Transformation Through Crisis

The Dark Night of the Executive Soul

What if that exhaustion is not evidence of failure, but the beginning of initiation? What if collapse is not the end of leadership, but the threshold to a deeper form of it? Many myths have suggested that descent is not destruction but a sacred re-organisation. The self that dies is the false one. What is born is something new.

When Things Fall Apart

Every culture tells a story about falling apart. Long before psychology had a name for it, the Sumerians spoke of Inanna, goddess of heaven and earth, who chose to descend into the underworld to meet her shadow-sister, Ereshkigal. At each of the seven gates, Inanna surrendered a symbol of her power: her crown, jewels, sceptre, robe until she stood naked before the darkness.

There she was struck down and hung on a hook. Only after her death and three days of stillness was she restored to life, her jewels returned, now transfigured with wisdom.

The myth is hauntingly familiar to modern leaders. The descent may arrive as burnout, redundancy, illness, a broken partnership, or a slow erosion of purpose. The trappings of success, status, certainty and control fall away, and what remains is raw humanity.

The Psychology of Descent

Carl Jung (1959) observed that the greatest crises of life occur when the structures that once gave meaning can no longer hold the energy of the growing soul. The collapse of the old order is the psyche’s way of making room for the Self, the deeper organising principle of wholeness.

Gestalt theory offers a similar lens. When the cycle of contact, our natural rhythm of engagement, nourishment and withdrawal, is over-extended by endless performance, the organism retreats to restore balance (Perls, Hefferline & Goodman, 1951). Burnout, in this sense, is not a malfunction; it is the body-mind reclaiming coherence.

The Anatomy of the Dark Night

Leaders often describe the dark night as emptiness: “I don’t know who I am without the next project.” “The work that once excited me now feels mechanical.” “I have everything I wanted and still feel lost.” These are not pathologies; they are the early tremors of disidentification from the false self—the persona that once served survival but now limits evolution. Every genuine transformation follows the archetypal rhythm of descent:

1. Disruption: Something breaks (a market collapses, a relationship fractures, the mirror cracks). The outer world stops cooperating with our inner script.

2. Descent: We meet the emotions long postponed: grief, rage, shame, fear. Jung called this stage nigredo (the blackening in alchemy when form dissolves so essence can be released).

3. Gestation: In the absence of old identities, silence arrives. This is the winter of the soul, when nothing seems to grow yet roots deepen invisibly. It is not depression; it is incubation.

4. Emergence: From stillness, new coherence arises. The energy that once maintained appearances now flows into creativity, humility, and genuine authority.

Rumi captured it with luminous brevity:

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

Transformation Through Crisis as Initiation

Organisations mirror the human psyche. They, too, go through seasons of disintegration.

When markets shift or scandals erupt, when key staff leave or old strategies collapse, the collective persona of the company is being questioned. Such moments can be treated as technical problems or recognised as initiations.

One firm I advised reframed a near-bankruptcy as “a rite of renewal.” During their retreat, executives named the grief of lost identity—the company that used to be. They discovered that beneath their obsession with growth lay a forgotten value: contribution. Within a year they rebuilt around that purpose, smaller but infinitely healthier. Collapse can purify culture. It asks, “What part of us must die so that integrity may live?”

Designing Rites of Passage in Leadership

In Gestalt organisational theory, change emerges through awareness, not control. A crisis exposes the gap between what the organisation pretends to be and what it truly is.If held consciously, breakdown becomes revelation. A mature culture does not fear descent; it designs containers for it. Leadership development should include spaces for unmasking, reflection, and symbolic renewal:

1. Retreats as Rites, Not Rewards: Most executive retreats are spa days with PowerPoint. True retreats mark thresholds.

   • Separation: begin with ritual letting-go—write what no longer serves and burn it.

   • Descent: include silence, solitude, and shadow dialogues; let truth surface.

   • Return: articulate the insight as a personal or organisational vow.

2. Mentorship Circles: Replace performance feedback with witnessing. A circle of trusted peers listens without fixing. To be heard without rescue is profoundly healing.

3. Organisational Composting: After major change, hold closure sessions before rushing to the next strategy. Ask, What must we thank, forgive, and release? Without digestion, yesterday’s pain poisons tomorrow’s potential.

4. Reflection Architecture: Embed reflection into the rhythm of work—journaling at quarter’s end, mindful pauses in meetings, shared silence before decisions. Awareness becomes infrastructure.

The Jewel Is Found

Through such practices, crisis ceases to be something endured and becomes something cultivated: an evolutionary function built into the design of leadership. Inanna eventually rises. She ascends from the underworld jewel by jewel, but each ornament now carries new meaning. Her crown is no longer authority over others but he radiance of awareness. Her sceptre is no longer control but it is the capacity to hold space for life to unfold.

The leader who passes through descent returns the same way: outwardly recognisable, inwardly transformed. They no longer lead from performance but from presence. Their voice carries gravity born of suffering transmuted into wisdom. A crisis survived consciously becomes credibility. People trust those who have met their own darkness and learned to listen there. Leadership, at its ripest, is not about shining brighter. It is about having travelled through darkness and knowing how to hold a light steady for others.

References

Jung, C. G. (1959). The archetypes and the collective unconscious. Princeton University Press.Perls, F., Hefferline, R., & Goodman, P. (1951). Gestalt therapy: Excitement and growth in the human personality. Julian Press.Rumi, J. (13th cent.). The Essential Rumi (C. Barks, Trans.). HarperOne.Kegan, R. (1982). The evolving self: Problem and process in human development. Harvard University Press.