Misbehaving with Integrity: Why the World Needs Its Truth-Tellers Now

The quiet light of soul-truth, enduring even when the world can’t yet see.

For those who see clearly, refuse to bow to illusion, and have paid the price. If that’s you, settle in.

I’ve gathered a few stories I think might help.

For the truth-teller in you, and for the one who’s still hurting.

Part I: Cassandra ~ The Weight of Prescience

In the ancient ruins of Troy, amid the crumbled stones and smouldering ash, lived the memory of Cassandra, the woman who saw it all coming, and was disbelieved.

According to Greek myth, Cassandra was gifted with the power of true prophecy by the god Apollo, who sought her as a lover. When she refused him, Apollo twisted the gift into a curse: she would always tell the truth, and no one would ever believe her.
Cassandra foresaw the fall of Troy, warned her people not to trust the wooden horse, cried out against the deceptions of enemies and friends alike. Her warnings were met with laughter, pity, and disdain. When the city burned, when the walls collapsed in fire and betrayal, Cassandra’s agony was not only the devastation of her homeland, but the private hell of having seen it coming, and being powerless to stop it.

In Jungian psychology, Cassandra stands as a timeless symbol of the truth-teller scapegoated for her prescience. She represents the intuitive voice, the one tethered to the unconscious, to patterns beneath appearances, that society often rejects because it threatens the brittle structures of ego and collective denial.

Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung’s long-time protégé and one of the most trusted interpreters and carriers of his work, wrote that when groups are caught in mass unconsciousness, the bearer of inconvenient insight is often treated as the danger rather than the danger itself being addressed. The problem is not the truth… it is that the truth demands a reckoning that the collective psyche is not ready to endure.

The wound of Cassandra is twofold:
It is the pain of seeing what others cannot yet face, essentially the group shadow.
And it is the heartbreak of being exiled for it.

In leadership spaces, creative industries, spiritual communities, the Cassandra wound appears in subtle, searing ways.
It surfaces when a woman names an abuse of power and is labelled “too emotional.”
When a student voices concern about a toxic community dynamic and is quietly pushed out for being “naive.”
Or when a sensitive executive sees the future risk of a strategy built on short-term gains with no integrity, but their warnings are dismissed as fear-based, negative or disloyal.

The psychic cost is heavy: shame, self-doubt, the erosion of trust in one’s own perception. Many truth-tellers internalise the rejection, asking themselves if they were wrong to see, wrong to speak, wrong to care.

Yet in the deeper language of soul, Cassandra is not a failure.
She is the guardian of reality in a world addicted to illusions.

Jung wrote that “the dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul”, and for the intuitive truth-teller, the “dream” is often not literal but a symbolic capacity: the ability to see what lies beneath surface consensus, to feel the tremors before the earthquake, like the canary in the coalmine.

In this way, Cassandra is not simply a figure of tragedy. She is a fierce, unbroken link to the Self. Her tragedy is not that she saw wrongly… it is that the world around her chose comfort over consciousness.

Today, when you feel the ache of isolation after telling a necessary truth, you are walking with Cassandra.
When you name what others cannot yet bear to see, and meet disbelief, dismissal, or disdain, you are enacting an ancient, archetypal path.
It is not an easy lineage, but it is a sacred one.

The wound of prescience must be honoured, not minimised. For in honouring it, you reclaim your birth right as one who carries the light of seeing, which, whilst it doesn’t bring immediate reward, is in service of the slow, costly, world-changing work of truth itself.

Not rejected for what he was, but for what others could not yet recognise.

Part II: The Ugly Duckling ~ The Pain of Othering and the Fierce Gift of Exile

Before the swan discovers its reflection in clear water, it must endure seasons of being mistaken for something grotesque.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling, the young bird is born into a family that immediately judges him as wrong. Too big, too clumsy, too different. His mother's shame is palpable. The other ducklings bully him. The farm animals mock and attack. Even when he tries to leave, hoping for a kinder reception elsewhere, the pattern repeats.

