Carl Jung observed that the things we cannot stand in other people — the small irritations that seem disproportionate, the people we find ourselves unable to forgive — are almost always reflections of the parts of ourselves we have not yet acknowledged, in a quiet psychological pattern he called the shadow, and the surprise is that doing the work of meeting it tends to soften nearly every difficult relationship a person carries

Think for a moment about the person in your life whose presence costs you the most energy. Not someone who has genuinely wronged you in a clear, identifiable way, but someone whose small habits and ordinary behaviour produce, in you, a reaction that is consistently bigger than what those habits or that behaviour would seem [...] The post Carl Jung observed that the things we cannot stand in other people — the small irritations that seem disproportionate, the people we find ourselves unable to fo