When narcissism crosses the threshold from human flaw to psychological darkness where does that lead us?
Carl Jung warned that when a person stops negotiating with their inner darkness, they can cross a point of no return — the moral event horizon. This article explores what happens when the shadow takes over, the three signs that mark this transformation, and how survivors can reclaim their power.
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” — Carl Jung
I recently had a conversation with my mother. We both marveled at how the dark personality types, the narcissists of the world and those who live in that realm, once simply lurked behind the scenes but had no real power over the authenticity that the rest of us lived in. But now, the tables have turned and in this current stage of existence, these personality types seem to be more empowered than ever dictating policy, politics, interpersonal relationships and stirring up trouble and manipulating situations that cause grief, abandonment of the self and all that is sacred and needed to live in a stable, conscious world.
They thrive and grow and expand on destruction, death, the death of consciousness and the death of self-will and autonomous sovereignty. And, they are no longer one or two people you might pass through in life, they have grown to a collective shadow that seems to be darkening our planet, our heightened sense of self and our future.
As these types have been allowed to thrive, they no longer operate from a space of simple, selfish desire. They’re operating from a place that revels and basks in the destruction of life and they serve a singular goal: their lust for power. They have now become a danger to our very existence. They do not follow a particular political space, but they exploit the political spaces that verify them and give credence to their existence.
These dark personalities seem to have been born out of the internet and social media, where like a cancer, a malignant and destructive force has found a home to grow and cultivate in the swamp of re-shares, likes, blocks, comments and attacks without conscience or accountability.
Here is a brief summary of my experience, where my health, life and safety have all been risked, to learn how to effectively weave in and out of these evil-centered destructive individuals, and remain upright, alive, employed and quietly still, viably living in a space of deep compassion and authenticity in the midst of the collective shadow.
What Lies Beyond Conscience
What if evil isn’t a supernatural force but a psychological state?
I have been resistant to describe people or circumstances as evil because it seems cartoonish and silly. But, once I let go of that preconceived higher-minded notion and started to read and explore the thoughts of Carl Jung and those who follow his practices, I realized evil must be accepted in order to undermine it.
Jung believed that the human psyche contains light and shadow in constant dialogue. The shadow is not the enemy — it’s the part of us we refuse to see. But when someone stops negotiating with it, something terrifying happens.
They surrender to it.
We’ve seen people who have surrendered to their shadow and have lost their true empathic nature, which exists in a space of light and compassion. A friend told me his former partner convinced him that his new kittens had burned their whiskers on my friend’s gas oven. After his feelings of deep guilt and inner turmoil over this accusation had subsided, he realized upon closer inspection the kittens’ whiskers had been cut with scissor-like precision when he wasn’t in the room. His partner had harmed the little kittens, evidence that he had surrendered to his own dark nature and used that surrender to gaslight, torture and psychically contaminate my friend throughout their relationship.
Narcissists often make this surrender look like strength but really it is psychic contamination. You may not even know you are being contaminated, but sometimes your own bodily functions will give it away. You may collapse into sobbing. This is a release. You may defecate. You may vomit. You may lose your temper. These are all signs that you are releasing that psychic contamination disguised as love, care, strength or even “helpful criticism.”
The dark narcissists will discard empathy and conscience in pursuit of control, crossing what Jung called the moral event horizon — the point at which a person becomes psychologically unreachable.
Like a black hole, they begin to pull others into their gravity. But before that happens, they reveal three unmistakable signs:
Sign 1: The Pleasure Principle of Destruction
These people don’t stumble into your life. They select you — not for weakness, but for strength.
I’ve been helping a loved one cross into a painful realization that the job he was hired for was not what he applied for. He was hired to be the scapegoat for a group of individuals whose sole desire seem to be to undermine him to make themselves unaccountable for their own faulty practices, undermine leadership and through chaos and dark energetic frequencies, undermine the success of the company, whether consciously or unconciously done. This dark realization attacks his self worth, for he felt he could facilitate change and improvement with his presence.
But these are the dark traits of the narcissist’s principle of destruction. They will lure you in by stroking your ego. But, their true motive is total annihilation and in some cases, even their own self destruction. Their obsession with destruction goes beyond even their own self preservation. This is not somone who can be bribed. Money has no meaning to these destructive types. In some cases, you must let them destroy so you can build something new out of the shell of the old.
But the warning here is that you recognize your empathy, your curiosity, your authentic compassion and love of the world and its inhabitants which reflect your emotional depth — these are the destructor’s targets.
At first, they study you. They mirror your values, your rhythm, your dreams. It feels like destiny, not deception. But that perfect resonance is an illusion: it’s strategic bonding, not emotional connection.
They don’t fall in love with you — they recruit you.
