A new direction
Welcome to The Shadow At Work
A while back, you subscribed to a Substack called Fuck Feeling Shit.
At the time, I loved the name, and I enjoyed writing the content.
But over the last year, my focus has changed, and therefore so has this Substack.
Last year I reached an inflection point in my life. I had been working for years to build a business. A business which I love and am still active in.
I also finished my training as a Deep Process Psychotherapist. The end of a five-year process that changed me profoundly.
I took a sabbatical and spent half a year in the Scottish Highlands with my dog.
Those months were a magical time and gave me the opportunity to assess my new direction.
Should I continue with the business?
Should I shift into becoming a psychotherapist full-time?
In the end, I decided to do both and combine them in a new way.
And so The Shadow At Work was born.
The Shadow at Work is a book I’ve been writing over the past year.
And it’s what this new Substack is about.
Why work?
Work is where most of us spend the majority of our waking lives.
And it’s the place where we are often least permitted to be our full, human selves.
We walk through the office door every day carrying every unresolved fear, every childhood wound, every protective habit we’ve ever built. And then we’re expected to be “professional.”
As if professionalism means the absence of feeling.
It doesn’t.
It means the suppression of feeling.
And suppression doesn’t make feelings go away. It makes them go underground. Into what Carl Jung called the shadow.
Introducing The Shadow at Work
This newsletter is now The Shadow at Work, which is the name of my book.
It’s where you’ll get the ideas first, before the book comes out, in short, standalone pieces you can read in five minutes. If you like what I’m sharing here, you’ll probably like the book when it comes out.
The book, and this Substack, is organised around a 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. Not our need for another framework or productivity hack.
Our hidden emotions.
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.
In the posts ahead, we’re going to walk into each of these hidden territories. One at a time.
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. As Gabor Maté writes, “The attempt to escape from pain is what creates more pain.”
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.
This newsletter is about retrieving 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.