“I am always running”
This is the story of a woman who heads the sales and marketing division of an international financial holding company. Anna is 34; she works hard and successfully—each year her team delivers several projects and major deals. She is building her career with confidence, and colleagues and leaders value her.
What brought her to Shadow Work was lateness and constant rushing. From the outside the problem did not look severe: Anna is rarely actually late, and when she is, it is at most five to seven minutes—but she runs—always. She cannot recall a single time she left early and traveled to a meeting without hurrying. Used to pushing through difficulty, she bore this trait stoically: she could sprint—it was fine if she was in heels and up a flight of stairs; never mind that she was drenched in sweat and her laptop bag was heavy… But there are circumstances you cannot ignore or overcome through sheer effort—her health. Over the past year she fell seriously ill twice, including pneumonia; she lost weight and began to notice that a state of intense tension had become her norm.
Here is Anna’s account in brief: “I am always running—literally. Because I am invariably late. Either I am genuinely late, or I arrive at the last moment. I have tried every way to deal with this. Even if I start getting ready early, I stretch it until the moment I should already have left, and I am still getting dressed. It is a daily hell where I curse myself for leaving late again, feel guilty that people will wait for me, am ashamed, and rage at everyone around me who drives too slowly and won’t let me slip through on a yellow light or blocks me from jumping onto the train as the doors are closing. I am exhausted; I am sick of this strategy, yet I end up in it again and again.”
The facilitators ask: “What would you like to happen? What resolution of the situation matters to you?”
Anna: “To stop running, walk calmly, notice life around me instead of rushing past with my tongue hanging out, and save my energy for other things that matter to me…”.
What is the cause?
The facilitators asked a series of questions to clarify the heart of the request: “What are you running from?”, “How do you feel in this situation?”, “What do you tell yourself?”, “What does this remind you of?”. Thinking aloud brings back for Anna a picture of how, as a child, adults were always hurrying her. “I did everything slowly. I ate slowly, got ready for kindergarten slowly, then held my mother up while getting ready for school. Constantly in my ears: ‘Faster! Faster! You won’t make it! You plan your time wrong! There’s too little time left! Come on, faster!’”
Anna’s father was the type who was never in a rush, largely because he was not drawn into the stream of household tasks—he could keep his own rhythm and schedule. He commented cynically on his wife’s inability to manage their daughter and took pride in being the far more successful parent.
Next, the facilitators worked to restore the destructive scenario as fully as possible. That is important so that it can then be transformed.
First, they needed to reproduce each character’s message in one or two sentences. The content conveyed not so much the words once spoken to little Anna as the emotion behind them.
Anna was able to return to the painful childhood situation that repeated so often—the one in which the scenario was “recorded.” And now, as an adult woman, she gained access to feelings experienced as a child. She was surprised that the primary feeling was fear. Telling the story of her lateness, Anna never once mentioned fear. Shame, guilt, tension—yes—but fear had been completely erased from her awareness. It was repressed. It went into the Shadow. Yet in the course of her Work she realized that the child, above all, was frightened—both by how bitterly her parents argued and by how little they noticed her. The fear repressed from that scene acted like sealing wax that “sealed” this metaphorical envelope.
This is the essence and skill of those leading the process: to help the client reach the causal layer and transform it. Describing this art and magic is very hard—practically impossible. It is like retelling a play—you have the plot, but not the full beauty of living it.
It matters not only to notice and understand the play unfolding inside, but also to find a way to “re-record” its content so that a new state and a different picture of the world can be integrated into life.
Having relived in this Work the fear that her childhood world was collapsing (her parents soon separated) and her decision to take on saving it, Anna understood where many of her other traits came from—the drive to control everything, decide for everyone, and carry it all herself. In personal relationships she found it hard to speak about herself, her wishes, and preferences. Seeing in the Work the little girl whom her parents did not notice, she understood how unmet her childhood needs had remained. She understood how impossible it was to “hold” her parents together—and how futile her attempts still are to stubbornly hold many processes in place. Her original wish to calmly notice life around her now took concrete shape. First she needed to step out of the scene where her parents fight and she, as a child, is paralyzed with terror.
Shadow Work
In the Shadow of her life lived fear; on the surface—the decision to take everything on herself and pretend all was well. Lateness was the “glitch in the program,” the fiasco of her inner controller, meant to draw attention to the Shadow.
The moment Anna saw her inner reality from the outside—its players, their roles and influence—the true nature of the whole scenario rose from the unconscious into awareness. The fear–inhibition–tension model lost its hold over her. As an adult, Anna needed to recognize that she now had a choice she did not have as a child: to act differently, regardless of how her parents treated her. If as a child she tried to please both father and mother at once—first slowing down like her father, then tensing and rushing like her mother—now she needed to find her own way of acting, not only when getting ready but in her whole relationship with time and busyness in life.
Anna needed several more individual sessions with her coach to finalize her strategy. First she took on the task of creating breaks and pauses in her schedule, leaving time to “come back to herself.” Then her calendar filled with events that served the goal of “noticing life around her”: walks with no particular purpose, solo visits to exhibitions and the cinema, time alone with herself. At work she could finally notice moments when her team was exerting too much effort with no visible result. They were able to focus on two key projects that became breakthroughs for the company.
And yes—she no longer runs up stairs, late for meetings. Anna also reconsidered how she conducts negotiations. Surprisingly, she found she did not need nearly as many meetings to run the business successfully. Gradually she became someone who even has time to drink coffee before a meeting. That strategy helped her close several major contracts, because she could settle herself calmly before an important conversation.
The space of Shadow Work makes it possible to unlock a destructive pattern and reach a different, desired outcome. That means vital energy that was once spent holding the Shadow back is finally freed.
