibly excited about an idea, she would roll her eyes and look for eye contact to share a mocking smile.

She wasn’t cruel. She was competent, loyal and often kind. But enthusiasm in the room did something to her. Of course, quickly, her team learned, without it ever being spoken, not to bring their enthusiasm to the meeting.

Robert Bly’s image

In A Little Book on the Human Shadow, the poet Robert Bly offered one of the most useful pictures anyone has given us for how the shadow forms. He asks us to imagine an invisible bag that each of us drags behind us through life.

When we are one or two years old, Bly says, we are a “360-degree personality.” Energy radiates out from every part of us. We are loud and quiet, fierce and tender, greedy and generous, all at once and without apology.

Then the people around us start to flinch.

Our parents don’t like certain parts. Teachers don’t like others. The kids in the playground make it clear which parts get you laughed at. Each time, we take the offending piece of ourselves and stuff it into the bag behind us, because belonging matters more to a child than wholeness.

As Bly puts it:

“We spend our life until we are twenty deciding what parts of ourselves to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.”

The bag is heavier than we realise

By the time we arrive at our first job, the bag is decades long and full. Inside it are all the disowned pieces: the anger we were told was ugly, the grief we were told was self-indulgent, the ambition we were told was unseemly, the softness we were told was weak, the neediness that ended a relationship.

We do not carry the bag consciously. That is the whole point. Inside the bag are the parts of us we cannot see.

The shadow is the material we have refused to claim. Until we claim it, it runs us from behind the scenes.

The golden shadow

The bag does not only hold what we were taught was shameful. It also holds what we were taught was dangerous to want.

Connie Zweig, who edited the landmark collection Meeting the Shadow, describes the shadow as the disowned self. Some of what we disowned was dark. Some of it was gold. The girl who was told she was too clever learned to hide her intelligence. The boy who was told real men don’t cry sat on his tenderness until he could no longer find it. The family where nobody was allowed to shine produced adults who still cannot let themselves.

Jung called this the golden shadow. It is why so many people, deep into successful careers, still feel that the most alive part of themselves is somewhere they cannot reach.

Why work pokes at the bag

The workplace is one of the places where the bag gets poked at hardest and most often. Every meeting, every piece of feedback, every colleague with a different temperament from yours is a potential encounter with something you put away a long time ago.

My old co-worker’s eye rolling was not about the colleague in front of her. It was about a young girl who had been told her enthusiasm was too much, and who had never been allowed to take it back out of the bag.

This is what it means to call the workplace a mirror. The image deserves to be taken literally. Whatever you flinch at in a colleague, whatever you envy, whatever you find yourself unreasonably irritated by, is pointing at something in your own bag asking to be looked at. Projection, indeed, is one of the surest ways to spot the parts of ourselves we have disowned.

The work is the unpacking

Bly’s line about spending the rest of our lives trying to get things out of the bag is the job description of the work we need to do as adults and as leaders.

This work is the slow unpacking of the bag we have been dragging since childhood. Every time a workplace situation lights us up, we’ve been given a hint as to what’s in the bag.

Our job is to open it and look.

Last week I returned to Iona, a magical island in the west of Scotland. A place I consider my spiritual home. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to spend a week living with the Iona Community, staying in the Abbey with 40 other guests. We were living in community, eating, working, and exploring the depths of the Easter story together.

At each meal, I sat with a different group. I loved meeting so many new people and hearing new perspectives and life experiences.

One evening, I sat next to a young American woman. Let’s call her Natalie, although that’s not her real name. I had been keen to get the chance to chat to her - she seemed full of life, energy and spark.

“So”, I asked, looking for an opening in the conversation, “where’s home for you?”

“Really, Kenny”, Natalie replied, with a cheeky spark in her eye, “is that the best you’ve got? That is a really boring question. What other inane questions do you have in your deck? Can we just work through them all now and get them out of the way?”

I was taken aback. My heart rate increased. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. How to respond to this? I tried to be light-hearted about it, tried to laugh it off. But I couldn’t.

I was triggered. Really triggered.

My head was spinning. It was just an opener. Admittedly, not the most interesting question ever, but it was just a “bid for connection”, a place to start.

Why was I having such a strong reaction?

Living in community is difficult. A lot of the challenge of it comes from the ways people trigger us.

Being at work is no different.

That thing your colleague said. The way the room went quiet. The look your manager gave you, or didn’t.

Most advice about workplace reactions treats the reaction itself as the problem. Breathe. Count to ten. Don’t respond in anger. Manage your emotions. Get better at regulation.

All reasonable advice, and I used to get myself centred again when I had been so triggered by Natalie. But it doesn’t go anywhere.

Which is a shame, because the ways we are triggered by other people are gifts, if we are able to receive them.

David Richo is a psychotherapist based in California. He offers this:

“Our goal is not to root out all our triggers but to find a trail head from them into the psychological and spiritual work that has been so long awaiting us. This is how we turn our triggers into tools.”

A trailhead is the place where a path begins. You walk into it.

Richo’s working definition of a trigger: any word, person, event, or experience that touches off an immediate emotional reaction. Anger, fear, sadness, shame.

The diagnostic feature of the ones worth investigating is this: that the reaction is excessive relative to the stimulus.

A loud noise produces a flinch. That’s proportionate.

A loud noise produces an hour of shaking. That’s excessive relative to the stimulus. And that excess is the signal we are looking for.

It shows us that something older and deeper is in play than just what’s going on in the moment. The reaction is the doorway. The work is on the other side of it.

Triggered reactions fire in the limbic system before the prefrontal cortex has a chance to catch up. Richo’s metaphor: the limbic system is a horse, sometimes spirited, sometimes wild. The prefrontal cortex is the reins. With a big trigger, you have lost the reins entirely.

This is why just breathe falls flat in the moment. The horse has already bolted. By the time you remember to breathe, you are chasing it.

The interesting question is not how to catch the horse faster. The interesting question is where the horse was trying to go.

Our triggers don’t cause our reactions. They are catalysts. They place us in a position where our particular reaction will happen.

Someone else in the same conversation with Natalie, hearing the same words, would have felt nothing. Or something completely different - perhaps just amusement.

Our reactions are like fingerprints. They are unique to us.

Which means that when someone does something, or says something that triggers us, without meaning to and without deserving any credit for it, they have handed us a piece of information we could not get any other way.

I was, quite quickly, able to ground myself with Natalie, and realise this:

There is a part of me that is afraid that, actually, I’m really boring.

And I remembered all the ways this old fear has turned up before in my life.

And this is showing me that I have some work to do to own, love, and integrate this old, afraid part.

