Shadow Work 2: Your Shadow at Work
Last week, I introduced the concept of a shadow in very general terms. If you need the basics of shadow work, click here to read the blog.
Today, we’ll take a look at the shadow and how it manifests at work. Use this blog to explore your own shadow: read it mindfully and pay attention to how you react emotionally. If you find yourself reacting intensely to any of these, whether agreeing or insisting that this is not you, that’s a good place to pause and explore that topic more. Some of your shadow might reside in precisely these places.
Work in our culture
Most of you reading this live in the so-called free world, where we’re free to live our lives any way we want. Of course, unless you’re a woman in the post-Roe America, then you’re not quite as free. But let’s not get into that right now. You’re also free to do whatever you want, as long as you do it outside of your working hours or make a career out of it and then you have the liberty to give up on free time entirely. Work is the central organizing principle of our civilization, for better or worse.
Our ethic revolves around work and being ready to do whatever it takes to excel at it. Working overtime? Of course. Work on the weekend? Sure. Work even if you’re sick? Yes, please, I can’t afford health insurance anyway! Pee in a bottle instead of taking a break like you’re a worthy human being? Yup!
This wouldn’t be as tragic if we actually lived in a culture that values workers. Instead, we find ourselves glorifying people who were born rich and haven’t worked a day in their lives. As Brecht once (1935) pointed out:
Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War.
Who else won it?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every 10 years a great man.
Who paid the bill?
So many reports.
So many questions.
Even our leisure time is determined by work. We are „free“ to pursue Netflix all we want – but after work, as Theodor Adorno rightfully pointed out long before Netflix was a thing. But because leisure time is the time when you don’t work, it is defined by working – in opposition to work. This still puts work squarely in the center of our modern life.
Workers who are forced to wear diapers, child labor in China, underpaid workers with barely any rights, chronic burnout and mountains of human waste produced are just some parts of our collective work shadow. Our collective work shadow is also reflected in enormous student debts that people have to live with, discontent that they are spending too much time away from their loved ones to pay the bills. Our collective shadow is very accurately reflected in Brecht’s wonderful verses: we don’t value the workers enough to remember them.
Those aspects of our collective work shadow deserve a more sophisticated sociological and philosophical considerations that are beyond the scope of this blog and above my paygrade, so I’ll stick to some more specific examples.
I don’t care about my job, I just do it
You may be thinking: „This does not apply to me; I don’t care for my job. I do it for the salary. “
Remember what I said in the previous blog: everything that has mass casts a shadow. You are no exception. The only question is: what kind of a shadow is it?
While there is a case to be made that we should only be doing our jobs for the salary - a good one, at that – to avoid being emotionally manipulated into unpaid work, the question to ask is: if you don’t care about it and it’s not fantastically well paid, why do you continue to do it? There are many jobs one can do, after all, they can’t all be equally horrible so quitting an unfulfilling job can easily be justified.
The truth is that many people stay on their jobs because they’re terrified of the change it requires. Change always leads to anxiety, threat and even guilt – that’s why we call it change, you stop playing by one set of rules and you’re finding the other set. Until you do, what is there but anxiety? It’s hard to be unemployed and not knowing when your next paycheck will arrive, and even if you have the savings, you may choose to do a job you don’t like because it’s a source of safety for you.
What could be the shadowy side of that? Perhaps you fear that you wouldn’t be able to do another job as well, that it would stretch you thin – maybe it would be too stressful? Perhaps you want to start your own business but you’re afraid that you just don’t have it in you? If lack of self-worth is what you mistaken for safety, your shadow is doing a great job at keeping your life stagnant.
A good friend of mine “settled”. He was a very talented pianist. I though he would have a stellar career. His playing used to send shivers down my spine. I still remember how eerie his performance of Prokofiev’s Suggestion diabolique was. He has (had?) the kind of talent that you see once in a generation, a talent that Martha Argerich has, the talent that Ivo Pogorelić has, and those who know me know well that I don’t invoke Argerich’s name in vain. At one point, he tried to qualify for the Chopin competition. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s possibly the most prestigious piano competition in the world and his nerves got the best of him. He went on to graduate from conservatory, but instead of pursuing a career as a concert pianist, he became a piano teacher. He is known to be very tough, very difficult, but people say he produces top notch pianists. He was a sensitive, nice guy and today he’s the guy from Whiplash, trying to get others to avoid his own failures by pushing his students above and beyond. And one could argue, instilling in them the same paralyzing insecurity that cost him his own career. One failure and he gave it all up, he settled. There’s some bitter irony in that. The shadow of not being good enough looms over a successful career as a teacher preventing him from enjoying it.