When their mask slips, guilt doesn’t appear. Instead, they feel relief.
Pain becomes their pleasure principle. Your confusion is their control mechanism. Chaos interwoven between the pain points becomes your entire world. You exist in a constant state of panic, anxiety and fight or flight, and you get pulled in many directions: everything, everywhere all at once.
This is psychological vampirism: they feed on this chaotic emotional energy, it is an elixir to their desire until you forget who you were before the chaos began.
But awareness is the antidote. Once you realize their cruelty is intentional, you stop personalizing it. Their manipulation no longer defines your worth — it reveals their pathology.
You must become like a social anthropologist, analyzing, archiving, recording and viewing this pathology without being affected by it. It takes time to get to this space and it doesn’t come without having to experience the pain of initiation into individuation and awareness. Only when you individuate — where you recognize those pathologies within yourself and learn to fine-tune them and allow your true empathic nature to guide you — can you learn the methods of the dark pathology even before they present themselves to you. You’ll see the signs of the pathology and know how to respond accordingly.
For instance, a friend told me his mother exhibited her shadow side out of nowhere. It was as if something clicked inside of her and she became acidic in her responses to him, collapsing into an evil persona that he had never seen before. He was afraid that she was exhibiting her narcisstic side. I explained that individuals her age are often accused of lapsing into dementia and there are certain innocent questions that misconstrue as accusations or condescension into their state of mind. Instead of reacting in a loving way, she went on the attack. If she were living in her true nature, she would have said, “My son, why do you say that I forgot to unlock the garage door? Do you think I have dementia?” But instead, she went into attack mode and said with hatred in her voice, “Oh yes, my entire life revolves around making your life a personal hell, and I locked the door on purpose to lock you out.” She was being sarcastic and mean-spirited, which itself is a sign that her shadow side has been speaking to her deepest fears. By not reacting to these shadow accusations and acidic sarcastic remarks, my friend remained observant, called me for clarity and protected himself from being hurt.
The moment you shift from reaction to observation, you begin your recovery.
Sign 2: The Assault on Your Reality
When they lose control of your emotions, they go after your mind.
Jung described this as psychic murder — the deliberate erosion of your ability to trust yourself.
They don’t just lie; they build entire worlds made of distortion. They rewrite history mid-sentence. They deny things you both witnessed. They reframe your truth until you start doubting your memory.
Their ultimate goal is not to win an argument — it’s to replace your reality with theirs.
They attack your most sacred compass: your intuition.
Attacking your reality is an act of gaslighting that seems fairly prevalent in the modern age It’s almost the go-to for these rampant narcissists that seemed to have thrived in our current age. But the collective shadow and the fact that gaslighting has been allowed to thrive and take over every corner of our existence, from media to interpersonal relationships to work situations, has cultivated a next-level form of gaslighting, where your very intuition is attacked.
There is a reason intuition is often referred to as The Holy Spirit, or a sacred compass that is a gift from the Divine. It’s a mother’s intuition that rushes to pull her wayward toddler from stumbling out onto the street even when there are no cars present. It’s the intuition that guides a single woman, walking back to her dorm room late at night to take a different path. It’s the intuition that tells the candidate not to accept a job offer, somehow knowing that in six months the company will file bankruptcy and he will be out of a job again. Our intuition is our most sacred guide, and stands the test of time even in the modern age.
These destroyers of life, these malevolent narcissists who have lost themselves to their shadow side and cannot return to the world of compassion and empathy target an individual’s intuition with razor sharp precision. They correct how you feel about a situation. They will explain your belief systems back to you. They will replace your true nature with something foreign to you or your way of thinking or how you operate in the world.
By destroying your sacred intuition or instinct, they rebuild you in their own image.
But, once you recognize this next-level gaslighting, then recovery begins. This pattern activates your psychological immune system. When your intuition or your instinct is undermined follow these steps:
- Recognition: Name what is happening — projection, gaslighting, distortion.
- Detachment: Observe without engaging. Don’t argue with delusion; witness it.
- Self-Validation: Rebuild trust in your own perception. Write, reflect, stay silent until truth settles.
Your intuition, once doubted, becomes sharper than ever. What was once trauma becomes pattern recognition — and no narcissist can control what you can clearly see.
Sign 3: The Death of Conscience
This is the final stage — the one Jung feared most.
When remorse and empathy die, the human element dies with them. What remains is an empty architecture of ego — a mask with no soul behind it.
You can feel this absence instinctively. It’s chilling, like standing near a void. Jung called it mystical terror — the moment you sense something human has been replaced by something else.
Their emptiness is not a wound to heal. It’s a feature of the design.
Trying to reach them through love or logic is like trying to reason with a shadow. It absorbs light but gives none back.