Most workplace cultures treat this information as noise to suppress. The performance review rewards the people who have learned to hide it. Corporate training teaches you to work around it. The wellness newsletter tells you to log off early and try a mindfulness app.

Richo’s frame turns the whole apparatus inside out. The reaction is a trailhead. The work has been waiting for you, and this is how you find it.

What made you go quiet in that meeting? Not what the other person did.

What part of you did their action reach?

That question is the first step on the trail.

Nothing in this frame excuses bad behaviour at work. Some workplace reactions are accurate responses to real injustice or toxic workplace behaviours, and the correct move is action rather than introspection. Richo is clear on that distinction, and I’ll come back to it in a later article.

Most reactions are something else. Most are a signal that something old is still alive and still looking for a place to land.

The good news is that you get another trail head tomorrow. Workplaces are generous this way. If you missed the one this morning, there will be another one by lunch.

The question is whether you walk into it.

As for me, I took five minutes to step away from the conversation and reground myself. I realised that this was my trigger, and it was here to teach me something. It had nothing to do with Natalie. I returned to the conversation and hit the reset button.

“So,” I said, “tell me something you’ve changed your mind about in the last year”.

“That is a much more interesting question”, she replied.

Eighty per cent say their current one is toxic, up from sixty-seven per cent the year before.

Those numbers come from two large 2025 surveys. iHire interviewed 1,781 employees and 504 employers across fifty-seven industries. Monster surveyed 1,100 American workers about their mental health at work. The two studies used different methodologies, asked slightly different questions, and arrived at the same place.

What I want to do in this piece is move past the headline figures and into the more interesting question underneath: What is actually happening inside these organisations? What is the mechanism?

Much of the public conversation about toxic workplaces stops at the level of bad bosses and poor culture, as though these were the explanation rather than the symptoms. They aren’t. The real story lies one layer deeper, in the territory of how power is held and what happens to those who hold it.

The good news is that this territory has been studied carefully for decades by researchers who don’t usually appear in shadow work conversations. Their findings are striking, well-evidenced, and almost completely aligned with what we see when we look at organisational life through a depth psychology lens.

Let me bring three of them in.

The power paradox

Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he runs the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory. He has spent more than twenty-five years studying what happens to human beings when they acquire power. His findings are summarised in his 2016 book The Power Paradox, and the central observation is unsettling.

People rise to positions of power, Keltner argues, because of qualities we would all recognise as “good”. They are perceptive, generous, attentive to others, and willing to share. They listen well. They make those around them feel seen. These are the qualities that win you the trust of a team, the respect of peers, and the recognition of senior leaders. They are the qualities that get people promoted.

And then, once people have power, those same qualities begin to disappear.

In Keltner’s experiments, simply placing people in a position of authority changes their behaviour in measurable ways. They become more impulsive. They interrupt more. They take more risks. They are more likely to behave inappropriately, to disregard rules, to feel entitled to things they would not have felt entitled to before. In one famous study, his team brought groups of three strangers into a lab, randomly assigned one of them to be the “manager,” and then, twenty minutes later, brought in a plate of cookies. The managers were significantly more likely to take an extra cookie, to eat with their mouths open, to leave crumbs on the table. The smallest experience of power, in a stranger, was enough to alter behaviour.

In another study, Keltner’s team observed drivers at pedestrian crossings in California, where pedestrians have legal right of way. They coded the cars by status, from old beaters to luxury vehicles. The drivers of expensive cars were significantly more likely to break the law and refuse to yield. Power, even in the form of a nicer car, eroded the basic civility of stopping for someone trying to cross the street.

The most important finding from this body of work is what Keltner calls the power paradox itself. The very practices that allow us to gain influence, namely empathy, generosity, and attention to others, vanish in the experience of having it. Power makes people less able to do the things that earned them the power in the first place. This is a near-universal effect that appears in almost every population studied.

A leader who began their career by listening carefully and making people feel seen will often, after a few years in a senior role, become someone who interrupts, dismisses, and assumes their own perceptions are correct. They will not notice this happening. Their team will, of course, notice it immediately, but they will often not be able to say so.

When you hear the iHire figure that 78.7% of workers cite poor leadership as the top reason their workplace is toxic, this is a large part of what they are pointing at. It’s not that their leaders were always bad. Their leaders changed, in ways the leaders themselves cannot see.

Abusive supervision and what it does

The second research thread I want to bring in is more clinical and more specific. Bennett Tepper, a professor of management at Georgia State University, coined the term “abusive supervision” in a foundational paper in the Academy of Management Journal in the year 2000. He defined it as the sustained display of hostile verbal and non-verbal behaviour from supervisors, excluding physical contact.

Note the precision of that definition. Abusive supervision is a sustained pattern of behaviour over time that people on the receiving end experience as hostile. This looks like belittling, public criticism, withholding of information, ignoring, taking credit for others’ work, blaming and ridicule.

In the twenty-five years since Tepper’s original paper, abusive supervision has become a heavily researched area in organisational psychology. There are now multiple meta-analyses, hundreds of empirical studies, and a 2017 Annual Review synthesis by Tepper and his colleagues that summarises what the field has learned. The findings are clear and depressing. Abusive supervision is reliably associated with lower job satisfaction, lower commitment to the organisation, higher turnover, work-family conflict, psychological distress, depression, anxiety, and physical illness in the people who experience it. It also damages team performance, reduces innovation, and increases counterproductive work behaviour. The cost to organisations runs into the billions.

But the most interesting question Tepper’s research has tried to answer is not what abusive supervision does. It is where abusive supervision comes from. Why do supervisors behave this way?

The answer the literature has converged on is not what most of us would expect. Abusive supervisors are not, in the main, sadistic personalities. They are not bullies who enjoy hurting people. The dominant predictors of abusive supervision in the empirical research are things like the supervisor’s own perceived stress, their own experience of being mistreated by their boss, their own sense of being threatened by the people they manage, and their own inability to regulate the anxiety that comes with the role.

Abusive supervision, in other words, is largely the behaviour of frightened people in positions of power. The fear comes first. The behaviour comes after. And the people on the receiving end carry the cost of the fear that the supervisor cannot acknowledge in themselves.

This matches Keltner’s findings. The same person who was generous and attentive on the way up becomes impulsive, defensive, and self-protective once the role is theirs. And when their own anxiety is high enough, that self-protection takes the form of behaviour that meets Tepper’s definition of abusive supervision.

Dying for a paycheck

The third research thread I want to bring in is the most sobering. Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He has been studying organisations for more than four decades. In 2018, he published a book titled Dying for a Paycheck, which examines how modern management practices affect the bodies and minds of workers.

