Answering the Shadow’s Call
If you feel seen by this quote then this is for you. I can’t think of a more perfect quote to share as someone who spends my time talking to people who are unhappy at work, trying to help them break free from golden handcuffs, or the constant brink of burnout with so much time spent away from loved ones. Having lived it before myself, I actually have all the patience in the world for it. I know how our brains play tricks on us to keep us “safe”. The problem isn’t out there, it’s in our minds. And that’s much harder.
In therapy speak we call this concept “secondary gains”. It’s another way of saying “hidden agenda”. We think we’re stuck with what we’ve got, but actually, our psyche is fooling us into thinking we don’t have a choice. The truth is… we get something from staying where we are, and that’s why we choose to stay stuck - whether it’s a job, a relationship or some other important part of your life.
The secondary gain is: We decide on some level we’d rather not change, that change feels too risky. A change in money, status, lifestyle, behaviour, being a martyr (this was one of mine), feeling needed where we are, “flexibility” (the kind, of course, that allows you to take the dog out or go to the dentist as long as you’re on your emails all night). Most people never get to find out that their fears were a lie. That it wasn’t true that they couldn’t make enough money doing something else. That the flexibility they thought they had was not freedom at all.
Handcuffs - that’s what they are. Our secondary gains are our handcuffs. And we are the ones holding the key that locks them. The good news is that means we can free ourselves. The bad news is it isn’t necessarily easy (and if it was there wouldn’t be a secondary gain).
It’s hard to be this honest with ourselves, but we all have secondary gains in different areas of our lives. They’re often unconscious… or just out of the conscious minds line of sight. But it’s there, deep down we know it. The truth of the choice we are making: That perhaps slowly over time, perhaps unknowingly, we’ve decided the price of our soul. In Bronnie Ware’s book ‘The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying’, the biggest regrets and deepest weights on people’s psyche as they knock on death’s door present as:
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard
I wish I’d let myself be happier
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends
I’m obsessed with the mind, ego (better known as ‘personality’, and I use the Enneagram for this work), self-sabotage and how we find our way back to ourselves… and I love that I get to help people who are unhappy at work realise they’ve been asleep at the wheel of their own life, and grab back control of the vehicle before it’s too late.
Because honestly, some people would thrive in the job you feel trapped by. It all depends on our ‘why’. As well as unfulfilled professionals, I also coach final year students who’d give anything to earn status and wealth for their families who’ve never had anything, who are the first in their family to go to university, who’ve fled war-torn countries to be where they are, who love the feeling of working quickly all day, and of having big goals & expectations made of them. These are the people who see office politics as a game that can be won by finding the right communication style and dancing with the limit of their potential (these are often the Enneagram Type 3s or 8s in case you were wondering).
And then I coach people who are desperate for creativity or earnest vulnerability and connection, who are exhausted by their work and want time back to spend with their loved ones and in nature. Perhaps they want to create some kind of social impact with their work to make it all mean something, or perhaps they just want to feel connected to a part of themselves they forgot about some time ago. I think I’m one of these kinds of people… but I borrow from our more business-oriented companions I described above too.
And of course, there are many, many other flavours of people out there. Just as there are many, many ways of earning money and being a professional out there too. My question for you is what’s yours?… Do you need a space for deeper self-enquiry to know? Or is it smacking you around the face immediately as you read my question?
If you feel the pangs of disquiet as you read my words then do your older self a favour and answer the call to investigate. That thing you’re hiding from is what Carl Jung called our shadow, and if we don’t turn to face it, it will erode our lives from the inside out, in ways that may not seem clear until we come to our old age, or worse, our death bed - when time is up and hindsight becomes 20/20. The shadow lives in our fear and shame, often unconscious to us, but running the whole show. It’s where we’re most afraid to look, yet it holds all the answers and freedom we relentlessly seek in the other direction. And the good news is that when we do this work suddenly life becomes our own again. We start to taste real freedom and choice. The lights come back on in our eyes. We reconnect to the joy inside ourselves.
I run a 10-month programme for people looking for that journey, and I’ll be starting a new cohort in early May due to popular demand, but sometimes a long walk without a device on you (which allows for the mind to chatter until it’s finally talked itself out and we can be in touch with something deeper!) or the right book is all it takes to open up something important we forgot about.
Book wise I recommend ‘Life Worth Living’ by Matthew Croasmun, Miroslav Volf, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz or ‘A Life of Meaning’ by James Hollis PHD (one of my favourite Jungian psychoanalysts).
Or if you’re looking for more structured support, check out the programme I run which I’ll be starting again in early May by clicking on the link above or right here. (No more than 8 people per cohort, so there are limited spaces!).