The Ugly Duckling is not rejected because of anything he has done.
He is rejected because of who he inherently is, and because those around him are incapable of seeing beyond the surface.

In Jungian terms, the duckling represents a soul in exile.
It is the emergence of an inner truth or a new consciousness that does not yet fit into the collective norms. Jung observed that when an individual carries a value or potential the group is not ready to integrate, that individual is often cast out, scapegoated, not because they are truly inferior, but because their very being unsettles the fragile identity of the collective.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes that in the early phases of individuation, the “wild soul” is often misunderstood and maligned, because it carries a frequency that challenges the smallness of the surrounding world that it is destined to outgrow.

The Ugly Duckling suffers, not because he lacks value, but because the environment around him lacks the capacity to recognise that value.

Unlike many traditional hero’s journeys, there is no helper figure who rescues him. No wise old woman, no talking animal, no fairy godmother arrives.
The duckling must endure alone.
The cruelty he faces is unrelenting, and the loneliness nearly fatal. He flees from one rejection to another, surviving through harsh seasons, driven only by the dim, aching intuition that somewhere, somehow, there must be a different life.

Yet in mythic and psychological traditions, exile is not only a sentence of death.
It is a necessary container for soul-formation.

Across stories and traditions, the wilderness, the place of abandonment, loneliness, othering, is often revealed to be strangely protective. Clarissa Pinkola Estés speaks of the “underground initiation” that occurs when a soul is cast out from false belonging. Marie-Louise von Franz reminds us that those driven into exile are often secretly chosen by fate, sent away not because they are broken, but because the soul needs space, pressure, and solitude to ripen into itself.

Exile strips away illusions. It severs the desperate search for external affirmation. It forces the slow, fierce work of learning to affirm one’s own being from within.

The Ugly Duckling does not die in exile.
He endures.

He was not cast out for being ugly. He was cast out for being too much of what they could not understand. He carried the seed of a beauty the group could not recognise- a group that clung to sameness as safety. And so, they named his difference grotesque.

And in enduring, he grows into the fullness of what he already was, unseen.

When he finally glimpses the swans gliding across the water, creatures of breath-taking beauty and grace, he bows his head in shame, expecting more rejection. But this time, he is acknowledged.
He is welcomed.
Because he is not, and never was, an ugly duckling at all.

And crucially, he does not return to the barnyard that scorned him.
There is no warm homecoming to win over the original group.
There is no triumphant vindication in the place that could not or would not see him.
He moves forward.
He finds his true community, among those of like soul, who can perceive him as he truly is.

I see this same ache unfold in the lives of my clients, those who’ve spent years in places or relationships that misnamed their difference as defect.
When we work developmentally, clients often come to recognise the profound soul-cost of staying in environments that refuse to see them clearly or value their gifts.
At first, there is often grief and heartbreak, the desire to be understood by those who have already shown they cannot, or are not willing to.
But over time, something powerful shifts: the realisation that their one wild and precious life is too sacred to be spent trying to prove their worth to those who cannot meet them, in places they have simply outgrown.
And then… slowly, fiercely, they begin to move toward kinder ground.
Toward workplaces, relationships, communities where they are seen not as a distortion of some ideal, but as the living truth of their own design.

This is the soul lesson of the scapegoated truth-teller:
Your unique gifts may be invisible to those who have not yet ripened enough to recognise them. Your difference is not a flaw. It is a seed of destiny.

In the darkest winters, in the harshest seasons of exile, it is the memory of your own soul’s truth, not the approval of the crowd, that will carry you toward the waters where you finally glimpse your wings.

Instinct, glowing softly in the forest of her psyche, waiting to be trusted.

Part III: Vasalisa ~ The Fierce Wisdom of Protecting the Inner Light

In the thick forests of old Russia, under a sky heavy with omens, a young girl named Vasalisa is sent into the wilderness with only a dying ember of hope to guide her.