You see this stage of the collective shadow most clearly within the dark halls of social media. The relentless anti-life rhetoric, the incessant sub human attacks against an empath’s post orchestrated by robotic algorithms that are designed to target anything that might resemble authenticity of emotion, or an authentic empath’s viewpoint of the world. If it inspires connectivity or consciousness, anything that celebrates the Divine or human nature is targeted with missile-like precision and broken apart and destroyed.
This is when you must shift from empathy to protective disengagement — the spiritual act of stepping out of their orbit. Many people begin this healing process by removing their entire social media presence and from that, comes liberation from the collective shadow that may be encroaching in their interpersonal, real-life connections.
The Power of Disengagement
The only true counter to the narcissistic field is silence.
No warnings.
No explanations.
No closure.
You withdraw completely — physically, emotionally, digitally, energetically.
This is not cruelty; it’s self-respect. Silence becomes your boundary, your therapy, and your protection.
They’ll react with rage or performative remorse, but every attempt to pull you back only confirms the truth: their survival depends on your attention.
Disengagement is not escape — it’s exorcism.
In the quiet that follows, clarity returns. Energy returns. You begin to remember who you were before the distortion.
Jung called this psychic purification — the soul cleansing itself through awareness. The light you recover afterward is stronger than what you had before.
From Victim to Wounded Healer
Freedom is not revenge. It’s transformation.
Jung believed that those who survive profound psychological darkness return with medicine — the wisdom of the wounded healer.
You now carry radar for manipulation. You sense falsehoods before they speak. You honor boundaries as sacred space.
Your empathy, once exploited, has become your superpower.
The goal is not to harden your heart — it’s to refine your compassion. To know when to extend it, and when to withhold it.
I have a friend who seems to be immune to psychic contamination and the collective shadow. She is well-loved at her work, and has enjoyed a long career. She is well-respected in her community, surrounded by friends who appreciate her. I studied her actions in life, her choices and her behavior. She’s always careful not to fall into gossip, but rather describes with a disconnected accurate precision when she witnesses injustice, and always seems to avoid being the victim of the injustice she may be witnessing.
But the key to her remaining immune to the contamination and free of the collective shadow that seems to be enveloping the world, lies in the micro world she has designed for herself. She stretches herself so thin into a space of compassion and love of nature and love of community that there is no room for the collective outside shadow to wedge into her packed little world. She has become the conservator to an abandoned home which she is slowly transforming into a public space. She is inspiring her neighbors to join in on the cause. She has made herself available to help friends and family who live outside of her area. She’s simply too busy doing the good work to make room for the narcissist.
But the darkness does try to creep in. It was something I call The Creepy Doll Effect, inspired by her. When she was beginning to clear out the abandoned, blighted property to turn it into a public park, or public space, she was finding random little creepy dolls scattered among the property. One day the dolls would appear and she would remove them. The next day she would find more, in new spaces and new positions. When we are conscious of our motives and make a decision to do a thing, it triggers a darkness, a playful Loki-like character that creates mischief and attempts to stoke fear of moving forward or creep doubt into our decisions. The dolls she found were a bit creepy, but they were harmless. She would take photos of them, like a paleontologist recording dinosaur bones. She would archive them, and often text me, “Found another one,” and we would laugh and she would go back to work. Often the creepy dolls we find scattered into our consciousness as we undergo our individuation are harmless and meant only to scare us. We can recognize what they are, catalog them appropriately and continue the shadow work unaffected by their materialization into our conscious world.
What you endured wasn’t just pain; it was initiation. You crossed the underworld of the psyche and came back with light. You are busy, you are transparent but protected. You are immune to the residue of creepy dolls in your subconscious.
Reflection
If the narcissist represents the unintegrated shadow, then the survivor represents its integration — the conscious use of pain as wisdom.
We must also acknowledge that there is an empath-narcissist bond, and often it’s a battle we find within ourselves. By denying the narcissist within ourselves, it will often materialize into our conscious world and wreak havoc on our lives. This bond isn’t something to be feared or punished, it’s rather a process necessary to carry us into individuation.
Evil does exist. It exists because those who once had an opportunity to choose their empathic nature instead chose their dark shadow, whether consciously or unconsciously done. There may be no recovery for them.
The narcissist was never meant to be your home. They are the mirror for that which could reflect the exile of your own soul.
But there is recovery for you. And once you’ve crossed your own moral event horizon — the moment you choose truth over illusion — you realize something profound:
You were never broken. You were becoming.
Warning After Recovery
You are dealing with an entity that views your kindness as weakness and your desire for harmony as a vulnerability to be exploited. Your silence is not an act of cruelty. It is an act of profound self-respect. It is the ultimate boundary. And finally, you choose yourself.
