You won't see this in the employee handbook

The workplace is a stage where old patterns are replayed with new actors.

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.