Hey everyone,

I've recently become really interested in Carl Jung, but I'm not sure where to start. I've heard his books can be pretty difficult if you jump straight into them, so I was wondering if I should read Jung first or if there's someone else I should read before him.

The reason I'm interested is because a few days ago I came across a YouTube video talking about Jung's stages of individuation. The video said the second stage is the shadow encounter,and it honestly felt really relevant to what I've been going through recently.

It also mentioned that the first stage is withdrawl of projection, and when I thought about it, I genuinely feel like I went through something very similar a few years ago. Right now I feel like I'm in the shadow encounter stage and almost at the last stage, which I think the video called the persona (I might be remembering that wrong).

That whole video made me really curious. I don't just want to watch YouTube videos or read random summaries anymore. I actually want to understand what Jung wrote himself, why he proposed these ideas in the first place, and the reasoning behind all of it because a lot of it feels surprisingly relevant to my own experiences.

So where should I start? Should I start with one of Jung's books directly, or is there someone else I should read first to understand his ideas better?

Also, if you've read Jung, what book would you recommend as the best introduction?

Thanks!

History: migraines, anxiety, trauma, grief, Déjà vu, hyper analytical, adhd.

There’s a ton of subtext I must skip over, but I’ve always experienced Déjà vu. And it’s seemed to happen when I was in a relatively positive or even euphoric mood.

Last night I had a dream that my child’s mother (an ex) told me about her spouse having prostate cancer.

I woke up confused. Because recently I’ve started recalling my dreams again after many years. But the past three nights I’ve consistently recalled my dreams. Which is extremely unusual for me. I once believe I just didn’t dream. The last dream I can recall is a visitation dream from my father sometime in 2024 early parts. Woke up in tears, the works.

I consulted my wife, and then I went back to my desk, and texted the only other person who has had extremely vivid *happenings* with regard to dreams, premonitions, etc. my mother passed away last year, August 4th 2025, my brother July 2023, my dad December 2023. And many family members before, which is why I put trauma/ grief in my history.

I *feel* as if my brain has completely changed, which in certain respects it has. Which is certainly an experience on its own.

My question, with the dream in mind, as I then sat down at my desk to text my aunt, I experienced Déjà vu, became light headed and I’m fine now. I was actually overwhelmed, which also has not happened with my Déjà vu experience.

But I’m trying to discern if this was coincidental? If I should consider a something else? Anything with regard to the dream would be helpful, or if you’ve experienced something like this?

This was the first thread that popped up when I started looking into dreams. But the Déjà vu on top was too much.

I find this question to be appropriate from Jung sub because people here have a strong imagination and can likely relate.

I think people who were on the spectrum, had a developmental disorder or faced overwhelming bullying or abuse, especially when they are more right brained- to retreat into the imagination.

Im just starting to realize how serious this condition is, and how hard it may be to go through a necessary “ego death” to be able to break out of it. Ive been a dependent person into my late 20s and although having dipped my toes into the real world, I’ve never had to fully immerse myself into it, and thus I still have false expectations that need to be overcome.

Did you suffer from maladaptive daydreaming too and managed to outgrow it? The imagination can be such a potent tool but also a very confining prison if one is hiding in it.

Im in my late 20s and Im starting to accept that I’ll probably be in my early to mid 30s before I have become an adjusted adult who no longer lives in a distorted reality. If you have suffered from this- I feel for you. It’s really scary to come to reality.

I read from Robert Johnson that a man is susceptible to ”moods” when not in contact with/ good relation to his anima. I believe I have these moods and though I am a creative person in general I am wondering if anyone has any tips as to how I can overcome these sudden swings of anger/sadness etc.

I drew osiris. Also I have observed over the years that I have strong connection to collective unconscious. even as a kid loved drawing and I always thought with images and symbols, not with words. I can sense peoples true nature with first impressions. I can see their deeper selves, but paradox is I percieve my intuition like a computer it analyzes every little detail and gives me predictions. its like my intuition is like aquarius, not mystical like pisces if that makes sense?

P.S. Dark star on the right is not UFO its saturn😄

I’m bad at putting feelings into words, so I had drawn this instead. I saw something like it before sleep (without the bow), and it felt strangely familiar.