His estimate, drawn from a wide range of public health and organisational research, is that workplace stress is responsible for approximately 120,000 excess deaths per year in the United States alone. Job stress costs American employers more than $300 billion a year in healthcare expenses, absenteeism, and lost productivity. In one survey he cites, 61% of employees said workplace stress had made them physically sick, and 7% said they had been hospitalised because of it. In China, where the culture of working from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week, is standard in many industries, an estimated one million people a year are dying from overwork.

Pfeffer’s central argument is that this is the result of specific management choices that organisations have made and continue to make. These choices result in long hours, layoffs, job insecurity, health insurance tied to employment, the removal of worker autonomy, and the destruction of work-life boundaries. None of these things is inevitable. They are the consequences of how power is held within organisations, and most produce no measurable performance improvement. Pfeffer’s evidence suggests that the toxic management practices that are killing people are also bad for the bottom line. The lose-lose is the common case, not the exception.

The cost of these practices shows up in the physical, and not just the psychological. It shows up in cardiovascular disease, diabetes, addiction, suicide, and early death.

The 80% of workers who reach for the word “toxic” are not exaggerating. They are describing an environment that is literally taking years off their lives.

The shadow underneath

So we have three converging lines of research from three of the most respected organisational researchers in the world. Keltner shows that power changes the people who hold it, eroding the very qualities that earned them the role. Tepper shows that supervisors under stress become hostile to their teams in patterns that produce measurable harm. Pfeffer shows that the cumulative effect of these dynamics is killing people.

What none of these researchers quite say, but all of them are circling, is what shadow work names directly:

Power, when held by a wounded part of a person, becomes harmful. The wound is what does the harm. And the wound is invisible to the person carrying it.

Every leader has parts. The seven-year-old who learned that being right was the only way to get love. The teenager who decided that letting anyone see weakness was unsafe. The young professional who built their identity around being the most capable person in the room. The middle manager who learned, painfully, that the way to survive in this organisation was to align upwards and offload pressure downwards. None of these parts is bad. All of them are the result of someone trying to survive a system that demanded a certain kind of self.

The problem is that when these parts are not integrated, they do not stay quiet simply because the person has been promoted. They take the wheel. The seven-year-old who needed to be right is now managing performance reviews. The teenager who could not show weakness is now refusing to take responsibility for the failed product launch. The capable young professional is now micromanaging the team because letting go feels like falling. The middle manager is now passing impossible deadlines down the chain because pushing back feels like a death sentence.

The leader does not usually know that any of this is happening. From inside the wounded part, usually taking an inflated form, the behaviour feels like leadership. It feels like decisiveness, high standards, and protecting the company. The leader cannot see that the team is being damaged because the part doing the damage cannot see itself. This is what shadow means. The parts of us we cannot see.

Keltner’s research tells us this happens to most people who acquire power. Tepper’s research tells us what it produces for the people on the receiving end. Pfeffer’s research tells us the cumulative cost, both in monetary terms and in years of life. And shadow work tells us why none of it can be addressed by the usual interventions, because those interventions are aimed at the behaviour, not at the part that is producing it.

What this means

If you take all of this seriously, it changes how you think of a toxic workplace.

A toxic workplace is not a place run by bad people. It is a place where the people in positions of power have not done the inner work required to hold that power well.

It is a place where unintegrated parts of leaders are being given the authority to shape the lives of the people who work for them. It is a place where the leader's wound becomes the team's daily experience.

This is not a counsel of despair. Quite the opposite. The inner work that would change things is real, available, and well understood. Leaders can do it. Organisations can support it. The shadow work that would help a leader hold power without inflation is not exotic or mysterious. It is the practice of getting to know the internal parts that are running the show without conscious permission, and learning to lead them rather than be led by them.

What that requires is something most modern organisations have actively discouraged in their leaders: the willingness to acknowledge fragility, to admit not knowing, to feel the fear that comes with the role rather than acting it out on the team. The willingness to let the adult self take the microphone away from the seven-year-old.

Only when organisations and leaders wake up to what’s really going on under the surface will there be lasting change in toxic workplaces. But this is hard for them to see because they were promoted, in part, for being good at hiding the parts that need to be integrated. The system that produced them rewarded the hiding.

This is why the numbers keep climbing. Eighty per cent and rising is a sign that the structural mechanism producing the harm has not changed. We keep promoting people for their public face, putting them in positions of power, and then watching the power activate the parts of them they have spent their lives keeping hidden. It is always the team that feels it.

The team eventually reaches for the only phrase that captures what they are feeling:

This place is toxic.

The themes explored here are central to my forthcoming book, The Shadow at Work. Please subscribe to support this project.

Sources: iHire, 2025 Toxic Workplace Trends Report (1,781 workers, 504 employers, December 2024). Monster, 2025 Mental Health in the Workplace poll (1,100+ U.S. workers, April 2025). Keltner, D., The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence (Penguin, 2016), and 25+ years of research from the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory. Tepper, B.J., “Consequences of Abusive Supervision,” Academy of Management Journal 43:178-190 (2000); Tepper, B.J., Simon, L. and Park, H.M., “Abusive Supervision,” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 4:123-152 (2017). Pfeffer, J., Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance (HarperBusiness, 2018).

Many people who have worked in a charity, an NGO, or a church office end up with a similar question: How could a place that “does so much good”, do so much harm to the people who work here?

It is one of the more consistent patterns in workplace research, and it’s often one that people on the inside find difficult to talk about.

What is it about mission-driven environments that so often produces toxic workplaces and emotional damage to employees?

Three pieces of research point to an answer.

What the data shows

Lisa Oakley, Professor of Safeguarding at the University of Chester, has spent more than fifteen years studying coercive behaviour inside Christian organisations. The largest UK dataset she and her colleagues have produced, published in the British Journal of Guidance & Counselling in 2024, surveyed 1,591 people inside Christian denominations.

1,002 of them said they had personally experienced spiritual abuse.

Almost two-thirds.

The dynamics were consistent across denominations and included scripture used to enforce obedience, dissent reframed as disloyalty, public shaming framed as spiritual correction, and the systematic discrediting of anyone who raised concerns.

Chuck DeGroat, Professor of Pastoral Care at Western Theological Seminary, has spent over twenty years counselling pastors with narcissistic personality patterns. His central observation, drawing on Henri Nouwen, is that hiddenness is the breeding ground for narcissism. Mission-driven organisations attract people with significant unmet needs, then ask them to perform a polished, virtuous, heroic public self, and reward them for keeping the gap hidden. The inner world of these leaders, DeGroat finds, is dominated by two emotions almost never spoken aloud: shame and anger. Shame from the constant private knowledge that the public self is a performance, and the real self would not survive being seen. Anger at anyone who threatens to expose the gap, or who simply asks the kind of ordinary human questions (about pay, about workload, about a decision that does not add up) that brings the leader too close to the part of themselves they cannot afford to feel.

