Accepting the Shadow

A contribution by Joel Blackstock about people's aversion to accountability

Environments of Accountability
Why certain individuals flee from them

by Joel Blackstock
Licensed Clinical Social Work Supervisor (LCSW-S)
Founder at Taproot Therapy Collective (Hoover, Alabama)

January 29, 2026

We are sitting in a circle and I tell people to imagine me handing them a ball. I tell them: “This ball represents your part in the conflict. I want you to hold it and tell us what you are responsible for.”

In a healthy environment, a person can look at it and say, “Okay, I did yell. That was my part.” They can sit with the weight of it without collapsing.

Anyone with a personality disorder can’t. Once you see it you can’t unsee it. This isn’t really about whether or not somebody did something, it’s about whether or not they’re able to look at what happened.

Some people can’t even introspect for a second, even if what happened actually wasn’t their fault. They’re defending themselves before they’re thinking.

When I did family counseling, I would often draw two lines down the board and ask someone to write down what they thought their partner did wrong.

What you see on one side are objective claims. Someone says this person spends more money than they said they would. This person didn’t tell me where they were and they lied about it, or this person says that they will stop behavior X and then they don’t.

Those are objective claims.

On the other side of the board you’ll see subjective claims. “They called me stupid. They called me a liar. They think that I’m crazy.” It’s an emotional narrative.

It’s a way of me making it your problem that I spent too much money, lied about something and wouldn’t stop. You have a reaction to my behavior that makes me feel less than.

“That’s not my problem, it’s your problem. You attacked my version of reality.”

The person we are discussing — the one with the fragility and the low capacity for honesty — cannot hold the figurative “ball.” To them, it feels like a live grenade.

Whatever comes up, their only biological imperative is to get the ball away from them so they don’t have to sit with anything “wrong about who I am.” Especially when what is wrong is real.

You will see them cycle through a predictable, frantic defense just to drop the ball:

Denial: “I didn’t do it.” (Even if there is proof).

Deflection: “Okay, I did it, but you did something worse.”

Victimhood: “I had a good reason to do it because I was forced (provoked).”

Amnesia: “I honestly don’t remember that happening.”

This might seem heady, but if you are familiar with Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey, there is a perfect, structural explanation for this behavior.

In screenwriting, the definition of a protagonist is the character who must change to survive the story. The antagonist cannot change.

The shark in Jaws (book and movie) does not have a character arc; the alien does not learn a lesson. They are forces of nature, frozen in their drive.

In business and in life, an “antagonist” is simply a person who is frozen on the Hero’s Journey. They are stuck in a predictive algorithm where they cannot accept reality enough to update their programming. Denial, deflection, victimhood, amnesia and false equivalency are just the subroutines they run to maintain their stuckness (sic).

These individuals actually thrive in bureaucracies and traditional hierarchies.

Why? Because those structures rely on objective requirements and inputs — forms, boxes to check, rigid metrics. These “stuck” people are masters at gaming the system; they run the metric rather than the actual task the metric was meant to measure.

Adam Curtis: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, BBC television documentary series, is relevant here.

They mistake the mirror for the reflection and the subject for the object.

I remember being a kid in the 80s and 90s when the internet was first being talked about. There was this naive, left-leaning libertarian (I am old enough to remember when conspiracy theorists and libertarians were considered left wing) optimistic that if the government could no longer control the flow of information, people would naturally gravitate toward the truth. The idea was that access equals enlightenment.

The problem with that idea was that it assumed people want the truth, not just confirmation that they already know it.

In actuality, we are behavior-reinforcement engines. We don’t want to change; we want to know that what we are already doing is right because that is all we feel emotionally capable of handling.

It takes being confronted with undeniable evidence to change, but even then, people strive to define self-improvement on their own terms, so they never have to admit they were wrong.

What the internet actually did was give people a million data points to argue that anything they want to believe is true. If you want to believe the earth is flat, you can type that into a search bar and find 50 reasons why you are right and everyone else is crazy.

A lot of the neuroscientists I follow explain exactly why we work this way: our brains are wired to protect our identity, not to seek objective facts.

In Jungian terms, this is about accepting the shadow.

We are able to create the change we want to see in the world but we have to start with the self. We have to admit that we are the ones typing “why the earth is flat” into the browser because we have a data-point generator that gives us infinite information that we’re already OK.

That is why we have to strip bureaucratic communication out of business and force people to communicate authentically. Authentic communication is the only thing that detects these types because they cannot fake the nuance of real human connection; they can only fake the “form” of it.

You’re not Enough

You can’t do the work for them. Your job is to try and get them out of the loop but if they won’t move, we apply the final rule (of family therapy):

“When a person refuses to respect a boundary internally, the boundary must move externally. The only boundary left is distance and time.”

In a business context, that is when you say “You’re fired,” with absolutely zero guilt.

You aren’t punishing them; you are just acknowledging that they are the shark in Jaws, and the shark doesn’t want to change yet and maybe, ever.

C-Suite

When I see executives one of the biggest problems that comes up is that I make them put content into two buckets.

One is skills and skills can be taught. How do you do Microsoft Excel? How do you learn an API? How do you function within a system politically? The second is emotional maturity. You are not their daddy and you cannot teach them that skill.

Joel Blackstock is a Licensed Clinical Social Work Supervisor (LCSW), certified complex trauma therapist and founder at Taproot Therapy Collective.

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