Confessions of an Introvert: The Solitary Path to Emotional Maturity - Paperback

by D. Stephenson Bond (Author)

Honestly confronting your own life story requires the emotional maturity to discover a radical acceptance of yourself as you really are. Introverts embrace the vibrant power of the inner life. For introverts, life is about the inward journey, expanding conscious awareness, and the quest for growth and maturity to the fullest extent.

Confessions of an Introvert is the true story of a near-death experience at age fifteen. As an introvert, Bond writes a compelling and compassionate memoir of the ups and downs of everyday life as seen by a Jungian psychoanalyst who committed his life to the quest for knowledge about personality development in order to understand the mystery of his own near-death experience. His outward journey stretched from the backwoods of West Virginia to psychoanalytic training in Boston and the dotcom world of Silicon Alley in New York, but the inward journey demanded the unrelenting scrutiny of an examined life to wrestle with the limitations of childhood and culture and an extroverted world interested only in success and money, not meaning and purpose.

Tracing the steps of each stage of personality development through which every life must pass from childhood to maturity, Bond reflects on thirty-five years of experience in Jungian psychology to tell the story of radical self-acceptance and individuation.

Confessions of an Introvert is a Jungian memoir crafted as an intimately personal narrative of inner discovery where dreams and near-death experience create a personal myth of meaning, using everyday language to explore important concepts which influence our true inner lives:

--What is the family myth and how does it shape our lives?
--The importance of discovering our aptitudes and developing them to full potential
--Fulfilling the demands of the first half of life, the midlife crisis, and discovering the goals of the second half of life
--Finding our opus, our life's work, and feeling the commitment to personal legacy
--What it means to become an individual against all the pressures to conform
--The joy of being an introvert and the power of the inner life to shape our world
--The meaning of dreams as a dialog with the inner self
--Major concepts of C. G. Jung in everyday language - shadow, persona, Self, opus, archetype, individuation
--A unique perspective on the meaning of near-death experience