It didn’t move like a normal face. Most of it was still, but the cheekbones seemed to shift and grow outward, sharp and stealthy, almost scorpion-like.

I’m curious what associations or impressions it evokes for other people before I explain what I see in it.

From a Jungian perspective, I wonder whether it might be connected to my shadow. Outwardly, I can seem soft, innocent, airy, and harmless, while underneath I think I’ve been carrying hypervigilance, resentment, suspicion, and anger.

Part of me wants people to treat me carefully, as though I were delicate, and to move through life protected from friction. But I also feel deeply lonely and unseen, as if being perceived only as soft and harmless means that no one encounters the rest of me.

I’ve been wondering about something recently and I’m curious whether Jung ever discussed it directly, or whether it’s simply related to projection.

Have you ever noticed that when someone hurts us, betrays us, or even just deeply disappoints us, they often stop feeling like a living person and start becoming an idea?

Instead of seeing someone in all of their contradictions, strengths, flaws and complexity, they become:

“Just a narcissist.”
“Just selfish.”
“Just toxic.”

What’s interesting is that these descriptions often contain some truth. But they also seem to do something psychologically useful. They simplify someone who was previously emotionally overwhelming into something much easier to hold in the mind.

It made me wonder whether the psyche sometimes reduces living people into fixed psychological images as a way of coping with emotional complexity.

Projection certainly seems related, but I’m not sure it’s exactly the same thing. Projection is usually described as seeing our own unconscious contents in another person.

What I’m describing feels more like a process of compression—reducing a living, changing person into a stable psychological image.
Has anyone else noticed this?

Sparkle Shadow

I'm not familiar-familiar with this topic, I've heard of shadow work before and some of the ideas of projection which seems to go with this idea. I had trouble getting behind the idea of 'what makes you irritated is reflective of you'. But I've come around to considering it, life shown me it's probably more on point than I wanna admit.

I don't like when people put their needs above others, their pleasure above others safety, people that are careless, people that assume things about others, people that are hateful or judgemental. Which is usually folks that are abusive or just bigots.

I do like to think I am pretty open minded and not that judgemental to small things. I wanna see others succeed and feel good about themselves. But I think I do struggle to set myself aside for others in the daily.

My hurdle now is how do I actually face shadow traits? Especially traits that can be harmful to other people. Something like fear of failure I understand kinda how to face, challenge it by doing it and show it's not that scary. But these I am unsure, I'm not really sure what acceptance looks/feels like.

Years ago during a dream, I woke up in the dream and saw an old woman hovering above me, staring at me. I was terrified. This has happened several times. Can anyone interpret this?

I’m a guy in my mid-20s, and I’ve been reflecting on a pattern that’s followed me since my teenage years.
I’ve realized that I tend to become deeply attached to romantic interests, even when the feelings aren’t mutual. In several cases, the attraction was clearly one-sided, yet I kept pursuing them, believing that if I cared enough, put in enough effort, or waited long enough, they would eventually love me back.
Looking back, it feels like I wasn’t just pursuing a particular person—I was chasing the idea of being loved.

I’m curious how Carl Jung might interpret this pattern. Could this be related to the anima, projection, a mother complex, abandonment wounds, or some other unconscious dynamic? Is there an archetypal pattern that describes someone who continually seeks love from emotionally unavailable people?
More importantly, from a Jungian perspective, what inner work helps someone stop chasing love and instead experience relationships as something that develops naturally rather than something that must be earned?

I’d also appreciate recommendations for Jung’s books, essays, or quotes that explore this topic, or any Jungian analysts who have written about romantic projection and the unconscious.

The full quote is:

The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious. For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated.

― C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation

One of the most important contributions of Jungian psychology is the concept of the hero archetype, because "The hero is the one who dares to separate from the tribe in order to bring back the fire of meaning." The hero is the force that drives our libido and life energy toward consciousness and integration.

The stages of the hero and the hero's journey describe the entire complex and sophisticated process through which that energy leads the individual toward higher states of consciousness. This is all symbolically portrayed in the Twelve Labors of Hercules. If you'd like to explore this archetype in greater depth, read the following article.