The Internal War
Before you can execute complete autonomous individuation, you must first win the internal war. You must overcome the empath’s dilemma, confronting the hooks the narcissist has planted deep within your psyche:
The Guilt Hook
A voice will whisper, “You are abandoning them. You are being cruel. They are in pain, and you are the only one who understands them.”
You must recognize this as their programming, not your truth. Their pain is a self-created vortex designed to pull others down with them. You are not obligated to drown in an ocean of their making.
True compassion is not setting yourself on fire to keep a narcissist warm.
The Hope Hook
The second hook is the most addictive of them all — hope. Hope itself is a false illusion and gives way to cravings of an outcome that represents control. In this space of hope, you will remember the good times, the moments of charm during the love-bombing phase. A voice will plead, “But what if they can change? I saw glimpses of that better person. If I just try harder, maybe I can save them.”
You must mourn the person you thought they were — the potential you fell in love with — and accept the brutal reality of who they have consistently shown themselves to be.
You cannot build a future on glimpses of a person who does not truly exist.
The External War
Once you resolve to disengage, you must prepare for the external war — the extinction burst.
When a parasite’s host begins to pull away, the parasite does not simply let go. It panics. It latches on with every tool at its disposal in a desperate, frantic attempt to reestablish the connection.
This predictable escalation is the ultimate proof of your power over them. It is the sound of a starving entity realizing its food source is gone.
The Final Manipulations
They will suddenly become the perfect person you first met, showering you with apologies, promises of change, and declarations of undying love.
This is not a moment of clarity on their part — it is their most potent venom, designed to lower your defenses so they can strike again.
When that fails, the next wave comes — the smear campaign.
The narcissist will begin recruiting flying monkeys, turning your friends, family, or colleagues against you. They will spin a masterful tale in which you are the abuser, the unstable one, the cruel aggressor. They will project all of their darkness onto you, and for a time, people may believe them.
This will be incredibly painful — a profound injustice. But you must hold the line.
Engaging in this battle is to lose. Your truth is not decided by a committee of their enablers.
The Mask Falls
Finally, when all else fails, you may face their pure, unfiltered rage. The mask will not just slip — it will be torn off completely.
This is the moment you see the void without its disguise — their final desperate attempt to control you through fear.
And when you refuse to yield, when you choose silence over chaos and peace over illusion — that is the moment you reclaim your power.
That is the moment you are free.
Carl Jung’s Final and Most Urgent Message to Humanity
Carl Jung’s final and most urgent message to humanity is a profound belief in our ability to create light through consciousness.
We can fight back against the collective shadow that has crept across our modern world.
The terrifying knowledge of the shadow — the reality of swarms of individuals who have surrendered to a moral void and are the psychic swamp zombies now occupying our world spaces from politics, to community leaders, to churches, to work environments and even down to the micro: friendships and family— is not a curse meant to haunt you. It is raw, untamed energy that, when met with courage and awareness, becomes the fuel for the most profound spiritual transformation the world has ever seen.
The journey we’ve taken through the three signs — from seeing their pleasure in destruction, to piercing their veil of illusion, to unveiling the emptiness in their conscience — was never really about them.
It was always about you.
This has been a curriculum for your own evolution.
Recognizing their parasitic nature taught you to value your own life force.
Resisting their mental invasion taught you to build sovereignty in your own mind. Witnessing their emptiness taught you to cherish the sacred substance of your soul.
You have learned that your empathy is not a weakness to be overcome, but a powerful instrument of perception that must be used with wisdom.
You have learned that your integrity is not naïve, but a shield that no manipulation can penetrate.
You have learned that your deepest wounds are not sources of shame, but gateways to your most formidable strengths.
The encounter with this profound darkness was an alchemical fire. It was painful, terrifying, and it may have felt like it would consume you — but it did not.
It burned away everything that was not essential. It stripped you down to your unbreakable core.
And from those ashes, you have been resurrected — not as a victim, but as a sovereign being. Not as a survivor, but as a supreme soul.
You are now the bearer of a rare and precious light — a light made all the more brilliant by the darkness it has known.
Go forward, not in fear of the collective shadow that has seemed to strangle our existence with images of fear and chaos, but in the quiet, formidable power of your own awakened light.
You are no longer just a participant in this world. You are a co-creator of a new one — one founded on the principles you fought so hard to reclaim.
Your empathy.
Your integrity.
Your awareness.
Your truth.
If you are ready to explore the next chapter of this journey — to learn how to use this new perception as a creative force in the world — then your path toward complete sovereignty is just beginning.
There is no profound secret toward this path, or club to join to pick up the cause of this war on our consciousness.
All you must do is just be you.
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