The story of Vasalisa the Wise tells of a girl whose mother, sensing her own impending death, gifts her daughter a small doll, a talisman of intuition, a living piece of soul.
After her mother’s passing, Vasalisa’s stepmother and stepsisters, consumed by jealousy and resentment, begin a slow, covert campaign to destroy her. They overwork her, isolate her, and finally, cloaked in plausible cruelty, send her into the dark forest to beg fire from Baba Yaga, the terrifying, death-dealing witch of Slavic lore.

Vasalisa’s exile into the woods is meant as a punishment.
But, as with so many fairy tales, it becomes a profound initiation.
She must learn to navigate a realm where appearances deceive, where the polite face of civilization falls away, and only instinct can guide survival.

Jungian analysts view Vasalisa as a tale of the awakening of intuition and inner sovereignty.
The doll given by her mother represents the seed of knowing planted deep within, a knowing that must be listened to carefully, and trusted against all outer appearances.

In the forest, Vasalisa faces Baba Yaga’s impossible tasks: sorting mountains of millet from dirt, cooking meals without instruction, enduring the terror of a house that spins on chicken legs and bones that whisper.
Each time, her survival depends not on force or persuasion, but on the quiet, unwavering fidelity to her inner voice, the whispered guidance of her doll, a remnant of her mother’s Sovereign care: know when to bow your head, know when to keep silent, eat when you are hungry, rest when you are tired.

There is no ally among the humans she has known.
The stepmother and stepsisters do not relent or repent.
There is no father who comes looking for her.
And crucially, there is no rescue from the dangers she faces.

In Jungian terms, Vasalisa’s journey is not about growing stronger by becoming harder.
It is about growing wiser by becoming more discerning, integrating the fierce awareness that purity alone is not protection.

It is in the wild forest, away from the false hearth, that Vasalisa must learn a critical truth:
If you do not guard the sacred light within you, it will be extinguished by those too cold to bear its warmth.

Through her trials, Vasalisa comes to understand that goodness without awareness is vulnerable.
That purity without discernment invites predators.
That survival, and soulhood, depend not only on carrying the light, but on seeing the truth of what threatens it, even amongst those who were meant to be your kin, and acting accordingly.

And she learns, through the doll’s wisdom, that there are seasons where the deepest strength is to keep still, to wait, to rest, to let the unconscious work while the conscious self recovers.

This is not weakness, it is the deep feminine knowing that not all power looks like action. The precise knowing of how to meet the female predator: when to speak, when to step back, and when to carry your light elsewhere.

This is an unbelievably painful maturation. It can almost kill you at a soul-level.
But by virtue of the fact that it happens, it seems it is a necessary one.

When Vasalisa survives Baba Yaga’s tests, she is given the fire she sought, a skull lantern burning with an unquenchable light.
She carries it home not to heal the toxic hearth, but to reveal it.
The fire illuminates the rot that kindness could not heal. It burns away the stepmother’s and sisters’ cruelty, leaving Vasalisa free to walk toward a life worthy of her light.

In my integral development and Jungian coaching practices, I have witnessed this arc of development in wholehearted female leaders, and I have painfully traversed it myself.
Those who carry a natural goodness, a warmth of spirit, often find themselves targeted in environments where envy, fear, coldness, or a commitment to comfortable ignorance dominate.
At first, the soul resists seeing the betrayal, hoping that love alone will be enough.
But there comes a moment, painful and clarifying, when the deeper intuition rises:
Not everyone will honour the light. Some will actively seek to extinguish it, out of disbelief in its healing power.
And you are not called to pour your life out trying to warm those who wish only to diminish you.

It is in this moment that true wisdom begins.
The wisdom to protect the inner fire above all else.
The wisdom to discern between soul kin and soul cold.
The wisdom to walk forward, away from burn out, anxiety, self-doubt, and depression, carrying the living light into a future where it can flourish.

