The Hollow Invitation: A Client Story About Rising, Being Undermined, and Reclaiming Sovereignty

The Innocent Sovereign: quiet power, unclaimed crown.

“They keep saying they want me to step up, but every time I do, something in the system pushes back on me.”

That was how a client opened a session recently, eyes bright with frustration and hurt. She worked in a nonprofit organisation that often spoke of values like collaboration, transparency, and impact- values that attracted her to the job in the first place. Over the years, she’d been invited into increasingly senior roles. They said they admired her vision, her emotional intelligence, her ability to hold nuance in complex dynamics.

But when she tried to bring structure to messy processes, suggest improvements, or call out subtle inequities… she was met with silence. Or worse, her ideas would be dismissed in the meeting, only to be picked up by someone else a few weeks later, credited to another voice and even met with a sly smile.

She began to wonder: Was I imagining this? Am I too much? Too idealistic? Too intense? Why am I not being taken seriously?

The Pattern: Called to Serve, Then Undermined

One week, she was invited to co-lead a project on team culture, only to find herself left out of key decisions. When she raised a concern about equity in how voices were being heard, a senior colleague told her she was “reading too much into things.” At the next meeting, someone else raised the same point in relation to themselves and was praised for their insight and asked to lead on diversity.

Another time, she offered to draft a clear, compassionate code of conduct to help the team navigate tension. The leadership thanked her… and then quietly gave the task to someone else. What was produced was underwhelming and did not address what was not working. Her initiative was met with ‘head-patting’ style compliments, but no follow-through. Her leadership was welcomed in words, but she was silently by-passed in actions.

And through all of it, her body started to speak what her mind had been trying to override. She developed chronic fatigue, and digestive issues that left her bloated and nauseated at the end of every workday, barely able to eat more than a single bite of a meal. She literally couldn’t stomach what was happening. She couldn’t metabolise the incongruence between what was said and what was actually done, especially alongside the growing sense that others were in on something that she wasn’t.

The Psyche’s Mirror

From a Jungian perspective, this wasn’t just about organisational dysfunction. It tapped into something deeper, a familiar but painful emotional landscape shaped by her early life: being expected to give, but never fully received. Being praised, but not protected. Being used, but not valued. Being flattered, but not truly welcomed. A very painful, demeaning experience.

This is what Jung called a complex, a cluster of emotionally charged thoughts, feelings, memories and perceptions that constellate around a common theme; an emotional knot from the past that gets reactivated in current relationships. And in her case, it was entangled with a deeper archetypal pattern that we came to name and work with directly.

The Innocent Sovereign: Being Sabotaged Instead of Supported

In this client’s case, we recognised that the part of her stepping forward again and again was what she actually named her Innocent Sovereign, a new leader who brings vision, care, and purpose, without manipulation or ego. She dearly wanted to serve. She believed in the mission. She came with a quick mind, good faith, and a deep desire to help the system evolve. She did not believe in ‘politics’, she believed in fairness, and she wanted everyone to benefit.

But her presence, so clean, so pure, so honest, began to activate the parts of the organisation that weren’t ready to grow. She was met with subtle pushback, not because she was doing anything wrong, but because she was embodying a kind of leadership that threatened the unspoken rules of the system. And the more she tried to earnestly step forward, the worse it got.

The Innocent Sovereign can carry the wound of being seen but not supported, valued in theory, but undermined in practice. Often, she was a first-born, parentified child or golden child who felt pressured to be perfect and forced to self-abandon. So naturally, her innocence and purity are mixed up with her sovereignty. She’s been the ‘little parent’ since she was far too young. And now, as an adult, she brings a kind of light that threatens to expose shadow. She calls others to higher standards, just by being herself, which can provoke resentment from those still operating in fear, hierarchy, resentment or ego. Unfortunately, because she won’t play power games (they don’t make sense to her, they feel like a psychic regression), she is an easy target for projection, because some consider her ‘too good to be true’ or lacking in some kind of grit. This isn’t usually true, she is likely full of grit because of what she has had to deal with in early life. But people can be incredibly cynical and judgmental, because of how they’ve been hurt, and the different ways they’ve adapted. When shadow remains unintegrated, it can sabotage the efforts of someone who could make a difference for everyone’s benefit, and this can happen at both an individual and collective level.

While I’m speaking here about women, these dynamics aren’t limited to us. I’ve also seen sensitively attuned men, especially those who lead with emotional intelligence, face dismissal or exclusion in systems that claim to value those qualities, but don’t know truly how to receive them.

Years ago, I dated a male ballet dancer who was quietly brilliant- humble, generous and naturally gifted. One of his peers once admitted that he had purposely tackled him in a football game to injure him before a major performance. The injury, a snapped achilles, affected his whole career. Another time, razor blades were found inside his pointe shoes, planted in the wings off stage. This is what it can look like when someone’s unguarded excellence triggers others’ unacknowledged shame. It’s not just women who experience this dynamic, the pattern is the same regardless of gender. The one who refuses to harden becomes the screen for other people’s projections.

