This is where I decide who you are going to be, how you are going to show up and how you are going to meet my needs...usually based on the sparsest of information. You light me up in certain, familiar and habitual ways, and then it is really game on. I don’t know you, you don’t really know me, because the wound has selected and all the wound needs for selection is the close approximation of that familiar sensation coupled with desire. It matters not what type the desire - it could be sexual, or security, it could be status, or it could be safety. You just need desire to fanned flames to ignite the burning embers of projection.
Then we are off and running. You have now largely just taken center stage in my nascent play. I will be directing you, coaching you, helping you with your lines. And you really are supposed to play along. And if this were the only thing going on, that might actually work. Except at the very same time, you have also cast me in the lead of your projection play. And all that I am doing and expecting of you, is similarly being expected of me...the major issue is that neither one of us knows that we are doing any of the above. To each of us, we just dig each other and it feels like it is working...this time.
But it won’t. Because we are both just allowing our wounds to select a mate that is going to open us up and break us down in the same ways as before. Our unconscious is in charge of selection and it only wants one thing, the familiar. And the fantasy that through you and your love, this time, I will be healed, loved, adored, protected, nurtured and valued takes over once more. And you are over there doing the exact same thing except it is your wound selecting so the variations of our fantasies line up only slightly.
James Hollis has referred to falling in love as a transient psychosis. And I see the logic there. “The lens of past experience passes over one’s eyes, distorting our perceptions and creating a whole new world of choice and consequence.”
Because I remain largely unaware of my past and its tentacles that reach out and affect, warp and distinguish my everyday, I am doomed to repeat them, but call them something else entirely. All of my relationships have started with the following phrase...”this time I will be different and this person is totally different from the last one...”
And guess what? I am right and wrong every single time. I am different and so is the other person. But there is much that exists beneath each surface. And neither party is really aware that though the desire for different is strong, it will never be stronger than the desire to go home, to heal that which remains festering all these many years later.
A commitment to projection is what I see in every failed marriage. Each party being absolutely married to the idea that this union, this person was sent to save them. And it all works until one party sees that perhaps this person was not the best choice. Perhaps they presented themselves falsely. Perhaps we misunderstood who they were in the first place. And of course we did, because who they actually are and who we need them to be is never actually the same.
And most of us never realize that it was our projection that created all of this in the first place. Sure the other party is doing the same thing, but we aren’t really aware of that either, at least not until much later. And then it is too late. Way too late.
Projection is a thing that once you realize you are doing it, you have largely ended it. It is like how darkness vanishes with the light. Every single time. Once the light comes, darkness must go. It cannot remain any longer. And once the light goes, darkness is the only result.
And so it goes too with our projections, all we need to understand is that we are doing it and become willing to see it even when everything inside us clamors for us not to. It is in this seeing that we release ourselves from the nasty cycle of recreating that which wounded us in the first place. We cannot ever heal the origins with the proxy. And in some cases, perhaps there is no healing for the original wound. Instead, perhaps, we can learn to see that we project and that is the start of the pattern once more. And if we can see this, we are very far along at changing that which has plagued us for decades. Then perhaps that which has always been attractive, shall be so no longer.
“But since my Eden project, my desire to go home through you, is essentially unconscious, I am unaware of its origin in myself and can only blame you for this great disappointment.” James Hollis.
When I come to terms with my projections and the reason they exist, I can begin to stop blaming you for failing to meet my ridiculous expectations and meet you on a plane where we might both get our needs met. But the fact that I keep ending up where I keep ending up, must always and forever be my responsibility and my part. Blaming you only further entrenches the pattern and relieves me of any responsibility in my own life. And perhaps most horrifically, allows my dysfunctional pattern to repeat and replicate itself...forever.
What a waste of a life, of love, of living...
It isn’t really a lot easier to own our projections, but if we do, we can watch them evaporate before our eyes and get a glimpse of a homecoming that might actually be workable, enjoyable and life and love sustaining.
We are offered the world, but only at the expense of acknowledging and owning our projections and their ever presence in our lives.
It is always going to be again..still. But if we know this we are armed with an ability to begin anew instead of repeating the same old patterns...forever while blaming everyone else for our problems.
Personal accountability comes hard. But the payoff is totally worth it.
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