I walked into an already-sinking ship with a torch…

“I walked into an already-sinking ship with a torch. They didn’t like the light, but the leaks were there long before me.”

The wildcard and the sinking ship

Jung wrote that archetypes are like “pre-existing forms” that shape how stories unfold, both in individuals and in groups. [1] When I look back on that year, I don’t just see “people at work”  I see roles, patterns, and mythic positions being lived out.

One of those roles was the wildcard: the person who doesn’t fit neatly into the hierarchy, who asks awkward questions, who notices when the numbers don’t add up. In myth, that’s often a blend of the Trickster and the Truth-Teller  the one who disturbs the false peace so that something more authentic can emerge. [2][3]

I didn’t arrive trying to be that person. I arrived tired, wanting a calmer life. But years of nursing, clinical work and now psychotherapy training had left me with habits I couldn’t unlearn:

• noticing patterns,
• following data,
• listening to what isn’t being said out loud.

So when I built audits and systems  parcel checks, key records, patterns of discrepancy  I wasn’t trying to expose anyone. I was trying to stop the ship leaking.

But in a fragile system, the person who points to the leak can quickly become confused with the cause of the leak.

Leaks, shadows and the things nobody wants to see

Jung speaks about the shadow as the part of ourselves (or a system) that we don’t want to know about, so we push it away. [1] Organisations have shadows too: unspoken agreements, tolerated misconduct, “this is just how nights work here.”

In this building, the shadow looked like:

• missing items that “no one quite remembered,”
• rules that existed on paper but not in practice,
• subtle discrimination and factional loyalties,
• a culture where some people were untouchable and others expendable.

When I started logging things properly  discrepancies, procedural gaps, incidents that didn’t fit the script  I was, in Jung’s terms, dragging bits of the organisational shadow into consciousness. [1][2]

Some people quietly welcomed that light. Others experienced it as an attack.
The data didn’t accuse anybody by name, but it made denial harder. And when denial becomes harder, someone often has to carry the discomfort.

It’s easier to say, “He’s difficult, he’s intense, he’s a wildcard,” than,

“We’ve been ignoring this for a long time.”

Person-centred ethics in a non-therapeutic world

At the same time, Carl Rogers writes about the importance of genuineness, unconditional positive regard, and empathy as the core conditions for growth. [4] Those values had become part of me. I couldn’t switch them off just because I was in a concierge uniform instead of a counselling room.

So I tried to:

• treat residents as people in distress, not “demanding leaseholders,”
• treat colleagues as nervous systems under pressure, not “lazy staff,”
• hold onto the belief that transparency is kinder in the long run than collusion.

But I was also in an environment where face-saving, fear and factional loyalty were often stronger currencies than honesty.

The tension between those two value systems person-centred ethics and organisational survival is what made the year feel like a living case study in applied psychology.

Rogers says that when a person becomes more congruent, they often disturb rigid systems around them. [4] In that sense, my attempts to be transparent and consistent were not just “good practice”; they were inherently destabilising in a culture built on looking the other way.

The scapegoat and the canary in the coal mine

Another pattern that became clear over time was the scapegoat archetype  the individual onto whom a system projects its disowned tensions. [2]

If a building has long-standing problems missing items, poor communication, unresolved complaints  it’s tempting, when things finally come to a head, to let all that history crystallise around one person:

• the staff member who was “too honest”,
• the person who wouldn’t join a camp,
• the one whose audits showed what people already suspected.

It’s painful to feel yourself sliding into that archetypal role. But there is another figure from myth that sits close to the scapegoat: the canary in the coal mine  the one whose distress is a signal of environmental toxicity, not personal weakness.

Both figures are “blamed” in different ways, but where the scapegoat is used to preserve denial, the canary’s suffering can become a turning point, if anyone chooses to listen.

I’ve come to see my time there as a mixture of both: I carried more projection than was fair, and I also showed, with data and with my health, that the way nights and days were being run was simply not sustainable.

Power, projection and the manager who doesn’t know what to do with you

There was also a quieter, more human level to all of this: the managers trying to navigate their own anxieties, loyalties and fears.

One manager, in particular, seemed caught between recognising my value and fearing the disruption that came with it. In Jungian terms, I had become part of his “shadow material”  the qualities he admired and perhaps once had himself (integrity, systems thinking, clinical calm), but which now sat outside him in the figure of a night employee he couldn’t fully control. [1][2]

His behaviour towards me made more sense when I saw it through that lens:

• moments of genuine support,
• moments of distance and discomfort,
• moments of subtle undermining when my presence made his own position feel exposed.

