Into the Office Woods: A Fairy-Tale Guide to the Christmas Do

Working in private practice, office parties are mostly a non-event. Yet they still wander into my consulting room: in reflective practice, in supervision, in the stories colleagues tell with both fondness and dread. During my years in the NHS and social care, I always felt conflicted about them. I rarely looked forward to going, but usually ended up having a good time once there. It is a familiar paradox, loving groups and fearing them, drawn to belonging and wary of it at the same time. Perhaps that is simply the fate of anyone who works with groups. Or perhaps it is just people.

This piece is my attempt to stay with what these nights reveal about the workplace psyche, the gifts they offer and the trouble they invite, using an unlikely but oddly perfect companion: Sondheim’s Into the Woods.

Office parties, especially the unruly cheer of the Christmas do, are often treated as a sanctioned break from ordinary life. Colleagues loosen ties and roles, raise their glasses, and step into unfamiliar ground. Beneath the tinsel there is a richer psychological field. With a little Jung and Foulkes in mind, these gatherings begin to look like what they are: liminal spaces, thresholds where group boundaries soften and the hidden currents of workplace life surface.

The meeting room becomes a dance floor. Managers become karaoke enthusiasts. The unspoken rules thin out. The work container, usually held by task, role and norm, stretches to its edges. Alcohol dissolves inhibition. Old tensions, attractions and rivalries seep through. The foundation matrix, the cultural surround, meets the dynamic matrix, the live patterning between us. It can be startling to notice how leaky our identities really are.

In group analytic terms, the party behaves like a conductorless group. Hierarchy loosens, roles redistribute, and unspoken themes rise from the analytic matrix. Someone becomes the joker, another the caretaker, someone else the scapegoat. These positions are not consciously chosen; they are delegated functions born from shared anxiety. No one nominates the person who will cry in the smoking area. The group does.

That leakiness has a mythic texture. Thresholds wake archetypes. The Shadow stirs. The restrained thinker becomes the exuberant dancer. The office miser discovers an inner Trickster. Christmas amplifies it with its mix of midwinter excess and fragile hope. For a few hours we are licensed to cross a line, and with that licence comes both play and risk.

Most people arrive ambivalent. Parties promise connection, laughter and a chance to meet beyond the task. Yet when structure thins, people feel exposed. The danger is real. Words and gestures land, sometimes harder than intended. That sense of “this could go either way” is the signature of a threshold. These moments often reveal the group-in-the-head, the internalised sense of how one belongs, or does not, to the team. The party brings it to life in a single evening; loyalties, grievances, identifications and old wounds re-enacted in glittering clothes and dim lighting.

Sondheim knew this: Act One is fun; Act Two is consequences. In Into the Woods he takes familiar fairy-tale characters and sends them wandering into a forest where their wishes collide. Act One is wishful, comic, charming. Act Two is something else entirely, consequences and repair, grief and revelation. The forest becomes a psychic device, a place where desire, error and outcome are staged.

Office parties are temporary forests. They relax ordinary restraint, invite enactments of longed-for wishes, and create a clearing where small slights can grow large. Colleagues enter with conscious aims, to network, to relax, to flirt, or simply to get through it, but other stories are travelling with them. Archetypes show themselves. The driven trainee climbs a beanstalk of ambition. The overlooked colleague glows for a night, Cinderella at the ball. The shy one gathers unexpected resources. The senior manager may or may not be the Wolf.

From a group analytic view, what emerges is the group’s shared fantasy life. Unconscious roles surface. Longings become enactments. The group’s basic assumptions, to borrow Bion, leak through: dependency, the sense of “who will look after me tonight”; pairing, the fantasy that “maybe these two can save the team”; or fight-flight, the impulse to drink more or to leave early. There can be real goodness here. Shared foibles become humanising. The group breathes a little. New links form. The narrative of the team is refreshed.

Yet there can also be harm. A tipsy confession becomes a giant’s footfall. Power hides in warmth. Bullying arrives in a velvet glove. Parties often stretch symbolic elasticity to its limits. A joke that would be harmless at eleven in the morning becomes loaded at eleven at night. Containment thins, meaning distorts. A tiny rupture can feel like a breakage.

This is the forest’s double edge. Into the Woods offers something psychologically accurate here. The forest is not evil in itself. It is the place where things come into view. What we bring with us, and how we stumble through together, matters more than the trees.

The benefits are easy to see. Shadowed parts are revealed. Teams remember their humanity. Horizontal links form across rank. Creativity sparks from new pairings and unlikely conversations. The risks are equally present. Personas crack. Projections harden. Factions gel. Outsiders feel more outside. Humiliation and harassment can take root precisely in these blurry spaces. Unprocessed feelings reappear on Monday morning as subtle shifts in alliances and trust.

I notice how much depends on the way these evenings are held in mind, before and after as much as during. Whether attendance is quietly compulsory, who feels they can safely opt out, how alcohol is used or refused, how leaders position themselves, what is spoken about the night afterwards and what is left to circulate as rumour. Each of these small details bends the path through the wood.

I also notice what these parties can stir in us as individuals. Which masks we reach for. Which parts of the Shadow are itching to come out to play. The familiar pull to repeat an old role and the faint wish to step sideways out of it. Often there is no neat answer, only an awareness that something in the workplace story has just been re-written a little, for better or worse.

Perhaps that is the most honest place to end. Not with instructions about how to fix the forest, but with a small acknowledgement that these gatherings are part of our institutional dreaming. They tell us something about who we think we are, and who we are afraid of becoming. We walk into them as colleagues and come back with slightly altered maps of each other.

As Sondheim warns, careful the things you say. People will listen. And they will remember, even if they cannot quite say what, or why.

If you are reading this with your own office party still in your body somewhere, I am curious what kind of forest it was for you this year, and which path you found yourself on.

A small winter thank you for readers:

✨ 15% off any of my workshops Eventbrite Code: WOODSPATH15 (valid until 10 January)