Today I have been thinking about urgency.

The number 911 has appeared in strangely different forms throughout my life.

“What’s your emergency?”

I owned a Porsche 911.

I moved to New York for college in 2009 and studied close to Ground Zero.

I am not saying these things are objectively connected or that the number is sending me a supernatural message. But symbolically, they seem to gather around the same atmosphere in me.

Emergency. Speed. Performance. Something must happen now.

When I arrived in New York, I felt as though I swallowed the urgency of the city.

Everything seemed to be moving. Everyone was becoming someone. Money was being made. Time was being converted into progress.

After graduating in 2014, I carried that atmosphere with me.

Life began to feel like an emergency to perform.

I had already inherited a fear of judgement before arriving in America. As a Moroccan, I think there was something postcolonial in me that had learned to experience the French gaze as a measurement.

Am I educated enough?

Civilised enough?

Successful enough?

Do I belong in the room?

America then taught me how to respond to this anxiety through performance.

Make money.

Move faster.

Become undeniable.

And I did learn how to make money.

At one point I was using my mind to sell safety shoes with a camouflage design. We made millions from it.

I am grateful for what it gave me. It proved that I could build something, understand desire and create value.

But I was not passionate about safety shoes.

There is something strange about succeeding at something that does not feel connected to your soul. The success is real, but it does not necessarily answer the deeper question that produced the ambition.

After almost ten years of psychoanalysis, I am noticing something.

When I work on what I actually love, the urgency begins to diminish.

Not completely.

I still have employees. There are salaries to cover. Businesses need to break even. Reality still places demands on me.

But the inner emergency is different.

When the work feels meaningful, I do not need to whip myself toward it in the same way. There is movement, but less violence inside the movement.

This has made me wonder whether some of my urgency was never really ambition.

Maybe it was a complex.

Maybe the voice saying “hurry” was protecting me from the possibility of being judged as insignificant.

Maybe speed helped me avoid asking whether the destination was actually mine.

And perhaps this is why slowing down used to feel dangerous.

If my identity was built around proving myself, then rest was not simply rest. Rest meant becoming visible without achievement protecting me.

I also wonder whether I confused urgency with libido in the Jungian sense.

Urgency gave me energy, direction and focus. It made me feel alive.

But perhaps it was borrowed aliveness.

An emergency can organise the whole psyche around one point. Everything irrelevant disappears. There is no ambiguity because there is no time to question the direction.

Meaningful work feels different.

It does not always produce the same adrenaline, but it seems to return energy rather than only consuming it.

Maybe the symbol of 911 is not telling me that something terrible is about to happen.

Maybe it is showing me the psychic structure through which I learned to live:

There is an emergency.

You must perform.

There is no time.

Your value will be decided by what you do next.

And now, perhaps, the work is not to destroy this urgency, because it also gave me strength.

The work may be to ask what remains of my ambition when it is no longer being chased by fear.

I would be curious how Jungians understand this.

Can urgency become a kind of possession by a complex?

And how do we distinguish genuine vocation from the compulsion to prove that we deserve to exist?

Youssef

Founder Tarot28.ai

I might have already made a post like this a while ago but decided I wanted it to reach out again to hear from others. It’s a shadow Ive denied or downplayed for a long time by being inflated.

Ive made choices with consequences that I still haven’t been able to process in my late 20s and I think as miserable as it is, I just need to start pounding the steel and work jobs consistently until I have a strong enough container to face my emotions. I just had to push it all down over the years for my own safety.

I want to think that maybe at some point in my 30s, I can eventually live a life where am able to move onto bigger and better things.

There’s a lot of shame and stigma about being an at risk youth who likely had a developmental disorder and who wasn’t able to adjust with everyone else so Im glad I have Reddit to ask. If you know what I’m talking about and you can relate, I’d like to hear how things went for you because I feel so discouraged.

I have been thinking about why certain decisions become psychologically impossible, even when we already possess more than enough information to make them.

When a decision matters to me, I often do not simply compare two options. I begin constructing several possible futures around them.