These two hot-button emotions are usually unconscious and often manifest as control, micromanagement, sudden coldness, and the punishment of dissent.

McKinsey's fifteen-country study on non-profit burnout identified toxic workplace behaviour as the single biggest predictor of burnout symptoms and intent to leave, predicting more than 60% of the global variance. AllThrive Education, working with over 100 community-based organisations, identified a category that traditional burnout research misses entirely.

They called it moral accountability pressures.

In a corporate job, if you take a sick day, a deadline slips. In a mission-driven job, if you take a sick day, the housing client does not get their advocacy meeting, the domestic violence survivor does not get their safety call, or the asylum seeker does not get their court paperwork filed.

Employees in mission-based organisations bear the burden that the cost of looking after their own needs is borne by the people they have committed their working lives to helping. Many workers in these settings carry that arithmetic in their bodies all day, and often break under the weight of it.

Three different research angles paint one picture. Harmful behaviour is widespread in not-for-profit organisations. The inner conditions that produce it in leaders are predictable. And the ordinary ways an employee might push back have been subtly taken off the table. To understand why that last piece is so distinctive to mission-driven workplaces, we have to look at the story the organisation tells about itself.

The “good” persona

Every organisation has a persona. The face it shows the world. The story it tells about itself.

In a tech startup, the persona is fast and clever. In a law firm, sharp and serious. In a bank, trustworthy and conservative.

In a charity, an NGO, or a faith-based organisation, the persona is good. Selfless. Doing God’s work.

You cannot argue with good. Or God, for that matter. And that is often the problem.

When the persona is good, every uncomfortable truth becomes an attack on the mission. These organisational cultures do not need to silence employees since employees learn to silence themselves. They learn to swallow resentment, call exhaustion commitment and perform gratitude for the privilege of being underpaid. The part of them that wants rest, money, recognition, or the simple acknowledgement that the founder is behaving badly goes underground and remains unexpressed.

The shadow side of vocation

Jung described the shadow as everything we disown to keep our self-image intact.

In a mission-driven workplace, the disowned material might include anger at leadership, envy of better-paid colleagues, resentment towards beneficiaries, boredom with the cause, or the simple desire to be seen, paid, and thanked.

Frequently, it cannot be spoken aloud. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

What gets pushed down does not disappear. It leaks. It comes out sideways as passive aggression, gossip, factionalism, sudden resignations, and breakdowns.

People who have never worked in a charity often find it hard to believe that it’s this bad. People who have are nodding.

When leaders weaponise the mission

The leader is in the same trap as the team, only worse. They were promoted for embodying the persona. They have built their identity around it. The gap between their public self and their private one is not only unspoken but is also the source of their authority, and so they cannot acknowledge it without losing the role.

So the shame and the anger stay hidden.

The mission becomes the weapon. The unspoken question in the room is How can you complain about your workload when children are starving? How can you ask about pay when we are doing God’s work? How can you raise that concern when it might damage the cause? Researchers studying spiritual abuse have a name for this: coercion through religious or moral position. Most leaders who do it would be horrified to hear it described that way, which is exactly what makes it shadow.

The reframe

A charity with a toxic culture is not necessarily a charity run by bad people.

It is a charity in which the persona of goodness has become so total that nobody is allowed to bring their full humanity to work, including the leader.

What gets disowned in the name of the cause does not disappear. It runs the place from below, in the form of the leader’s unintegrated parts and the team’s swallowed resentment.

The work these organisations need is not another strategy day or another theory of change. It is the slow, uncomfortable practice of letting people say out loud what the culture has taught them to hide, and of letting leaders acknowledge the parts of themselves the role was designed to keep invisible. The shame underneath the persona, the anger underneath the smile, the exhaustion underneath the vocation, the resentment underneath the gratitude.

This is hard for mission-driven organisations to see because they were built, in part, on hiding. The system that produced their leaders rewarded the polish. The donors who fund them want to believe in the persona. The beneficiaries who depend on them need the persona to be real. Everyone in the chain has an interest in the shadow staying where it is.

Which is why, year after year, the same private story keeps surfacing.

If you work in a place that constantly talks about its goodness, watch what isn't allowed to be discussed. Watch who gets pushed out or sidelined. Watch what initiatives get blocked.

Watch what you yourself have stopped saying out loud.

Sources: Oakley, Kinmond & Blundell, British Journal of Guidance & Counselling 52(2), 2024. DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church, IVP 2020. Langberg, Redeeming Power, Brazos 2020. McKinsey Health Institute, “Addressing employee burnout” (2022). AllThrive Education research on mission-critical burnout.

According to research from the National Safety Council, up to 80% of workplace accidents are preceded by unreported near misses.

Eighty percent.

The signals were there, people saw them, and nobody said anything.

They didn’t speak up because a part of them had learned, correctly, that speaking up would cost them something.

There’s a concept in Shadow work called a “protector part”. It forms when a younger part of us got hurt, criticised, humiliated, or punished for telling the truth. When that happens, it makes a decision:

Next time we’ll stay quiet.

Next time, we'll handle it privately.

That decision is a rational calculation in a blame-based culture.

Publicly imposed blame teaches us to hide our mistakes, suppress our concerns, and keep our heads down. Blame-based cultures repeatedly teach us that honesty comes at a price.

And so, the information that the organisation needs to stay safe is never surfaced.

What’s remarkable about the NIST research is that it frames blame culture as an information problem rather than a values problem. When individuals are held personally responsible for failures rooted in systemic or environmental conditions, the organisation loses its capacity to see itself clearly.

Blame drives risk underground. Learning brings it into the open.

This is identical to what happens inside a person.

When shame governs the inner world, the parts that carry difficult information, the ones that feel afraid, confused, out of depth, complicit in something wrong, go underground. They distort behaviour from the inside. And then, eventually, the pressure finds an exit.

In individuals, that exit might be a breakdown, an outburst or a collapse.

In organisations, it might be the accident that nobody saw coming.

Except some people saw it coming.

The NIST paper uses the language of systems thinking. It argues for decoupling learning from punishment.

Beneath the technical language is an old psychological truth. Shame and learning cannot coexist. The moment a person, team, or organisation associates telling the truth with being diminished, learning stops. The system closes around its own wounds. The aviation industry learned this the hard way.

Punitive cultures often think they are creating accountability and improvement.

But they’re not.

They’re creating a workforce of people making the same rational, protective, self-preserving calculation: the cost of honesty is higher than the cost of silence.

Blame feels powerful to the people who deploy it. It feels decisive. It looks like “standards being upheld”.