As you can see, what seems like a conscious decision to do something unchallenging and simple can be rooted in deeper issues.
Let’s consider another specific case.
The other side of success
In 2018, I had a famous client, although famous here refers only to the legal world. My client was a young celebrity lawyer, and a very good one at that. (She is aware that I am mentioning her here.) She quickly rose through the ranks of her company thanks to her remarkable brain, hard work and enviable social skills: she was able to get clients that brought enormous amounts of money to her company and was firmly on the track of getting her name on the building, as she would say.
When she came to therapy, her complaint was that she struggled with panic attacks. These would usually take place in her “free” time. Here, I used quotation marks because she would routinely work 12 – 14h days, so her free time would involve that brief period between coming home, having a glass of wine and falling asleep, often still fully dressed and with her makeup on. Before seeking treatment, she tried medication but after two different antidepressants failed to help, her doctor suggested she seek therapy, which she did begrudgingly. Her friend recommended me and she agreed.
In therapy, her life story quickly unfolded, and it seemed straightforward, although she wasn’t liking what she was telling me and would often try to point out that I am somehow magically getting her to “spew out” all the psychotherapy clichés about parents and childhood, “the Freudian stuff”. Namely, her father was a highly successful engineer who worked for NASA at one time and then made a sizable sum of money in the private sector. His work ethic killed him – quite literally, as he had a heart attack at work, in the middle of a team meeting.
As she was growing up, she would watch him and the recognition he got from others, as well as her mother’s unambiguous adoration. Every absence was explained away: daddy was doing important things. When I once referred to him as an absent father, judging by her stories at least, she became upset saying there were more important things than playing with children, such as solving complicated aeronautic problems. At the same time she was reluctant to put herself in the shoes of a child and say how it must have felt – it was still too hard.
I do not wish to simplify my client’s therapy – it was a long and winding road full of challenges such as intense transference and resistance and several everyday topics and digressions – but at one point she came to the inevitable conclusion: her “love” for work was actually her mimicking her father’s life story, all the way up to her panic attacks.
Did I mention that chest pain and shortness of breath were her main symptoms? She went to the ER several times convinced she was having a heart attack.
A part of that was keeping his memory alive and avoiding mourning the loss of her father – he was, in a way, living through her – at least the most memorable part of him was: his unwavering dedication to work.
But the other part was that if she wasn’t like him, she would have to be like her mother: a woman who gave up her career and was, in my client’s words, a depressed apologist for a man who cared more about airplanes and rockets than his own children. Her mother was undoubtably caring and loving, but my client saw her as weak - and that’s what she had to disown in herself so she wouldn’t risk spending her life married but lonely, like her mother did.
Needless to say, her shadow caught up with her just before she started therapy. Shadows are annoying that way, almost as much as therapists are.
Be perfect or don’t be
Another common way our shadow rears its ugly dark head is through dedication to work and perfectionism. Just recently a client in one of my support groups described herself as a “recovering perfectionist”. Such an apt way of putting it!
When one identifies with perfection, the shadow can be many things.
If you aren’t perfect, perhaps you’re lazy and good for nothing?
If you aren’t perfect, perhaps you’re not worthy of love?
If you aren’t perfect, perhaps you fear being “found out” as a fraud that you really suspect you are?
If you aren’t perfect, it could be that no one will stay with you? Maybe you’ll be fired?
The trick with perfectionism, of course, is that it’s never attainable, so no matter how hard we try, we always fail. A perfectionist, therefore, always suffers at work because their shadow has already caught up with them; every day is a failure for a perfectionist. At the same time, a perfectionist is the perfect employee: they will never say no and will work more than anyone. Their fake image depends on never saying no! So if you wish to exploit a worker, find a perfectionist.
Sometimes people defend perfectionism and say that’s what drives them to be better. And that very well may be true to a certain extent, but at what cost?
One way to see the shadow of perfectionism is as a fear of being seen for what one really is – ordinary, unremarkable, perhaps even bad, unacceptable. So, one pours all of one’s heart and soul into achieving that elusive, nonexistent perfection.
And ends up failing.
Where is your shadow at work?
I hope I was able to show, at least in broad strokes, how our shadow gets the best of us – both our personal shadow and our collective shadow. First, society rigs the game by placing work at its very center and structured the economy around a story that it’s moral to work and not moral rest. There is a lot to be said about the shadow of capitalism and perhaps I’ll leave that for some other blog. But that shadow has a sticky texture, so many of our personal shadowy aspects glue onto it, making it stronger, making us more invested in the whole affair – making us suffer more.
Next time, we’ll dive in some more into this topic. I will give you a few exercises to start unpacking your work shadow. So get ready, it won’t’ be easy, I promise.