Vasalisa’s story reminds us:
It is not enough to carry beauty, goodness, or vision.
We must also carry the fierce clarity to defend it, and the courage to walk away from whatever seeks to blow it out from smallness, envy, fear or malevolence.

A crown that wounds, when power is claimed without truth.

Part IV: The Emperor’s New Clothes ~ The Danger of Inflated Leadership and the Risk of Silent Cultures

In Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, a vain ruler commissions two weavers who promise to create the most exquisite garment ever made. A suit so fine that it will be invisible to anyone unfit for their position or in his view, hopelessly stupid.
The Emperor, his ministers, and his subjects, all terrified of being exposed as unworthy, pretend to see the non-existent fabric presented by the con men.
The Emperor parades through the streets in his imaginary splendour, while deep beneath the surface smiles, the reality of his nakedness weighs heavy in the unspoken thoughts of the people.

In the most well-known version, it is a small child who blurts out the obvious: “But he hasn’t got anything on!”
The spell is broken, the truth ripples through the crowd, and yet, even as the Emperor hears it, even as he knows it is true, he continues his parade with even greater pride.
Better to maintain the illusion than admit the humiliation of exposure.

In this version, truth emerges through innocence, but leadership remains too captured by pride to transform.

Yet there is an older, lesser-known telling of the tale.
In some folk versions, it is not a child but a wise old woman who speaks first.
Seeing the Emperor’s nakedness, she calls out, not mockingly, but with the grave clarity of one who has lived long enough to see the devastation that pride and falsehood can wreak upon a people.
Unlike the child, the old woman knows the risks of telling the truth. She has seen what happens to truth-tellers in the courts of fragile rulers. She knows the cost, and she chooses to speak anyway.

In this telling, the King stops.
He does not continue the charade.
Instead, he acknowledges the truth of her words.
He sees how far vanity and the fear of losing face had possessed him.
He brings the wise woman back to the palace as a trusted adviser.
He punishes the deceitful merchants who had profited from his pride.
And he begins the work of restoring his reign, with humility, discernment, and a renewed understanding that leadership must be in service to the people, not to the ego’s hunger for admiration. And that to cast out a truth-teller is to lose a precious and loyal asset, out of defensiveness and stupidity.

It is a different kind of story.
Not a satire.
But a possibility: the redemption of sovereignty through humility.

In depth psychology, the figure of the Sovereign, the King or Queen archetype, is meant to serve as the axis of the kingdom.
The Sovereign’s true task is to care for the people, to hold space for life to flourish, to uphold justice and mutual thriving.

But when the Sovereign becomes inflated, when pride, isolation, and the desperate hunger for approval overtake conscious responsibility, leadership collapses inward.
Shadow accumulates in the corners of the court.
Truth-tellers are silenced.
Criticism is treated as betrayal.
And the leader loses touch not only with reality, but with the silent majority, those whose unspoken fears, needs, and wisdom are vital to the health of the kingdom.

There are two great dangers to leadership when sovereignty is inflated by ego:

Surrounding oneself only with yes-men, courtiers and advisers who reflect the image the leader wants to see, not the reality that must be seen.

Losing the ability, or willingness, to hear the voices of the quiet majority who don’t care enough to risk challenge, and the silent minority, those too fearful or fatigued to speak openly after having been shut down.

Both are symptoms of the same wound: forgetting that leadership is not a private entitlement, but a sacred trust.
A mandate, given not for personal glory, but for the stewardship of the whole. And the whole doesn’t mean the majority, it means each living soul.

Pride does indeed come before a fall.
But the greater tragedy is what is lost before the fall:
The breaking of mutuality and trust.
The severing of the leader from the living reality of those they are meant to serve.
The replacement of service with self-protection or self-aggrandisement.