But what it actually does is satisfy the emotional needs of the person doing the blaming while destroying the conditions for the organisation to learn.

In the language of archetypes, it is an inflated Action-Taker response: movement without wisdom. Punishment as a substitute for understanding.

The leader who reaches for blame is, almost always, a leader who is frightened. Frightened of looking weak, or of a system that might implicate them, or frightened of failure. Very often, they are frightened of being blamed themselves; they, too, are a product of the culture.

Tom Geraghty, a researcher in psychological safety, coined the term “blametropism” to describe our innate instinct to attribute the cause of any adverse event to an individual rather than a system.

We are wired for it. When something goes wrong, a part of us moves immediately toward the nearest body to pin it on. It’s faster than systems thinking. It’s more emotionally satisfying than complexity. And it’s almost always wrong about where the real problem lives.

Organisations run by leaders operating from that part create blind organisations. The very signals that would protect them are being actively suppressed by the culture they are creating.

The safest workplaces are the ones with the highest near-miss reporting rates. High reporting means people feel safe enough to be honest. And honesty, as both safety science and depth psychology keep finding their way back to, is the only foundation on which anything solid can be built.

You cannot fix what you cannot see.

And you cannot see what you have taught people to hide from you.

The strategies you developed as a child to stay safe are the same strategies you’re using at work right now.

The child who learned that anger was dangerous becomes the adult who avoids conflict at all costs, and then resents everyone for walking over them.

The child who learned that visibility meant criticism becomes the adult who never speaks up in meetings, and then wonders why they’re overlooked for promotion.

The child who learned that love was conditional on performance becomes the adult who works eighty-hour weeks, and calls it “dedication”, or “commitment”, or “passion”.

The child who learned to read the room and manage the emotions of others becomes the adult who is brilliant at office politics, and exhausted by Wednesday afternoon.

They’re necessary, useful, adaptive strategies from childhood that have never been updated. They made perfect sense when you were eight. They make considerably less sense when you’re running a department.

But the parts that hold these strategies don’t know that. They are, psychologically speaking, still eight years old. Still scanning for the same dangers. Still running the same programmes.

Until someone (that’s you, by the way) turns toward them and says: “I see you. You can stop now. I’ve got this.”

A toddler reaches for something and hears a stern, “Don’t touch that.”

A child cries and is told, “Don’t be silly.”

A little boy expresses fear and hears, “Be brave.”

A little girl expresses anger and hears, “Don’t be difficult.”

A teenager shows enthusiasm and gets mocked by peers.

A young employee speaks up in a meeting and is shut down.

Each one results in a message being internalised.

It could be: “I am wrong for having this feeling.”

Or: “I must hide this part of me, to keep the connection.”

Either way, something goes into the shadow bag. And every time the need for connection wins, authenticity loses. Not permanently, but functionally. The feelings don’t disappear. They simply go underground, where they wait for the right conditions to resurface.

The workplace provides those conditions daily.

The shadow is created through a predictable sequence. This is a pattern that shows up across cultures, across centuries and in every therapeutic tradition that has taken the unconscious seriously.

Debbie Ford mapped it out clearly in The Shadow Effect, and it looks like this:

1. Secrecy. We learn to hide. We discover which parts of ourselves are not welcome, and we push them out of sight. This secrecy is a necessary adaptation for our early survival. We simply stop showing what isn’t welcome with our primary caregivers, what isn’t safe to show.

2. Shame. Once hidden, those parts begin to feel wrong. The logic is airtight to a child: if I have to hide this, it must be bad. If it’s bad, I must be bad. Shame is not the belief that you did something wrong. It’s the belief that you are something wrong.

3. Judgement. Shame is unbearable, so we turn it outward. We judge ourselves first, and with it comes the birth of the inner critic. Then we judge others. Judgement is shame in a moral disguise.

4. Blame. Once we’ve decided that pain is a moral issue, we need someone to be responsible. Blame arrives as relief. It feels better to point at someone else than to sit with our own discomfort.

5. Projection. This is the critical move. We begin to see in others what we cannot bear to see in ourselves. The qualities we’ve exiled, such as anger, neediness, ambition, and vulnerability, get projected outward. We spot it everywhere except in the mirror.

6. Separation. Once projection takes hold, the world divides. Us and them. Good people and bad people. People like me and people who are “the problem.” Separation feels like clarity. It’s actually the furthest point from self-awareness.

7. Struggle. At the bottom of the spiral, we are at war. Internally, externally, or both. We are fighting our own unacknowledged material, yet we experience it as a fight with the world. And the war never ends, because we’re fighting the wrong enemy.

This sequence runs in nearly every human being.

And it runs especially hard at work, where hierarchy, belonging, and survival provide the perfect conditions for each step to be reinforced.

Twenty-five minutes’ notice. A 15-minute Teams call. No questions allowed.

That’s how 484 BrewDog workers found out their jobs were gone.

Staff were informed of the closures during a short Teams call hosted by BrewDog’s chief executive and a restructuring specialist.

“Your role is no longer required. Your position has formally been made redundant.”

That was it.

Fifteen minutes to end someone’s livelihood. Fifteen minutes for hundreds of people whose labour built an entire brand from scratch.

Unite’s Bryan Simpson, who has represented hospitality workers for over a decade, said it was the worst mass redundancy he had ever dealt with, including during the pandemic.

The punk brand and its shadow

BrewDog built its identity on rebellion. On being different. On sticking it to the corporate machine.

Founded in 2007, BrewDog grew from a self-proclaimed “punk” startup into one of the world’s most recognisable craft beer brands. Its Equity for Punks scheme invited ordinary people, many of them workers, to become co-owners. Shareholders with skin in the game. Partners in the revolution.

Then the revolution ended. The company posted a pre-tax loss of £37m in 2024, the fifth consecutive year it had failed to make a profit.

The media were informed about the administration decision before the workers were told.

Punk, it turns out, had a shadow.

And that shadow looked a lot like every other corporate structure it claimed to oppose.

Organisational personas

This is a story about what happens when an organisation builds its entire identity on a persona, a carefully constructed mask, and never looks underneath it.

Jung called this the persona: the face we present to the world. For BrewDog, that persona was loud, values-driven, and anti-establishment. It told a story about community, belonging, and shared ownership.

But personas always have a shadow. Everything that doesn’t fit the story gets pushed down. The inconvenient truths. The gap between the values they marketed and the decisions they made.

In 2024, BrewDog faced backlash after revealing it would no longer hire new staff on the Real Living Wage, instead paying the lower legal minimum. A company that had staked its brand on being a better kind of employer abandoned its commitment overnight. That’s shadow behaviour.

