by Connie Zweig
Others who are less heroic but equally driven may need to uncover the god behind a perfectionistic demand for efficiency or an insatiable hunger to consume material goods. When we can break our identification with this father figure or senex-like character who orders all work and no play, when we can separate our function at work from our larger identity as a person, we can begin to gain more internal freedom at work and, eventually, make more self-affirming decisions, as our client Pam did.
Pam, thirty-eight, had been a chief financial officer in the garment industry in New York City for many years. When she first came to therapy, she worked sixty hours each week, came home late to an empty apartment, and felt dried out and hopeless about her life. But because in her company everyone worked compulsively, the workaholic character at the head of her table felt at home there and did not understand why she suffered.
Pam had tried on several occasions to take time off, but she had not felt replenished. Instead, she returned each time to her industry because, she reported, she could not turn down the money. She would begin to panic about the future and return to the treadmill again, offering up all of her life energy in a Faustian exchange for a feeling of security. Pain’s repetitive work pattern resembled an eating disorder: bingeing or fasting. She shifted between the senex, who demanded all work, and the puella, who demanded no work. Yet neither side of the equation offered her a sense of soul satisfaction or a balanced life. And Pam began to realize that she was betraying herself; her workaholic pattern had become poisonous, and she felt that a part of her was dying.
During this time Pam had the following dream: My grandmother has lost track of a dear friend and asks me to find her. I find this strong, wise, creative old woman in a hospital. A polished, sinister, corporate-looking man tries to give me an intravenous injection, but I know that it’s poisonous. From this dream, Pam came to realize that her creativity was sick and dying and that the corporate mentality at work had become poison to her.
Doing shadow-work, Pam discovered the senex tyrant, the character at the table who was driving her to do nothing but work. She found a taskmaster with her mother’s voice. “She told us to be dutiful, no time to have fun. She made throwing a party seem like a chore. And when this robot would take her over, I couldn’t stand being around her—I was afraid it would suck dry my life juices, too.”
This tyrannical figure, which had consumed Pam’s mother, was now consuming her. But she had begun to wake up, and the self-critical inner voices, which she had been able to silence earlier, were growing louder. And they held a vital message: Pam faced a crisis of commitment at work, a conflict between the call of the Self and her ego’s need for safety and security. She had tried to honor the voice with short-term solutions, such as vacations. But they did not relieve the internal conflict, and her feelings of depression, resentment, and anxiety grew worse. Eventually, they became intolerable and led her into therapy.
The therapist suggested that she needed to find a way to honor the Self’s demands consciously or she would continue to be unconsciously controlled by her symptoms of burnout. Pam began by shutting off the television at night and using the extra time to explore her creativity, which might result in discovering a fresh new life direction. Like many others, she found Julia Cameron’s best-selling book The Artist’s Way to have a tremendous impact. After several months of writing daily “morning pages,” she uncovered a deep desire to return to school to get a teaching degree.
Pam took a part-time position at her firm in order to maintain an income without perpetuating her workaholism. In this way, she stopped swinging between the two extremes of overwork and no work. But within a few weeks she came up against a deep resistance: She felt paralyzed, unable to choose between two graduate school programs. Because of her procrastination, she missed the registration deadlines. Her heart sank with the self-sabotage and the missed opportunity.
Continuing to do shadow-work, Pam identified the voice of resistance—the saboteur—that stopped her from taking the necessary step to change her life. At a conscious level, it told her, “Graduate school is a long haul with no financial compensation. Even after I’m a teacher, it’s a poor-paying profession. And where will I find a job?” At an unconscious level, Pam felt unworthy of taking her own desires seriously and fearful of giving up her dependency on the job to begin a more self-directed life.
She felt trapped: She could either challenge the voice of resistance by using her newfound impulse and direction as a catalyst for action, or she could succumb to the resistance, allowing the saboteur to take over and suffering the consequences of disappointment and depression. When she found a school that would permit her to enroll in six months, she signed up. And she reported that, although she would earn less money, the idea of working part-time for six months without school actually made her very excited; she planned to read, write, and explore her feelings about her next career.
Who is the shadow character that drives your productivity or fuels your perfectionism? What are the cues that this character has taken over the kingdom? What is the deeper need of this character that you have been unwilling to address?
MEETING THE OTHER IN A COMPANY HIERARCHY: HEALING FAMILY PATTERNS
Just as we unconsciously identify with our parents’ style of intimacy, re-creating their relationship dynamics in our own, we also identify with their styles of work. If we enter a family business or join a parent’s profession, we unknowingly may be living out a parent’s life and risk remaining trapped in family persona, rather than doing the hard work of carving out our own fate. On the other hand, if we reject a parent’s life wholesale, we unknowingly may be living out their unlived life and risk remaining trapped in family shadow. Frequently, two siblings adopt these opposite strategies: one conforms and one rebels. Either way, the legacy of family sins can be detected in our patterns of work. As a result, we have an opportunity, with shadow-work, to uncover unconscious family patterns and resolve them on the job.