When a leader of a community, an organisation, or a nation, surrounds themselves only with flattery, silences dissent, and hides from the truths their people already see, they set the stage not for longevity, but for the group or society’s collapse.
They may still parade for a time, but the foundations beneath them are already hollowing out.

We are living, now, in a time when the risks of sovereign inflation are playing out across the world stage with devastating clarity.
We see what happens when leaders refuse to face their own shadows, when institutions prioritise looking good over being good, when entire communities fall silent under the unspoken pressure to maintain the status quo rather than grow.

It is not cynicism to name this.
It is, as Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes, the courage to “misbehave with integrity.”

It is the sacred willingness to speak the necessary truths, even when doing so risks exile, discomfort, or disruption of the false peace.

This isn’t just myth. It plays out in real-world leadership, especially among my clients who are learning to misbehave with integrity, to stand not only for personal authenticity, but for what serves the whole.
It is not always easy.
It requires discernment, courage, and a fierce loyalty to the soul’s deeper compass, rather than to the brittle comforts of image management.

But now, more than ever, this kind of leadership, this soulful misbehaviour to disrupt the performance of virtue, is needed.
Needed to protect what is real.
Needed to challenge what is hollow.
Needed to remember that sovereignty, in its truest form, exists not to protect itself, but to serve life and the creation of healthy, rather than unhealthy, power.

For true sovereignty is not about perfection.
It is about the willingness to listen, to correct course, to serve something larger than the fragile needs of the ego.

It is about remembering:
The crown is not for the leader.
It is for the people.

A flame passed down through silence and exile- still burning.

Part V: Why the Wound of the Truth-Teller Matters

Across myths and stories, the figure of the truth-teller appears again and again:
Cassandra, gifted with prescience but cursed to be disbelieved.
The Ugly Duckling, cast out for carrying an unseen, unrecognised beauty.
Vasalisa, sent into the dark forest to protect the fragile ember of her soul’s knowing.
The Wise Old Woman, risking the wrath of the King to speak the truth that could restore the kingdom.

Each carries a wound, exile, scapegoating, misunderstanding, but also a gift:
The capacity to stay aligned with reality when others favour the comfort of conformity.
The fierce loyalty to the living truth, even when it costs belonging.

In every era, the courage to stand apart, to name what others would rather ignore, to protect the fragile light of what is good, true, and necessary, remains one of the rarest and most essential acts of soul.

This piece was born from my deep desire to honour that courage.
To name the cost of truth-telling as evidence of profound inner strength.
And to offer nourishment for those who find themselves carrying the burden of seeing clearly in a time that often rewards denial.

In my work as a coach, I have the privilege of walking alongside wholehearted leaders, creatives, and visionaries who have chosen again and again to stand in truth, even when easier paths of silence were available.
I have seen the loneliness, the heartbreak, the moments of doubt. And, if you can’t already tell, I’ve walked through the fire of this particular spiritual initiation myself, one that scorches, shapes and ultimately clarifies what truly matters, not without pain and disillusionment.
But I have also seen the fierce beauty that emerges from these souls, a beauty that cannot be faked, that cannot be crushed, that becomes a living testament to the soul’s resilience.

If you recognise yourself in these stories, if you have spoken when it would have been safer to stay silent, if you have carried a truth others could not or would not receive, know this:

You are not alone.
You walk in the company of those who have, across all times and cultures, chosen to serve life rather than illusion.
Your wound is real, but so is your gift.

We need you.

We need your clear seeing.
We need your fierce tenderness.
We need your courage to misbehave with integrity when the structures you live and work within demand complicity instead.

You may not always be recognised by those around you.
You may not always be thanked.
You may, at times, feel the cold winds of exile more keenly than the warmth of welcome.

But make no mistake:
The soul of the world leans closer every time someone chooses truth over comfort, clarity over cowardice, sovereignty over shadow.

And somewhere, even now, others are kindling their own inner fires by the light you carry.

Hold fast.

Stay true.

The story is not over yet.