People who have lost their emotional innocence through trauma or social conditioning unconsciously punish those who have managed to preserve theirs.

The pattern Jung documented would become one of his most important insights into human psychology: authentic emotional expression triggers unconscious shame in those who have betrayed their own emotional truth. 

Here’s Karl Jung and Alan watts explaining a phenomenon that we all see more and more of. I suspect it’s from the kids exposed to advanced trauma technologies (screens) and unstable families becoming adults.

If you have kept your spark you will relate to this. I’ve been dealing… pic.twitter.com/JbOhpIbkqH

— Owen Benjamin 🐻 (@OwenBenjamin) August 22, 2025

Carl Jung documented why people with what we now call "empathic abilities" face a cruel psychological paradox.  Their greatest gift becomes the source of their deepest pain.  He discovered that empathic individuals unconsciously attract people who project their shadow on to them.  People [. . .] resent the empath's emotional freedom because it reminds them of their own emotional numbness.  Jung found that the more authentic and radiant someone with highly developed feeling function becomes, the more they threaten other's psychological defenses.  What Jung called "shadow projection" creates a pattern where empaths are simultaneously sought after and secretly despised for possessing what others have lost or buried within themselves.  Individuals with extraordinary empathic abilities who seem to magnetize people that would eventually turn against them with inexplicable hostility.  Jung's observations revealed these individuals draw others to them like moths to flame.  Yet these same people develop unconscious resentment toward the very qualities that initially attracted them.  It is as if their light exposes shadows others cannot bear to acknowledge.  People would confess their deepest secrets to them, find healing in their presence, and experience profound emotional relief.  Then without warning they would begin to criticize them, undermine their confidence, and eventually abandon them entirely.  Jung realized he wasn't observing simple relationship dysfunction; he was witnessing what happens when unconscious people encounter someone who has maintained connection to their authentic feeling function.  The pattern Jung documented would become one of his most important insights into human psychology: authentic emotional expression triggers unconscious shame in those who have betrayed their own emotional truth.  The resentment is not toward the empath.  It is toward their own abandoned emotional truth.   People who have lost their emotional innocence through trauma or social conditioning unconsciously punish those who have managed to preserve theirs.

2:17.  And the death of the old self becomes the birth of freedom.  True power is not the ability to keep the ego intact; true power is the freedom to let it dissolve  again and again, knowing that what you are cannot be touched by gain or loss, by success or failure.  That is why sages laugh.  They laugh because they see the joke that all along you were clinging to an illusion, fearing its end, when in fact it's end was your liberation.  And so, when life breaks you, when the story collapses, when the old self dies, remember, nothing essential is lost.  What dies is only what was never truly you.