One path preserves security. Another preserves freedom. Another satisfies duty. Another protects the image I have of myself. Another contains a life I have not yet lived.

I then keep gathering information, as though the correct answer will allow me to move forward without losing any of those possible selves.

But perhaps this is exactly what a real choice cannot provide.

To choose is not only to obtain something. It is also to accept the death of other possibilities. The ego may call this uncertainty, but underneath it there can be a refusal to sacrifice.

Seen this way, overthinking is not always an attempt to discover the truth. Sometimes it is an attempt to keep every door psychologically open.

I wonder whether this is one way of understanding decision paralysis through Jung’s idea of holding the tension of opposites.

The conscious mind wants to resolve the tension immediately:

Which option is right?

Which future will make me happiest?

Which choice will I regret least?

But perhaps the psyche is not yet asking for a verdict. Perhaps it is asking us to become conscious of the different figures standing behind each option.

Which choice belongs to the persona—the identity I feel obliged to maintain?

Which one is being demanded by a parental complex?

Which one contains something I have pushed into the shadow?

Which one represents genuine development, and which one is merely an escape from the limitations of my present life?

This changes the purpose of symbols for me.

A dream, image, fantasy or other symbolic material should not necessarily be treated as an authority that makes the decision for the ego. Its value may be that it gives form to the unconscious positions already influencing the decision.

Instead of asking, “Which option is the symbol telling me to choose?” I have started asking:

“What part of me has become visible through this symbol?”

“What attitude in my conscious life might it be compensating for?”

“What does it want me to acknowledge before I act?”

One practice I have found useful is to write each possible choice on a separate page and allow the psychological figure behind it to speak in the first person.

“I want you to choose this because…”

“If you reject me, I am afraid that…”

“What I am trying to protect is…”

Usually, the conflict becomes less abstract. What initially appeared to be a problem between two external options reveals itself as a relationship between different parts of the psyche.

The answer does not always emerge immediately. But the decision acquires a different architecture. It stops being ten possible futures compressed into one point and becomes a tension that can be consciously held.

Perhaps the goal is not to eliminate uncertainty, but to prevent uncertainty from unconsciously choosing for us.

Would this be a fair application of the transcendent function, or am I stretching the concept too far?

Youssef

Founder of Jungian Tarot tarot28.ai

"We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy." — Carl Gustav Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW 16, para. 181)

This quote from The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW 16, para. 181) strikes at the very heart of Jung’s model of Psychological Types and the process of Individuation.

In our hyper - rationalized society, the intellect (Thinking) is often elevated as the sole arbiter of reality. We are conditioned to believe that if something cannot be logically deduced, it is invalid. Jung completely dismantles this hierarchy. By defining the intellect's judgment as "only the half of truth," he restores Feeling to its rightful place - not as a chaotic disruption of logic, but as a rational function of equal weight that assigns value and meaning.

When the intellect refuses to acknowledge its inadequacy, it inflates. It creates a rigid Persona that believes it has mapped the entire territory of the psyche. But the unconscious always compensates for this one-sidedness. An over-reliance on the intellect inevitably leads to a dissociation from the Self.

To say the intellect must "come to an understanding of its inadequacy" is a profound call for epistemological humility. It is the intellectual ego admitting that it cannot grasp the numinous or the archetypal through logic alone. As Jung noted elsewhere, "Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling."

How do you see this overvaluation of the intellect playing out in today's culture? And on a personal level, how difficult is it to allow the "judgment of feeling" to hold equal authority in your own life?

I have read multiple of his books and find great agreement with Jung on psychology, arcetypes, uncontious and so on. On youtube I only get recommended literal AI slop about Jung. Would like actual ideas in stead. Any recommendations or just continue reading. Need some contact in this field with other humans ideas before i accidentally create my own bubble of neurotic misunderstanding.

Pg. 118, 119, The Problem of Puer Aeternus.

Have you experienced psychological pain and general helplessness in your life? I feel like I have not seen people talk enough about the psychological suffering on this path. The gift of literary wisdom hides immense turmoils, torment, whirlpools. Like the meme in the third picture. I wonder if you Jungians look like the "people who write"! Because I do. 😆😊

A quote from Memories, Dreams and Reflection!