Robert Bly described the shadow as the long bag we drag behind us. Every part of ourselves that we can’t afford to show, we stuff in the bag. Organisations do exactly the same thing. The gap between the values on the wall and the decisions in the boardroom gets wider and wider, and nobody talks about it, until the bag gets too heavy.

The believers

It wasn’t just the workers who were left holding nothing.

BrewDog’s Equity for Punks scheme raised around £75 million from roughly 200,000 small investors between 2009 and 2021. These people were true believers in a different kind of company. They bought in at £20 to £30 a share, drawn by the story as much as the returns. Some invested a few hundred pounds. Others put in their life savings.

One investor, Richard Fisher, told the BBC he had written off his £12,000 stake. “There’s nothing for us,” he said.

He won’t be getting it back. Administrators confirmed that equity holders, including every Equity for Punks investor, will receive nothing from the Tilray deal.

Here’s what makes this particularly sharp. When US private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners took a 22% stake in BrewDog in 2017, they were given preference shares. That meant they would be first in line in any sale. The punk investors, the believers, the ones who funded the dream in the early years, were always going to be last.

This is how shadow operates in organisations. The gap between what is said and what is true. People buy into the persona. They invest, emotionally and financially, in the version of the company that it being presented, and that they want to believe in.

In an email to investors after the administration, the new owners thanked shareholders for their “belief, passion and investment” and invited them to continue as “ambassadors for the brand.”

Ambassadors. For the brand that just took their money.

The workplace is a mirror

I wonder about the 484 people on that call. What was it like for each of them?

I believe the workplace is a mirror. What it brings up can tell us a lot about ourselves.

Maybe some felt pure rage. For some, it might have brought up feelings of being discarded before, treated as disposable, told that the numbers matter more than they do.

Maybe some felt something colder. Resignation. Of course, this is how it ends. This is how it always ends. That kind of numbness is also a signal. Parts of us stop feeling when feeling has cost us too much in the past.

Maybe when you read about the layoffs, you feel vicarious rage. Maybe you’re looking at your own boss, wondering whether you’d get fifteen minutes or less.

All of it is data.

The workplace is a mirror.

BrewDog is not the first company to behave like this, and it won’t be the last. This kind of behaviour exists everywhere, in different forms. The performance review that comes with no prior feedback. The way certain conversations simply never happen in organisations, until it’s too late.

Organisational shadow

Gabor Maté writes about how trauma isn’t what happened to us; it’s what happened inside us as a result. The same is true for organisations. BrewDog’s wound wasn’t the £37m loss. The wound was the years of unacknowledged tension between image and reality, between the story being told and the decisions being made.

Workers cited a lack of consultation about major company decisions, the abandonment of commitments to pay the real living wage, widespread closures of underperforming bars, and significant reductions in contracted hours. One worker said they had found out about the sale at the same time as the press.

This is what the shadow looks like in an organisation. Not dramatic villainy. Just a persistent pattern of the people at the top making decisions in the dark, and the people at the bottom finding out through a fifteen-minute call.

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham put it plainly: “BrewDog workers built this brand. They deserved respect. Instead, they were treated as disposable pawns.”

The BrewDog story is an invitation

Not to feel superior to BrewDog’s leadership. That’s easy. That’s cheap. That’s shadow work of a different kind, the kind where we project everything we don’t want to see in ourselves onto a convenient villain.

The real question is: what is your organisation’s shadow?

What do you know, and don’t say? What does your company claim to value that gets abandoned when the numbers get difficult? What version of the 15-minute call exists in your own working life, either one you might be on the receiving end of, or one you might one day be delivering?

And perhaps most uncomfortably: when have you been the one who treated someone as disposable? Not dramatically. Just by prioritising the task over the person.

I know I have in the past. I’m aware of my own ability to drop people, to cut them off and cut them out when the relationship no longer serves me. I have, at times, behaved no better than the Brewdog leadership.

By sending the email instead of having the conversation. By letting the meeting run over and pushing the difficult thing to next week, and then the week after, until there was no next week left.

BrewDog’s fifteen-minute call didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a thousand smaller moments where the harder, more human choice wasn’t made.

That’s where organisational shadow work begins. With the small, daily decisions about whether to be honest or whether to preserve the persona a little longer.

The bag gets heavy over time. Always.

In A Little Book on the Human Shadow, Robert Bly described a long, invisible bag that each of us drags behind us. He called it the shadow bag.

We arrive in the world with our full personality intact, and then, piece by piece, we put parts of ourselves into the bag. Our anger goes in. Our sadness goes in. Our sexuality, our wildness, our power, our vulnerability. Whatever earned disapproval, whatever risked disconnection, into the bag it goes.

Bly believed we spend the first twenty years of life filling the bag. And then we spend the rest of our lives trying to get everything back out again.

The problem, he said, is that what goes into the bag regresses. It becomes more primitive, more charged, more volatile. The anger you stuffed away at age seven doesn’t emerge at age forty as a neatly expressed boundary. It emerges as road rage. Or a slammed door. Or a frozen silence that people have to tiptoe around.

It comes out at the people around you.

It comes out sideways.

It comes out as a passive-aggressive email at 11 pm.

It comes out as humiliating someone in a team meeting and calling it “direct feedback.”

It comes out as the resentment towards a peer who has received the recognition we deserve.

Debbie Ford, who spent decades working with Jungian shadow, described it as being like holding a beach ball underwater. You can keep it submerged for a while. But the moment your energy drops, your guard slips, your stress peaks, it erupts to the surface.

The workplace is a particularly fertile environment for this. Hierarchy activates our oldest stories about power and approval, belonging and exclusion, status and recognition, bringing up parts of ourselves we have long stuffed into the bag.

There’s a story organisations tell themselves when times get hard.

We need to tighten up. Cut the soft stuff. Focus on what matters. People need to be more resilient.

It sounds responsible. It sounds like leadership.

It’s the organisational shadow speaking.

A landmark study by Amy Edmondson and Michaela Kerrissey, published in the International Journal of Public Health, tracked more than 27,000 US healthcare workers across two surveys. The first was published in May 2019, before anyone had heard of COVID-19, and another in May 2021, deep into the pandemic. They were looking for what actually protected people against burnout and the desire to leave.

Not what should have, in theory. What did.

The answer wasn’t better pay. It wasn’t lighter workloads. What protected people was psychological safety: the felt sense that they could speak up, raise concerns, name mistakes, and ask for help without being punished.

Increasing psychological safety by one standard deviation decreased burnout by 0.72 points and increased willingness to stay by 0.63 points. The effects were strongest for women and people of colour. Those were the group burning out fastest, and the ones who historically have been least listened to.

The shadow of high performance

Most organisations carry a group shadow: the collection of truths, impulses, and realities a system pushes underground to maintain its self-image. Every culture has one.

