“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” – C.G. Jung
There’s a lot of personal development writing about how it’s important to avoid “toxic people” and “energy vampires”—people who criticize us, make fun of us, tell us we can’t achieve our goals, and so on.  I actually have the [...]

(This is a further exploration of the ideas in my article a few months back at Urban Monk, “Are Your ‘Projections’ Limiting Your Success?”.  This piece is about how we can learn about ourselves from the ways we criticize others, and “project” the parts of our personalities we’re uncomfortable with onto them.)
To me, one fascinating [...]

I wrote an article a while back about how, ultimately, many of our anxieties can be traced back to a single fear—the fear of annihilation, or nonexistence.  I described a few exercises we can use to grasp this fact at a deep, visceral level.  In this article, I’ll talk about a method I’ve used to [...]

One of my former clients—I’ll call him John—is a respected, highly-paid attorney.  John worked in several different legal positions—at a law firm, in a government office and finally at a nonprofit organization—and in each job his work was well-received.  However, John had a problem that doggedly pursued him from one job to the next.  Everywhere [...]