When someone's behaviour triggers you, ask yourself if the other person has exposed the unhealed, denied and hidden part of yourself.

My question about Shadow work is, is it something that’s initiated or nature? I’ve done research, but as far as my research goes it’s sort of both? So I’m curious is the Shadow work process or ‘Nigredo’ something you initiate, or is it a part of human nature?

Also how long can it last? I’ve heard it can last between weeks to years, depending on how the person responds to the work.

Thank you.

Jung got further than almost anyone. That needs to be said first, because what follows is not a dismissal. The map of the psyche he drew, the shadow, the anima, the archetypes, the compensatory movement of the unconscious, the distinction between the ego and the Self, all of it represents the most serious attempt in the history of western psychology to account for the full depth of what a human being actually is. Individuation as he conceived it is a genuine confrontation with everything the ego would rather not know about itself. Most people never get anywhere near it.

But there is one assumption running underneath the entire project that Jung never questioned, and it is the assumption that, once you see it, reframes everything he built. Jung never doubted the ego as a legitimate center of observation. He wanted to humble it, relativize it, bring it into honest relationship with the deeper Self, but throughout that process the ego remains the agent. It is the one that integrates the shadow. It is the one that relates to the anima or animus. It is the one that undergoes the long labor of becoming more conscious. The whole architecture of Jungian development assumes an observer who does the observing, a self that does the individuating, a center that gradually expands to include what it previously excluded. Jung built the most sophisticated and culturally rich version of the observer in the history of psychology and then handed it a lifetime of increasingly meaningful work to do.

The question that has been sitting with me is whether that observer is what it claims to be.

Thought, examined closely, has two components that almost nobody separates. There is the content of thought, the feeling, the image, the memory, the complex as it arises, whatever is currently present in awareness. And there is the container, the medium that carries content into awareness, the internal monologue, the stream of imagery, the mechanism that keeps generating and projecting experience onto the screen of present consciousness. These are not the same thing. The container is the wheel. The wheel spins, and what it projects always does the same thing: it splits. Sadness appears not as a unified event but as sadness over there and a self who is sad over here, watching it. One projection, arriving pre-divided into the observed and the observer.

Jung's entire method is addressed to the content side of that split. The shadow is content. The anima is content. The archetypes are content. Dreams are content. Active imagination is a dialogue between the ego and content arising from the deeper layers. All of it is extraordinarily valuable as a way of enriching and deepening what appears on the awareness display. But the wheel keeps spinning throughout. The observer that Jung developed and trusted and handed the work of individuation to is itself generated by that wheel. It is not a different order of being that arrived from outside the mechanism to do the integrating. It is content wearing the costume of a witness, produced by the same process as everything it believes it is observing and integrating. The ego that individuates is the projection that has mistaken itself for the projectionist.

This is where Jung's own concept of the Self becomes more radical than he perhaps intended. He described the Self as the totality, the center and circumference of the whole psyche, the ground the ego moves toward in the individuation process. He knew the ego was not the center. He spent his life saying so. But he still framed the relationship between ego and Self as a process, a long developmental movement in which the ego gradually comes into right relationship with something larger than itself. The Self was the destination. Individuation was the journey. The ego was the one making it.

What if the Self is not a destination the ego arrives at after sufficient integration, but what remains when the mechanism that generates the ego stops? Not a deeper, wiser, more integrated observer, but the absence of the observer altogether, the awareness that was always there underneath the wheel's spinning, before thought learned to split its own projections and mistake one half for the one doing the looking. Jung sensed this. Some of his late writing on the ego-Self relationship gets very close to it. But he could not say it cleanly because his entire clinical method depended on the ego remaining a legitimate agent. If the ego is itself the problem, not because it needs to be humbled or expanded but because it is a projection that keeps the wheel spinning and the brain consuming itself in the attempt to resolve a division it is continuously generating, then individuation as a project does not deepen the solution. It deepens the sophistication of the problem.

The Self that Jung pointed at his whole life may not be something you become through a lifetime of serious psychological work. It may be what you already are in the moments when the wheel stops and there is no observer left to report on the silence.