Many people unconsciously project their family patterns onto their company or working group. If we project a positive experience, we may expect the group to be stable and supportive, open to communications, and able to solve conflict. When it fails us by silencing dissent or heartlessly firing a colleague, we feel betrayed. If we project family shadow issues onto the group, we may assume that there is no space for soul: Like a child, we feel that we need to behave properly, obey authority, avoid conflict, and banish our feelings into the dark.
If as an employee we project a mother or father complex, turning a boss into a parent, we may feel shamed, devalued, trapped, enraged, or terrified of being rejected. If as a boss we turn an employee into a child, we may feel overly responsible, judgmental, guilty, or rigid. If we project sibling rivalry, we may feel envious or competitive, creating an adversarial atmosphere or triangulating with one person to scapegoat another. In every case, we are blinded by projection, unable to see the Other for who she is or to act like adult individuals with a voice. This situation is a setup for shadow-boxing. However, if we can become aware of re-creating early family patterns at work and learn to witness our projection, we can return the King to the seat of power and make decisions about our work lives as adults with some knowledge of their consequences.
Terence, thirty-four, was a rising star in the men’s retail shoe business in New York City who felt that he was being treated without respect by his superiors. Initially hired as a salesman, he worked his way up the ladder to become a designer for a successful chain of stores. For the first few years, Terence followed orders and was eager to please. Then, as he increasingly recognized his own abilities, he began to feel more entitled to acknowledgment from above and support from his team. But he failed to express these needs.
Terence disclosed that a year earlier a superior at the firm had stolen one of his designs and placed it in another line of shoes, thereby garnering the credit for himself. Terence had not complained because he did not want to feel petty or be seen as overly am
bitious. Recently, the president offered him a year-end renegotiated contract, which included a lateral move in the organization and a small increase in income. He felt helpless to express his needs and heard a message in Turkish from his boss: You are not worthy of more. And again, he did not complain but chose to play it safe.
However, Terence soon began to feel depressed and resistant to going to work in the morning. “I dread waking up now. I’m working in my sleep, trying to solve problems instead of resting. So I wake up exhausted and just push my body through space to get ready in the morning. Then, I resent having to arrive at the office on time, to be in position like a soldier. I feel dead, lifeless. And I watch the clock. Time seems to pass so slowly. It used to fly by. Then I go home feeling empty and get up the next day to start over again.”
When asked what he would like to say to the president, his body filled out and his eyes brightened. “I want to say that I’m busting my butt here, and I’m not satisfied with this nickel-and-dime response. I love my job, work hard, and want my efforts acknowledged. I would rather lie in the sun and surf than work a seventy-hour week next year at this salary.”
In effect, Terence feels that the company treated him like an employee with a day job, whereas he feels as if he gave his soul to his work. As this contradiction became conscious, he began to feel more and more internal pressure. Terence faced a crisis of commitment: The authentic demands of the Self to be seen and rewarded stood in conflict with his ego’s needs for job security.
Terence was unable to speak up to his boss because of a psychological law: Under stress, we regress—that is, we return to our early patterns of coping. Terence imagined that his boss, like his alcoholic dad, would lose control of his anger, intimidating and belittling him. In fact, he is treated like a child because he has been unwilling to take his place at the table as an adult. Several months later, increasingly uncomfortable, Terence decided that he had no choice: He risked his boss’s rage and spoke to him about his feelings of resentment. Although he did not receive as much of a raise as he sought, he felt as if he had broken through a wall: He gained more autonomy, self-respect, and ultimately more creative freedom with his designs at work. In effect, he found the gold in his shadow: an ability to speak in his own voice and be heard without the fear of retribution.
Another example of projections coloring relationships at work: Chuck, forty-eight, head of the Chicago division of a nationwide manufacturing firm, supervised Bruce, twenty-seven, who had been hired the year before. Chuck disclosed, “Bruce is hot-tempered and demands attention by pestering me. If I don’t give it, he becomes hurt and aloof. He has no regard for the rules and won’t take responsibility for his mistakes. He just makes excuses. And he uses marijuana and alcohol but won’t admit that he has a problem.”
When asked what he would like to say to Bruce, Chuck responds quickly, “I want to take him off the premises and go man-to-man with him. I want to say, ‘You have a drug problem. You’re not being straight with me.’ But I can’t do that at work.”
Chuck identifies with his function as Bruce’s boss, so he believes that Bruce is behaving in this way to get at him; he takes the situation personally. He loses the perspective of the organization hierarchy and wants to go outside of it to leave his role behind because he sees no way to go inside of his role as boss and speak to his employee with soul. He cannot imagine, for instance, telling the younger man that he cares about him and sees himself in him. Instead, he gets caught in a shadow projection.
“To be Bruce’s supervisor, I have to become the very thing I rebel against—the boss. I have to become an authoritarian, perfectionistic father. And I hate that because my dad really abused me with his power.”
During the next week, Chuck’s supervisor made a decision about his turf without consulting him. Chuck felt left out and took it personally. Like the powerless, abandoned child he was once, he felt alone with a door shut in his face. When he began to complain to others, forming alliances and fomenting dissent inside the company, he thought of Bruce. “You know, I was doing the same thing he does. I felt powerless, but instead of taking it on directly, I bitched and moaned about it. I mean, I did with my boss exactly what he did with me.”
