Agnes said, “I’m, like, O.K., what is jealousy? Am I entitled to feel it? Is there something I’m getting right in feeling this way?” Baraz wants to comfort her. “I feel like she’s treating herself as a guinea pig or a case study,” Baraz told me, “and I want to relate to her as a person I care about who is in distress.” But Agnes is impatient with t

started thinking about my problems the first thing in the morning because I had come to identify myself with them.

I came to discover that underneath these tirades was a chasm of shame and excruciating anguish.

Without answers, at my most desperate, I came to feel (in some unarticulated way) that if I could just tell the right story about what was happening, I could make myself better. If only I could figure out what the story was, like the child in a fantasy novel who must discover her secret name, I could become myself again.

The adequate question therefore never is: Have I a shadow problem? Have I a negative side? But rather: Where does it happen to be right now? When we cannot see it, it is time to beware! And it is helpful to remember Jung’s formulation that a complex is not pathological per se. It becomes pathological only when we assume that we do not have it; beca

When designing a character, it’s often useful to think of them in terms of their theory of control. How have they learned to control the world? When unexpected change strikes, what’s their automatic go-to tactic for wrestling with the chaos? What’s their default, flawed response? The answer, as we’ve just seen, comes from that character’s core beli