From a Rogersian angle, you could say: his conditions of worth (being seen as strong, in control, indispensable) were constantly activated around me. [4] I triggered something he hadn’t resolved in himself. And instead of processing that, the system around us tried to resolve it through procedure, hearings, and “conduct” discussions.

The mythic pattern was simple: the king who both needs and resents the oracle.
You want the person who sees the truth… just not too clearly, and not at the wrong time.

When the ship chooses the leaks over the light

In the end, the ship chose its leaks.
The culture that existed long before me reasserted itself.

I didn’t walk away feeling like a hero; I walked away feeling tired, underestimated, and oddly relieved. But when I strip the story back to its bones, a familiar archetypal pattern emerges:

• a complex, already-wounded kingdom,
• a wildcard who arrives with tools, data and inconvenient insight,
• a court split between those who want change and those who fear it,
• a gradual realisation that you cannot fix, alone, what a system is committed to not seeing.

My task now is not to turn that into a victim narrative, but to integrate the experience: to recognise the skills it showed me I have  resilience, pattern recognition, ethical stubbornness  and to accept the limits of what one person can do inside a system that is more invested in appearance than repair.

Walking out with the torch

The torch I carried into that building is the same one I walk out with:

• clinical discipline,
• technical creativity,
• psychological insight,
• and, underneath it all, a stubborn belief that people and systems can change when truth is met with courage rather than punishment.

Jung once said that “what is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate.” [1]

Rogers suggested that when a person is accepted as they are, they can begin to change. [4]

I wasn’t fully accepted there; neither was the truth I carried. So the fate of that “ship” is no longer mine to carry.

What I can carry forward is the knowledge that my work  whether in concierge, clinical, or psychotherapeutic settings will probably always bring a bit of light into places that are used to the dark.

And not everyone will like it.
But the leaks are never my invention; they were there long before me.

The Desert Court and the Story-Keepers

In my mind, the place I walked into was not just a development; it was a desert kingdom.

At the centre of that kingdom stood an oasis-city, ringed by high walls and guarded not just by gates, but by stories. There was a Court of Story Keepers an inner circle of powerful figures whose real currency wasn’t money or title, but the ability to decide what things meant. They didn’t move bricks; they moved narratives. If they called someone “loyal,” the person rose. If they called someone “dangerous,” the person was quietly exiled to the margins.

In Jungian terms, you could say the Court functioned as a collective shadow-manager: the group that holds what the system does not want to admit about itself its fear, envy, fragility and then projects it onto convenient carriers.[6] The more cracks appeared in the kingdom’s infrastructure the leaks in the cistern, the missing parcels, the broken doors the more important it became to keep the story of control intact. When reality wobbles, propaganda stiffens.

So they did what many embattled courts do: they managed anxiety by managing images. Those deemed “one of us” were bathed in a warm story: pious, respectable, aligned. Those who didn’t fit too questioning, too observant, too different were slowly wrapped in a darker tale: suspect, impure, not quite safe. It wasn’t always explicit. Sometimes it was just a raised eyebrow, a strategic silence, a half-sentence left hanging in a back office:

“You know… he’s not really like us.”

In the desert myth, these story-keepers become a kind of priestly caste, standing between the people and the truth, claiming to interpret the will of the gods. Their power lies not in what is, but in what can be made to seem. Over time, the kingdom forgets the difference. The narrative is reality. To question it is to risk being cast as a threat, a heretic, or a vessel of something unclean.

Walking into that environment with a torch trying to track patterns, reconcile numbers, follow procedures felt, at times, like an act of quiet blasphemy. The more the light fell on the leaks, the more the Court needed a figure to carry the tension so the system didn’t have to own it. In group-analytic language, I became a kind of container for the community’s unspoken anxiety and aggression: the one onto whom frustration, fear and doubt could be safely displaced. [7]

From the inside, it did not feel heroic. It felt like stepping into a kingdom where the wells were already cracked, and being told that noticing the cracks was the problem.

Looking back through a Jungian lens, what I see now is a familiar archetypal pattern: a desert court clinging to control through narrative, a wildcard / truth-teller arriving with inconvenient light, and a community unconsciously choosing between the comfort of illusion and the discomfort of reality.[5] The names and uniforms change, but the pattern the way power clusters, the way stories are used to bless some and curse others has been walking the sands for a very long time.

References

[1] C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works Vol. 9 Part 1, Princeton University Press.
[2] C. G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, Penguin.
[3] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press.
[4] Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy, Mariner Books.
[5] Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, Shambhala. [6] C.G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self.
[7] W.R. Bion, Experiences in Groups.