Yes I am still on the Jung and James Hollis beat. I am telling you, both these men are fucking amazing!
Let me catch myself up, we have made it to the following facts:
1. We are all wounded in childhood by too much, too little or a sick combo of both.
2. We all seek to heal these wounds in our relationships.
3. We remain very unconscious about the above facts.
4. Because we remain unconscious the pattern proliferates and grows.
5. Because we reinforce the pattern over and over again, we suffer as do our marriages, friendships, dating life and pretty much all of our relations with other people.
6. Before addressing how this plays out in our relationships, we have to do the inner work on ourselves first. No exceptions.
7. This inner work is hard to do and painful to address and it is very hard to overcome the allure of our childhood reactions and decisions related to our trauma, so we are kind of hellbent on doing what we always do, because it feels like one magical day, our strategy for living and relating will finally pay off and we will be rewarded with everything we have ever wanted. And this is very hard to let go.
8. Society reinforces this idea - just keep trying and one magical day you will find your person.
9. We all seem to miss that we need to be that person for ourselves first.
Today - we are looking at how we get set up into this relational pattern to begin with...
Projecting. Yes, this very unconscious fuckery called projecting.
We all desire connection. And connection seeks to establish itself wherever there is a space. And our psyche hates emptiness. And is always looking to fill the gap. In today’s world, so many of us have already picked out a new partner before we even told the old one that we were leaving.
Projection is the way we fill the gap, with or without an actual person. Projection is the best hole filler ever! It allows us to imbue qualities and ideas onto and into people they don’t really possess so that we can continue our pattern and goal of resolving these childhood wounds of too much or too little or both.
For me, the visual is this: It is like walking through life drunk as fuck, but you don’t know you are wasted, because you have been perpetually wasted forever and have forgotten there is another way to be. And you need and want to believe that everyone around you thinks you are hilarious and great. So the side glances and weird looks, you project are humor, or jealousy as the case may be, thereby neutralizing any negative consequences for you and your merry delusion.
You just wander aimlessly through life, drunk as fuck, slapping an accepting happy sticker on all you meet, so that you can continue your drunken craziness for all time.
That, to me, is projection. I could come up with a 100 examples of it and still not be able to define it succinctly. Generally speaking, things that are lacking in others, our minds come in with this wonderful, hurtful, amazing talent for just whitewashing everything, neutralizing the stuff that doesn’t fit in our delusion and casting it aside, or reframing it, or wholly just pretending isn't fucking there.
“Projection, as a psychological phenomenon, is ubiquitous and inevitable.. Psychic energy is, to borrow Freud’s phrase, polymorphously perverse: that it, it is forever taking, twisting, turning, and recreating in order to fill the lacunae.” James Hollis
Projecting uses whatever it can to change our thinking and thereby our relating to better fit whatever delusion is being manufactured in our minds. And then those projections are landed upon our intended with a thud. And they stick.
That is until the Other doesn’t behave so as to allow us to hold onto that projection anymore. All of this happens without our awareness because the second you know you are projecting, all of the projecting ceases to exist. We only begin to reclaim the projection when the other person refuses to comply. When the other person refuses to reflect back to us our projection, that is where all the trouble begins.
James Hollis says “if there is a central law of the psyche, it is that what is unconscious will be projected.”
So whatever remains unaware, will absolute find its way into our lives and reality, and we call it fate.
“All relationships, all relationships, begin with projection” James Hollis
And we don’t like this reality. But it is true. Some of us are better at getting it more right than wrong...but all of us engage projection as a precursor to becoming involved.
We think we know, we feel it to be true, we know we are right...and sometimes we actually are right. But a lot of the times, we are dead fucking wrong. And in order to keep our projection factory in mass production, we have to ignore that we are projecting in the first place. Because if we begin to notice our projections are occurring, with that knowledge, we have begun to stop our projections from proliferating.
“But such is the power of an idea, an effectively charged idea whose proper definition is complex. To call an idea like this a complex is in no way to derogate it; a complex is, simply said, an idea with a lot of energy that knocks about autonomously in our psychic cellar”. James Hollis.
And the power of a complex cannot be denied! Completes are what drive us, motivate us and keep us stuck in repetitive patterns of behavior that always feel like they are going to pay off but rarely do.
Two important complexes are outlined that all people seem to have and believe in despite their absolute invalidity and falsity.
One is the idea we are immortal when we know we will all eventually die. And the other is this idea of the Magical Other. And we believe that we are somehow going to resist time and death. And we believe, with all that we are, that there is one other person out there for us that is right and best and will solve everything for us. This soul mate has the capacity just in their sheer existence to change our personal histories, relieve us of our projections and our need to project and resolve all which is in us currently that is unresolved. This magical Other can and will save us.
And we believe it with all that we are. And we project this idea onto others until they let us know usually with behavior, but also sometimes with words, that our projection has no home in them. And then we are crushed, but we don’t stay down for long, we just see that that particular person is wrong, not our projection of course, and we renew the search once more...
And as a divorce attorney, I can tell you, this happens over and over and over again, forever.
And I can also say, somewhat sheepishly, that I too do this. In fact, I think I might have inadvertently gotten a PhD in projection. I am fucking amazing at it. And I am the best at pretending I am not doing it even while I am fucking doing it.
But with this blog as my witness, I am claiming my need, desire and abject inability to stop projecting this idea and all its accoutrements onto this Magical Other that I have always believed is someday going to just appear and I will be healed.
And today, I stand in the place where I cast all of this aside and say, "I don’t believe in that anymore." There is no magical other coming to save me. There are just a bunch of other fucked up people out there throwing projections all over the place, and failing repeatedly. I think there are some people who have figured it out and now work very hard to keep the love going, because projection, when it fails, is quite the fucking let down. And if you are in a long term, healthy union, you are quite familiar with the aftermath of the failure of projection. And you have found another with whom you can mutually work through the heartbreak and loss that comes when each of you fail to live up to your other’s projection. And you have developed a strategy and mechanism for dealing with it.
And if you haven’t, then you are bonded but fucking miserable and probably often engaging in magical other thinking, which in my experience is only over fueled as you age, when the other major delusion that operates in your life, that you are never going to die, becomes unsustainable.
That is a hard day indeed. And I am there. I am going to die and there is no magical other ever coming for me. I just stand here empty, and vacuous and void. And I guess that is just where I have to be right now. Standing alone, allowing all the projections of immortality and magical life saving and affirming love to just wither on the vine of my life.
And that sounds and feels pretty fucking bleak!
But I do so, with this idea that perhaps if I can do this inner work, I can change myself enough that I may live out however many days I have left, creating a space within me that is better and might resonate with others better. I do not do this to GET the magical other. No instead I do this to save myself the further heartbreak and loss that holding onto my complexes and delusions and projections cause me, every single time...
Again...still.
Fuck.
But perhaps today there is more hope than there has ever been. Perhaps in this time for me alone and on my own, swimming in the demise of my own failed projections, I might be able to change my own interiority and in so doing find a lasting peace that exists outside of the delusion of immortality and enduring love of another. Perhaps, and I am pretty sure the work is mine, to come to love myself and my life enough that I stop seeking this magical other, and instead become content with the life I am living.
Again, still, but this time without all that fucking projecting.
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