And in many workplaces, one of the deepest shadow elements is this: vulnerability is dangerous here.

High-performance cultures are especially prone to this. The stated values are excellence, accountability and results. The unwritten rule is: don’t show strain. Don’t say the workload is impossible. Don’t be the one who can’t keep up.

This rule gets transmitted through micro-signals. The way a manager’s face changes when someone says, “I’m overwhelmed.” The conspicuous silence when a colleague takes a mental health day.

Jung called projection the act of seeing in the outer world what we cannot face in ourselves. Organisations do this too. The high-performance culture that exiles vulnerability will find it manifesting as burnout, attrition, and the slow erosion of trust. The very thing it tried to eliminate becomes the thing it cannot stop producing.

The Edmondson and Kerrissey study makes the cost visible. When people don’t feel safe enough to speak, they go quiet, burn out, and eventually leave. And the ones who stay are often the ones who’ve learned to suppress the most. This has the knock-on effect that the culture grows quieter, more brittle, more toxic over time.

The double bind

When an organisation takes its own systemic failure to provide psychological safety and locates it within individual workers, this is projection operating at the cultural level.

You’re burnt out? Build resilience. You’re struggling? Practice self-care. You want to leave? You’re not committed enough.

The system creates conditions that damage people, then frames the damage as a personal deficiency. The shadow stays hidden because the narrative is so convincing: it’s not our culture to blame; it’s your coping skills.

Edmondson and Kerrissey frame psychological safety as a “social resource”; something the organisation provides or destroys, not something individuals manufacture alone.

Brené Brown has been pointing at the same truth from a different direction for years. In Daring Greatly, she describes how organisations simultaneously demand courage and punish vulnerability, creating a double bind that leaves people with no psychological ground to stand on. You’re supposed to bring your best self. But your best self isn’t welcome here.

That double bind has a name. It’s the organisational shadow.

What the shadow protects

If psychological safety is this powerful, and the evidence is now substantial that it is, why do so few organisations invest in it seriously?

Because real psychological safety threatens the shadow.

If people can speak freely, they’ll name the dysfunction. They’ll say the strategy isn’t working. They’ll say the workload is inhumane and that the “culture of excellence” is actually a culture of fear.

Psychological safety is an accountability mechanism. And that’s precisely why the shadow resists it. A psychologically safe team is one where the truth can surface. Most organisations are not structured to survive their own truth.

The shadow’s function is to keep the unsayable unsaid. Psychological safety makes things sayable. They are natural enemies.

Amy Edmondson originally developed the concept of psychological safety studying medical teams in the 1990s, and found something counterintuitive: safer teams reported more errors, not fewer. These teams didn’t make more mistakes; they were better able to report them. The willingness to say “something went wrong” was itself the sign of health.

In many organisations, that willingness has been trained out of people.

The leaders who can’t see it

McKinsey research found that only 26% of leaders consistently exhibit behaviours that create psychological safety. Three in four leaders are actively, if unconsciously, maintaining environments where people cannot be honest.

Most of these leaders don’t experience themselves as unsafe. That is exactly how the personal shadow works.

The leader who shuts down dissent believes they’re “keeping the team focused.” The one who micromanages believes they “care about quality.” The one who punishes visible emotion thinks they’re “maintaining standards.” Each of them has a story that makes their behaviour reasonable. Each story keeps the shadow intact.

This is why leadership development so often fails to shift anything. It addresses skills when the real barrier is shadow. Creating psychological safety requires tolerating uncertainty, admitting you don’t know, and sharing power. For leaders whose identity rests on competence, control, and certainty, that will feel threatening. For some intolerable

Gabor Maté, writing about the physiology of stress and suppression in When the Body Says No, observes that what we cannot express internally tends to express itself through the body and through the systems we inhabit. The stressed, suppressed team is the organisational equivalent of the stressed, suppressed body. The symptoms look different. The mechanism is identical.

Safety is the presence of connection

While it might be tempting to think of psychological as the absence of tension. It isn’t. It’s the presence of connection.

Organisations that misunderstand this spend enormous energy trying to eliminate discomfort. They run away from conflict and smooth over difficult conversations.

Real safety is the capacity to stay in contact with the truth and with each other when things are hard. The ability to say the hard thing and stay in connection. To make a mistake and not be cast out. To disagree and not be punished for the honesty of it.

That quality, the felt sense that you are not alone with what you know, is what Edmondson and Kerrissey found holding people together through the worst conditions of the pandemic.

The organisations that build that kind of culture do so consciously. It never happens by accident.

The invitation

The research is unambiguous. Psychological safety doesn’t require more money or more time. It requires something far harder: the willingness to let people tell the truth about what’s happening, and the courage to hear it without punishing them for speaking.

The shadow’s deepest fear is that if people start telling the truth, the whole story the organisation tells about itself will come apart.

That’s exactly why they should.

The patterns explored here of projection, shadow leadership, and organisational dynamics that damage people are central to my forthcoming book, The Shadow at Work. Please subscribe to support this project.

You arrived in the world with everything turned on.

Anger, joy, grief, desire, fear, wildness, tenderness, need. All of it was available to you. You could scream with rage one moment, dissolve into laughter the next, and weep for comfort without a trace of self-consciousness.

Robert Bly, the poet who spent decades exploring the shadow through a Jungian lens, described this original state as “360-degree radiance.” We came into the world shining in every direction. We weren’t strategic about which parts of ourselves to show. We just were.

But that didn’t last.

Because we quickly learned that not all of our radiance was welcome.

The First Bargain

Here is the deal every child makes, without ever knowing they’re making it:

I will give up parts of myself in exchange for your love.

John Bowlby, the psychiatrist who founded attachment theory, showed that human infants are biologically programmed to maintain proximity to their caregivers. An infant separated from its caregiver is an infant in mortal danger. Connection to our caregivers is survival.

So when a child discovers that certain behaviours threaten that connection: when crying earns disapproval, when anger provokes withdrawal, when exuberance is met with “calm down”, the child faces an impossible choice: be authentic, or be safe.

And safety wins. Every time.

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott saw this clearly. He described how children develop what he called a “false self” - a compliant, adapted version of themselves designed to meet the needs of the environment rather than express their own inner reality. The false self isn’t a lie, exactly. It’s a survival mechanism. A brilliant one. But it comes at a cost: the true self goes into hiding.

And the hiding place? That’s the shadow.

One of the most useful changes in my own thinking about myself came through my training as a Deep Process Psychotherapist. And it’s this:

I am not one, unified self. I have many parts.