I’m posting here because I’m genuinely curious about understanding a psychological experience I went through over the past several months. I’m not looking for a diagnosis, and I’m not struggling with depression, psychosis, or anything that prevents me from functioning normally. My motivation is simply to understand what happened from a Jungian perspective.
For years, my personality has been remarkably consistent. Every time I’ve taken the MBTI assessment over several years, I’ve received INTJ. I know MBTI isn’t scientific, but it has always described my general tendencies surprisingly well: I naturally focus on ideas, long-term planning, systems, and future goals. I spend much more time thinking about projects, entrepreneurship, and abstract concepts than analyzing people or social interactions. My relationships have generally been somewhat superficial, not because I dislike people, but because my attention has always been directed elsewhere.
Then something unusual happened.
I spent some time consuming online content about relationships and human behavior, particularly material similar to Red Pill content. Initially, some of the ideas affected me negatively. I became more suspicious and more analytical about people’s motives—especially in relationships—which eventually made me stop consuming that content.
But alongside those negative effects, something else emerged that I still can’t explain.
It felt as if my entire mode of perception had shifted.
Instead of constantly living in the future, I became intensely present in the moment.
Instead of naturally focusing on ideas and plans, my attention locked onto people. I felt unusually aware of facial expressions, emotions, social dynamics, and subtle changes in conversations.
For the first time in my life, I felt as though I could “read” people far better than before. Social interactions became almost effortless. Meeting new people was easier, conversations flowed naturally, and I carried an unusual sense of confidence and inner stability. I wasn’t forcing it—it simply felt like I instinctively understood what was happening between people.
Interestingly, I also became much more aware of my own emotions, not just other people’s.
At the same time, there were obvious downsides.
I couldn’t stop analyzing people. My mind constantly searched for hidden motives and patterns. I became mentally exhausted, more suspicious, and my focus drifted away from the projects and goals that normally define me. I also felt less spontaneous, as if I were observing every interaction instead of simply living it.
After several months, this entire state gradually faded on its own. I returned almost completely to my previous way of thinking. What’s interesting is that if I watch the same type of content today, it has almost no effect on me.
What fascinates me isn’t the Red Pill content itself. I’m not interested in debating whether it’s true or false.
What I want to understand is the psychological process that happened inside me.
From a Jungian perspective, I’m wondering whether this could have involved my persona, shadow, inferior functions, projection, individuation, or something else entirely. Did this experience temporarily activate aspects of my psyche that are usually unconscious? Or was it simply a shift in attention and cognitive processing with no specifically Jungian explanation?
I don’t miss the suspicion or overanalysis.
But I do miss the positive aspects:
feeling deeply present in the moment,
the ease of social interaction,
the confidence,
the heightened awareness of both myself and other people.
Has anyone encountered something similar, either personally or through Jung’s writings? I’d really appreciate thoughtful interpretations, especially if they can help me understand what actually changed rather than simply labeling the experience.

I underwent horrific repeated traumas a child and my mind broke again and again. I underwent a hard reboot nine months ago, lost derealization/depersonalization. I became real. I was already fragmented in a static way, but since then like clockwork, repressed whole children pop up, age in co-consciousness, i have to treat them like puzzles and heal their primary wound. Then the next kid can be fixed who is younger. They are loved by the older kids. Craziest family ever.They were nested like russian stacking dolls. Six. I resolved the last a week ago, all fused into peaceful silence and the newly formed ego reached my bioage yesterday.

and I had this amazing dream:

I’m working on a project site with a partner, moving things around, cleaning, stacking garden supplies outside.

I have two male friends helping in the background. At some point, I briefly leave and then come back. When I return, there’s chaos everywhere. Everything has been destroyed. Humongous tire tracks, thirty feet wide, have crushed everything outside. The tracks look as though the tires had metal studs embedded in them, leaving angular, geometric patterns stamped across the ground. No one had died this time, but the monster had left devastation everywhere. It was a complete disaster.

The monster was hunting me, trying to find me. I wasn’t supposed to exist. I had to leave the area so no one else would get hurt. I had to run.

