When burnout hits or toxic work takes its toll, you don’t fall apart randomly.
The parts of you that formed years ago to protect you from pain, shame, and helplessness — they step up. They take over. They do what they were built to do.
In the HeartRich framework, I call them your Inner Crews.
For a long time, the people around me thought I was doing fine. From most angles, my life looked stable — even successful.
Inside, I had a word for what was actually happening. A word I made up, because no existing word quite covered it.
Depranxed.
Carl Jung called it the Shadow: the parts of ourselves we’d rather not see. Our hidden fears, flaws, impulses, needs, and shames. The weakness we can’t tolerate in others.
In Self Leadership and parts work, we know the Shadow by another name: the Exiles.
Here’s what happens when you finally turn toward the parts of yourself you’ve been hiding from.
There’s a conversation happening inside you whether you’re aware of it or not. Parts of you protecting, striving, avoiding, criticizing — often at cross-purposes, often exhausting. This book teaches you how to listen to all of it, and how to lead from who you really are.
This post is a spotlight about the compassionate, practical guide to Self Leadership and the inner life.
In this video, I put an important spin on Self-Love & explain how Coaching for Self Leadership helps us heal & grow by loving our problematic protective parts & wounded parts