In that moment, Chuck felt empathy for his employee. He realized that the rebel character in Bruce is also a character at his own table, which gets overshadowed when he is the boss but erupts when he is the subordinate. In fact, even when Chuck’s boss solicits his opinions, he feels that he cannot risk showing his anger or feeling his power in front of him. So he sets himself up as powerless, then rebels so that he can take power in indirect ways. He concludes: “I guess I avoid being authentic with Bruce and with my boss to avoid feeling my real power, even though I’m getting a green light to be more real.”
To break this shadow-boxing pattern of avoiding authenticity and maintaining distance as an outsider, Chuck learned to romance the shadow characters of the rebel and the boss, allowing each to find its appropriate place at the table. As he identified the rebel as the one who emerges when he feels reactive, angry, and left out, he began to witness it and to choose more direct ways of expressing himself, instead of defaulting to indirect subterfuge. In this way, he broke his childhood pattern of powerlessness. As he identified the boss as the one who emerges when he becomes critical, superior, and rigid, withholding his approval from Bruce, he also began to witness it and to choose more caring, related ways of managing, instead of projecting and blaming. In this way, during the course of several years, he broke his father’s pattern of power and learned how to use authority in a soulful way.
Finally, if we can uncover a shadow character at work that is at the root of a mother or father complex, we may discover it at play elsewhere in our lives. In this way, shadow-work at work opens a window onto life at large. For instance, one female client, who worked for ten years in a mentor relationship with an older man, reported that their collaboration was primarily friendly and supportive. However, despite her long hours and meticulous efforts, he always expressed dissatisfaction at the completion of projects. In Turkish, the woman heard that she was not good enough. “At some level, I continued to work for his approval—and continued to feel that I was never enough.”
On saying these words, she looked up, startled. “Oh, my god. That’s how I feel in my marriage. No matter how much I nurture and support my husband, it feels like it’s never enough. Not enough time, not enough talk, not enough sex. And, of course, that’s how I felt with my dad. I could never be good enough.” So, as a result of romancing the shadow in her professional relationship, she discovered that her father complex colored her personal relationship as well. As she began to sort out the disapproving ghostly tyrant who kept her seeking approval through overworking and overgiving, she slowly found her own limits at work and at home. Eventually, her own self-acceptance deepened as well, leading her to find gold in her dark side.
What is it that you cannot stand in a colleague? What messages do you hear in Turkish? When did you feel this way earlier in your life? In what ways are you like this person?
MEETING THE OTHER IN A COLLABORATION: TAKING PROJECTIONS HOME
Building a team of two can be as treacherous and as gratifying as building an intimate relationship. Collaborations can evoke family shadow issues, trigger projections, escalate into a confusion of French and Turkish, and end in devastating roller-coaster rides. Finally, their termination can be as excruciating as divorce. With shadow-work, a collaboration, like a soul friendship, can act like a mirror that reflects us back to ourselves, deepening our self-knowledge and enabling us to work through conflicts and disagreements so that we can remain allies.
Some collaborations begin with a romantic feeling: the two partners enter the eggshell, blind to the potential for discord. They make an agreement, blind to the Faustian bargain of each. Then, before too long, one partner begins to feel impatient: perhaps their timing to achieve their creative goals is not in harmony. Another feels disappointed
: perhaps her contribution is not appreciated. Another feels resentful: perhaps their agreed-upon division of labor does not reflect the reality of the tasks. Yet another feels regret: perhaps he realizes that in the initial negotiation he gave up his power to avoid a power struggle.
Angry and anxious, the dissatisfied partner may begin to turn the collaborator into the Other, the cause of the shadowy feelings that are arising. Our client Sid, a successful entrepreneur, described this dilemma: A neighbor, Peggy, had patented a new invention with market potential but, as a teacher, she had no business expertise. So they formed a partnership: a fifty-fifty deal for both responsibility and compensation.
Six months later, however, Sid had spent full-time on the project, creating marketing materials and a strategic plan, while Peggy had basically pursued her teaching and family life. Sid’s frustration built into resentment, which now bordered on rage. And these feelings began to halt the progress of the project because he avoided meetings with Peggy in an effort to escape his own anger, which for many years had been buried in shadow.
As Sid returned to the project each day, carrying its full weight on his shoulders like Atlas carrying the heavens, he began to imagine its success as his own. He began to make decisions single-handedly and to see Peggy as incompetent and inferior. When she was late with completing a task, he felt confirmed. When she blundered, he puffed up with pride. Eventually, Sid told Peggy that he wished to renegotiate their contract; he could not tolerate sharing half the profits when he was doing almost all of the work.
When Peggy refused to renegotiate, Sid felt paralyzed. He had invested nearly a year in the project and did not want to give it up; however, he felt cheated by the original agreement and did not want to go on. In our language, it was unclear to Sid whether he faced a crisis of commitment in which an authentic need of the Self went unseen in the collaboration, or whether his power shadow had erupted. He came to therapy to try to understand how to handle this dilemma.