The long invisible bag
How our disowned parts show up at work
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.