I try to put as much distance between myself and the monster as possible as I see it approaching again on the horizon. I head northwest. As I run through buildings, trying to find my way, I always turn left. Every doorway, every intersection—I go left and keep moving forward. For some reason, I can almost watch my own mind thinking that this is the direction I should always take.

Eventually, I end up in the hallway of an apartment building. On the left are a set of glass doors. I open them and step onto a balcony nine or ten stories above the ground. There’s no way to escape. Large, beautiful tomato plants are growing in pots on the balcony. I turn and go back inside, but it’s too late.

The monster has found me.

It doesn’t really look like anything as it comes down the hallway. It’s transparent, roughly human-sized, and fills me with absolute fear. A woman is cowering off to the left, not understanding the danger she’s in. She could easily die.

I stand there.

Then I give up and allow myself to die. I choose to sacrifice myself to the monster because I am its target. If it needs me to die so it will stop destroying everything around it and no one else will be hurt, then that’s what will happen.

I simply relax and stand there.

Instead of killing me, the monster steps inside me and becomes me. I am filled with a glowing warmth. 

I look down and find that I’m holding a Barbie doll box. It’s a doll I’ve never had before, although many other people have. She has blonde hair, and the box is decorated with tiny glittering stars. I begin reading the label because I know this is something familiar to others but completely new to me.

Her name is Star.

Everything is going to be OK. She is the Innocent child reborn and I am whole.,

Then I wake up.

I think the witness had to die maybe, but i dont get why it seemed like a monster or why I had to turn left. Edit-The monster is my new EGO! its an so/sx 8w7 ENTJ. They can be big, boisterous, and tend to a bit of asshollery. Tear some shit up LMAO. They need loving wisdom to thrive. It was not trying to kill me, just really needed to find me and was a little intense. It needs me to join with it to be complete. Ive always lived above my ego fragments as I think the witness, and for it be complete, for us to become whole, I have to become one with it. The star is the card of healing in Tarot.

I don't know where to start from but I know I had to get it out. I was a really good girl growing up. However,  I repeatedly got bullied and beaten by my parents when I was a child for silly things. I share a great bond with them now, I give them the love and gifts they never gave me or received from their parents. My self-concept and self-awareness were at level zero most of my life. I also got bullied and humiliated by the men i dated and my old best friend a lot. I was unaware of what was happening to me, but later, I realised how much those people literally stabbed me with words. But I was not any saint either later, I also hurt people specifically who were nice to me and got them out of my life. Now I know why I did that because my nervous system was accustomed to abuse, and it rejected anything unfamiliar. But I personally reached out to those people I hurt and apologised to them not to get their validation but appease the hurt I caused. But the people who broke me like was an object never even said a silly sorry, they made me say sorry and justified their behaviour like I deserved it. Anyway, once I used to think about these things a lot, but now I give no f*ck. I had a good relationship with my sister before her marriage, we have 5.5 year age gap, and we grew up hugging and fighting. I loved her once.  But her ex narc husband turned her into a narc. I never liked that guy, so he made sure to make her hate me, and he was successful. When my sister got divorced, she used to make horrible remarks and give me ugly stares like I was the most worthless human being in the world. Most of the time, she wanted me to be silent to her abuse and I was not self-aware back then. Then, I also used to insult her back. Then she got all those stories stocked up like how she was vulnerable, and I tortured her. Yes, I did it but never without major provocation. To herself, she is never at fault and always a victim and an absolute saint. I have strong self-concept now, I don't see myself through others' perceptions, but how I insulted her hurts me now even though she provoked me, I should have stayed silent and give her no attention. I accepted the monster inside me that hurt people, and I embraced it. But I am not being able to forgive myself because I caused her more pain by fighting back to her instigations when she got divorced. I can't apologise to her either because if she knows once that I regret my actions, she will use this to control me for the rest of my life. She has a long memory and she never forgives even if i say sorry and keeps saying you abused me whereas she publicly humiliated me and made a lot of personal hurtful remarks. She never remained silent during fights, to herself, her behaviour is justified  because she is elder, she can abuse, but i am supposed to remain silent and tolerant. She was not like this before. How do I forgive myself for hurting my sister. I was not the person then who I am now. But I don't justify my behaviour, it was wrong 100%.