That said, I do find these dynamics can be more intense between women, because of how we’ve been socialised, within patriarchal systems, to downplay our power, disconnect from our needs and compete for limited space.

In some cases, when wounds around power, competition or scarcity go unhealed, women may project those wounds onto others, especially when the other woman seems to embody something they had to give up. If she’s small, softly spoken, or carries a perceived innocence through youth or essence, like my client, that can provoke unexpected hostility.

Sometimes, this hostility comes not just from envy, but from deep discomfort. Her presence stirs something buried, because once upon a time, they too may have been innocent, earnest, or trusting. But they had to disown those qualities to survive. To be taken seriously. To belong. So, when someone dares to show up embodying what they had to abandon, it hurts. And because that hurt is unconscious, it often flips into projection.

At first, they may idealise her innocence, but then they will resent it. They may begin to question her motives. They don’t trust the light, because they learned not to trust their own.

It’s important to name the difference between naïveté and genuine earnestness. The Innocent Sovereign doesn’t lack complexity, she often carries immense depth and hard-earned clarity. What others read as naïveté is often simply her refusal to become jaded. She leads from conviction, not strategy, and that’s threatening. Her vision is clean, not because she’s untested, but because she hasn’t let cynicism define her. And that refusal can feel unbearable to those who had to trade their sincerity for safety.

So the psyche flips. It projects not just light, but shadow. Suddenly, she becomes ‘too good to be true’, or seen as manipulative, or self-righteous.

Until she shows some kind of shadow, some sign of fallibility or even a sharp edge to relieve the pressure of their projections, they may struggle to trust her. It makes their own unkind thoughts more bearable if they can believe she deserves them, which, of course, she doesn’t.

Some may argue, and I’ve heard colleagues say this, that she really can’t be trusted until she shows her fangs. But this, too, is often a projection. It’s a way of demanding she prove she’s for real by showing a dark side, when really, their discomfort is not hers to fix. She shouldn’t have to perform shadowy behaviour just to make them feel more at home. Maybe manipulation of power isn’t the route she took. But in group settings where power plays are the order of the day, this dynamic can tip into bullying, othering, or relational violence.

The Innocent Sovereign’s strength may lie not in displaying her shadow performatively, but in refusing to abandon her essence, despite everything she’s been through, just to be palatable to others’ pain. She invites others to rise and meet her, and as far as I can tell, that is real sovereignty.

And so the projection may intensify into what Jungians call projective identification, where others attempt to force her into living out their unsubstantiated accusations by gossiping, turning others against her because they can’t get to her directly. If they subconsciously believe innocence is dangerous, or are simply threatened by her values-led approach, they may provoke her until she withdraws, snaps, or completely shuts down, and then use that as proof that they were right that she was either too weak, or must have had a secret agenda.

In Jungian terms, this is enantiodromia: the psyche’s attempt to restore balance by swinging to the opposite of what’s been repressed. Here, what’s been exiled is innocence, but instead of being reclaimed, it is projected onto her, then flipped and distorted into mistrust which they try to get seeded through gossip.

They don’t reject her because she’s unqualified, they reject her because, just by being herself, she makes them feel disqualified from their own moral centre.

This is incredibly tricky for her, because the last thing she should do is contort herself to meet the limitations of others’ unresolved wounding. And when she does try to name the way she’s being treated- calmly, clearly, without blame- just with a request for change, she may get accused of thinking she’s perfect, that perhaps she should go hunting for shadows rather than calling them out. But this too, is another ego defence. It protects others from the discomfort of being seen, and in the process, their avoidance of shame is centred, while she is shamed instead. The projection of moral superiority onto her is a form of gaslighting via character attack- a classic shame-shifting tactic that flips the roles of aggressor and truth-teller. Her clarity isn’t arrogance, it’s self-respect. Naming mistreatment doesn’t mean she sees herself as flawless, it means she refused to internalize what isn’t hers. And when she stops self-abandoning, refusing to carry the projected shadow any longer, others may project pride onto her simply because she’s no longer available for erasure.

Think of my client like a young Queen Elizabeth, stepping into the role of monarch with humility and strength, only to realise that claiming authority isn’t the same as being respected for it. During that time, she found quiet comfort in watching The Crown, seeing the young Elizbeth carrying the weight of duty without collapsing into bitterness or self-betrayal. It reminded her that leadership isn’t always recognized in the moment, but over time, those who embody it as a way of being often outlast those who resist it or try to lead from control. That view gave her strength, and helped her trust the long arc of becoming. Sadly, it takes time for some people to take you seriously, due to their own limitations. This was also her first leadership role, and we explored how many people, frustratingly, judge others based on first impressions, forming what I call a ‘fixed listening’ for them. In leadership terms, this can mean that if you started on the bottom rung of the ladder at an organization, no matter how hard you try, some people just can’t grow their vision of you in lock step with your growth and development. I’ve also found that people who can’t be with their own vulnerability will hold your conscious expression of yours against you and will therefore never see you as a leader because you showed what they would consider ‘weakness’.