As Walt Whitman put it:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

This idea, that we are made of multiple parts, is now a well-established framework in modern psychotherapy. Richard Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems (IFS), built an entire therapeutic model around the recognition that the human psyche is naturally multiple - that we are each made up of different parts, each with its own feelings, beliefs, and agendas.

I find that when I talk about this with my clients, and we use it in our work together, they know this intuitively. We’ve all said things like:

“Part of me wants to speak up, but another part is terrified.”

“I know I should let it go, but something in me won’t.”

“I don’t know what came over me.”

We often don’t notice ourselves speaking like this and think it's just a figure of speech. But they are actually an accurate description of your internal architecture.

At work, these parts show up constantly:

The Perfectionist who rewrites the email seven times because one mistake might mean rejection.

The Pleaser who says yes to every request because saying no feels like abandonment.

The Invisible One who stays quiet in meetings because visibility once meant danger.

The Defender who snaps at the first hint of criticism because somewhere, long ago, criticism meant shame.

The Overachiever who works weekends because a younger part still believes love is earned, not given.

The Freeze Part, who goes blank when the CEO asks a direct question, because authority still triggers the old alarm.

These parts show up because you’re wired for safety. And somewhere in your history, each one of them learned a strategy for keeping you safe.

The problem isn’t that you have parts. Everyone does. The problem is that most of us don’t know they’re there. So instead of leading our parts, our parts lead us.

This is an idea I’m going to come back to again and again throughout this work because when we make this shift, and start to engage with these parts, rather than thinking they are the whole of us, new opportunities for change and growth open up.

This shift in perception can transform your experience of work. It’s the difference between shame and understanding. Between self-attack and self-leadership. Between being trapped in a pattern and being free to choose differently.

The shift is this:

From “I am broken” to “A part of me is protecting me.”

From “I’m difficult” to “A part of me is overwhelmed.”

From “I’m weak” to “A part of me is scared.”

From “I’m a fraud” to “A part of me feels unworthy.”

From “I always do this” to “This is a pattern a younger part created to stay safe.”

Can you feel the difference?

Parts can be understood. Parts can be met. Parts can soften when they no longer have to carry their burden alone.

You don’t need to fight them or bury them. You just need to meet them.

And that meeting, with understanding rather than judgement, is what this entire book is about.

Your boss becomes the parent you could never please. The colleague who challenges you becomes the sibling who overshadowed you. The team becomes the family system all over again.

And your reactions are the same as you had decades ago. Except now you’re wearing a suit.

Psychoanalysts have long called this transference - the unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another. Freud first identified it in the therapeutic relationship, but it operates everywhere. Any situation that echoes the power dynamics of childhood will activate it. And what is the workplace if not a daily immersion in power dynamics?

At work, we have to deal with people who control our income, evaluate our performance, and determine our future. We spend more waking hours with our colleagues than with our families. We have to navigate unspoken rules, compete for recognition, and manage the constant tension between what you want to say and what feels safe to say.

If that doesn’t sound like the dinner table you grew up at, you’re one of the lucky ones.

As Jung wrote in Aion:

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.

This is frequently paraphrased as “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate,” which is cool, but there’s no evidence that Jung actually said that.

At work, we don’t call it fate. We call it “culture.” We call it “personality clashes.” We call it “just the way things are around here.”

But beneath all of those labels, it’s the shadow. Doing what the shadow always does: running the show from behind the scenes.

Our nervous systems evolved on the savannah. In a world where the rustle in the grass might be a predator, where being cast out from the group meant death, and where status in the hierarchy determined access to food and protection.

Stephen Porges, who developed Polyvagal Theory, has shown that our autonomic nervous system is constantly scanning the environment for cues of safety and danger, a process he calls neuroception. This scanning happens below conscious awareness. We don’t decide to feel threatened in a meeting. Our body decides for us, and then our conscious mind scrambles to make sense of why our heart is racing.

As Porges writes in The Polyvagal Theory:

The detection of a person as safe or dangerous triggers neurobiologically determined pro-social or defensive behaviours. Even though we may not always be aware of danger on a cognitive level, on a neurophysiological level, our body has already started a sequence of neural processes that would facilitate adaptive defence behaviours such as fight, flight, or freeze.

This is the machinery running beneath every email, every performance review, every team meeting. We think we’re responding to the content of the conversation. But our nervous systems are responding to something much older:

Is this person safe?

Is this group going to keep me?

Am I about to lose something I can’t afford to lose?

We are running ancient software on modern hardware. And we wonder why it keeps crashing.

We pretend it is. We talk about “professionalism” as though it means the absence of emotion. We design open-plan offices and agile workflows as though human beings are rational actors making logical decisions in calm, predictable conditions.

Well, it turns out we’re not.

It turns out work is one of the most psychologically activating arenas a human being ever enters. And it activates us so powerfully because it presses on three ancient survival needs simultaneously.

Hierarchy. The moment someone has authority over you, a part of you that is five years old starts paying very close attention. Am I safe? Am I in trouble? Am I good enough?

Belonging. Humans are not individuals who happen to work in groups. We are mammals whose nervous systems are wired to treat exclusion as a threat to survival. Psychologist Naomi Eisenberger’s landmark research at UCLA showed that social exclusion activates the same brain regions as physical pain. Being left out of a meeting doesn’t just hurt your feelings. Your brain processes it the same way it processes a physical assault.

Survival. We rely on our salaries pay rent. Our job title tells the world who we are. Our reputation determines our next opportunities. The stakes are high. For oour nervous system, they’re existential.

Put those three together, and work becomes a pressure cooker. Hierarchy, belonging, and survival are all being activated five days a week.

And into that pressure cooker we bring our entire psychological history. Every unresolved fear. Every old strategy for staying safe. Every part of ourselves that learned, long ago, what to show and what to hide.

No wonder work sometimes feels difficult.

Here’s what we all learned about work:

Show up. Be professional. Do your job. Leave your feelings at the door.

Here’s what actually happens at work:

You walk into a meeting. Your stomach tightens before anyone speaks.

A colleague’s tone shifts. Something inside you goes cold.

Your boss gives you feedback. Your hands start shaking, even though you’re nodding and saying “Great, thanks.”

You have no idea why a particular person irritates you so much.

You can’t explain why you avoid certain conversations.

You don’t understand why you said yes to something you wanted to say no to, again.

At work, when we’re busy being professional and all so put together, something deeper is running the show from behind the scenes.

Something you were probably never taught to see, let alone work with.

Carl Jung called it the shadow: the parts of ourselves we’ve learned to deny, hide, and repress. And we all have some parts of ourselves that we have learned to deny or hide.

It’s the central thesis of this book that if we can learn to see and work with our shadows, we’ll all be far happier at work.

And if we can do this as a species, it might just save the world.