None of this is ideal, but it is what happens. Especially with women’s wounds. And to deny it with a ball-breaker, air punching attitude, hollow ‘girlboss’ rhetoric or the tired trope of “you just need stronger boundaries” would be to erase my client’s lived experience. Her pain wasn’t caused by a lack of boundaries, it came from being misread, undermined, projected onto and ultimately scapegoated by people who weren’t willing to self-reflect, share power or grow.

She rose without rivalry, and found a realm that could receive her.

Reclaiming Her Sovereignty

Our work together wasn’t just about how to manage the dynamics at work which were increasingly challenging. It was about healing the pattern itself. We worked with archetypes, narratives and metaphor to help her see her experience not as a personal failure, but as a developmental journey, a heroine's call that had been twisted by a system, and by individuals, who simply weren’t capable of meeting her.

There were further nuggets of understanding that fell into place to complete the jigsaw. We explored how she may be carrying the Rejected Helper complex, from the devastating early experience of being needed as a caretaker but not nurtured as a child, forced to grow up too soon and so developing an excruciating complex around being useful but unloved.

This is such tender work, and I always remind my clients that just because we have a complex, it doesn’t mean it is always active or in the driving seat. It is completely insulting to the soul to suggest that because of such a complex, the only reason my client was stepping up to help or lead was in order to be loved, for example. I always cringe when I hear people coaching others this way. It’s a huge over-simplification, very diminishing and does nothing to honour their essence, which is full of goodness and which in this case was largely what wanted to express itself through this new role. However, knowing what a complex is, and how it comes about, can explain those moments of blind rage, gripping fear, or deep grief at being treated badly in the present day by unskillful or misattuned others. Jung talked about being ‘possessed’ in such moments, and it really does feel like that, when we struggle to steady ourselves and stay in our adult self in the face of discrimination or bullying.

We engaged in very gentle inner parts work over time to support the little one inside who was essentially un-mothered. We used somatic practices to help her reconnect with what was true in her body in the face of sabotage, even when her mind was spinning in self-doubt. We practiced new ways of speaking and setting boundaries, allowing her to experience what it felt like to stand in her power without apology in the face of layer upon layer of projection.

Something began to shift. As her self-trust grew, her physical symptoms improved. Her mental clarity sharpened. She stopped trying to win over a system that couldn’t see her, even though it had said all the right things superficially, and instead began to trust her own knowing, as well as the concrete data she was receiving.

We explored whether there were any women who truly embodied healthy sovereignty, women she could connect with, who might mentor her and actually ‘put their money where their mouth is’ as my Dad used to say. The truth was, there were ‘inflated’ female sovereigns, who felt performative and surface-led, more concerned with image and self-interest than with nurturing and mentorship. And this is often a threshold moment in my coaching work. Sometimes my clients have to confront that there is simply nothing left for them in their current environment. This can be a painful truth. One that often reactivates the mother wound. As an Integral Development coach, I understand what is happening here, and it’s actually good news. When we are ready to let go of ‘fitting in’, and when we realise that we can declare whatever we want from our place of sovereignty, but we can’t change those around us, we choose to actually change our environment. And that’s when we step into grounded, authentic power, instead of leaking it by staying close to people who just aren’t up for playing the same game.

Outgrowing the Old, Entering the New

Within three months, she received an offer from a new organisation: double the salary, a clear leadership mandate discussed powerfully at interview, and a boss who didn’t just say they needed her to keep her quiet or stop her asking for more, but followed through in action, trust, and tangible support. The difference was that there was a genuine sovereign at the head of the organization, one who knows how to empower and enable people to step fully into their greatness, one who is big enough to acknowledge and make space for budding leaders instead of gatekeeping power because of their own insecurities.

She told me, “It’s like night and day. I used to feel like I was swimming against the tide, getting hit by wave after wave. Now, it’s like the water actually wants to hold me.”

Now, her ideas are received. Her team is thriving. She’s flourishing, because instead of twisting herself into a pretzel trying to figure out how to fit into a broken system, she broke the pattern of staying too long in places that drained her life force. Oh, and her fatigue, her digestive issues? I’m sure you can guess. They completely healed once her body no longer had to carry the cost of being repeatedly rejected and subtly undermined.

A Reflection for You

If you’ve ever found yourself in a similar pattern, invited in, only to be subtly shut out, you’re not alone. And you’re not imagining it.

Sometimes, it’s not about your readiness. It’s about the system, and others’ unreadiness to receive what you bring.

And when that’s the case, your healing may come not from trying harder to fit, but from trusting your own deeper invitation. The one that’s not coming from a broken boardroom or brittle hierarchy, but from your own soul.

Periodically I share a fully anonymised, permission-based case study like this, real experiences from my coaching practice, offered with care to shine light on the deeper dynamics many of us face at work and in life, that I find don’t often get talked about openly enough.

If this story resonates, I’d be honoured to support you.
I offer one-to-one shadow work coaching for soulful, sensitive women ready to reclaim their power and lead from a place of embodied truth.