I was mostly aware of the shared field of transference, and the pressure I felt internally to behave in a certain way. Not consciously, but I found stepping out of that professional role, both in my community and within myself, has been liberating. Ironically I am now deeper seeing and kinder to myself and to others.
Huge topic! Feels like the meat of the individuation process. I feel like projection happens first and mostly at home and it’s quiet and insidious, often covered up by niceness or dutiful parenting that stems from trauma and rigid systems like religion and even school/academia but it’s harmful and it makes differentiating really challenging when coupled with other factors like neglect which is like pointing to a black hole. Very hard to navigate what is what inside in this combo. When immature parents don’t do their own healing work within (and most don’t due to fear but also costs) it seems to make for a forced development (or not) in middle age for the next generation. I think we see it in society with men who internally blame their wives for their own unhappiness and dominate through passive aggressive and betraying behavior because they have been taught to believe they are superior to women and that her job is to fix and fulfill him. I think they’re projecting their mothers (what they didn’t get in childhood) and they go for younger ones because they are usually easier to dominate due to developmental stages of life. It’s a terrible feeling to be in relationship with someone who is needy and unaware of these projections and I think it requires space from parents (hence the strong desire to leave home in adolescence) and other relationships too in order to recalibrate back to your own energy.
As a recently retired psychotherapist (4 years), it has been a great relief not to be a professional nice person. Of course clients will project onto us what they might need to heal, but it is a great relief to break through that projection. I found that the breaking through often gave a good surge of energy to the therapy.
This immediately made me think of the “black sheep” character / trope. I’m currently working on a story about the benefits of family therapy, will definitely be including your insights.
So insightful and well-timed in my life, too. The idea that we assign others--or self-assign roles to ourselves--within the system is *fascinating.* The more conscious awareness we bring to the idea that we're assigning these roles, the more (I believe) we can develop fluidity and freedom from getting locked in to one. That women are the cultural scapegoat -- and canary in the coal mine, as you aptly put it -- is something I'm writing more and more about.
This blew my mind as it’s helping me see where my codependency comes from, too. I’m sending this piece to my therapist so we can unpack it in next week’s session.
What would you recommend if you’ve seen this play out in your extended family for decades? How would you convince a seemingly codependent “patient” of the larger forces at work, especially as everyone is getting old and there is a clinging to the “known” as a life raft even as symptoms become more and more acute? Can an outside observer (family member) productively intervene?
Yes, I am thinking a lot about this too right now, as I enter my own threshold of Sacred Union. The external union reflects the internal, the internal the external. What does a healthy union process look like? I am brought to MLvF's Projection & Re-Collection. To recollect/withdraw the projections one has stockpiled on their partner ('both' parties) and assume responsibility for the behaviors in the other that one finds annoying, irritating, unacceptable, reprehensible, disappointing. Post-withdrawal, then shared responsibility, or co-responsibility, co-acknowledgment, Eye of the Thymus, becomes possible (intoxicatingly so! A true relational ekstasis). So many amazing threads here~
Wow! What a powerful insight. So helpful. I've been doing shadow work for a while now and this seems to be another dimension of that. Both in terms of intimate relationships and in terms of our relationship to the collective. Thank you!
This seems to me a subtle but deeply intriguing mechanism. I remember, when I was married a long time ago, I had a persistent vision of a person made of shadow clinging to my back. At the time, no matter what I did, I was i error, and was punished for it. I realized intuitively it seemed to be my wife's shadow that she'd put onto me. For reasons that might be obvious, the marriage didn't last very long. I wasn't as grounded in Jungian theory at the time, but I understood enough to literally see that.
I’ve never thought of this and it’s as if the lights have just been turned on. WOW.
I was mostly aware of the shared field of transference, and the pressure I felt internally to behave in a certain way. Not consciously, but I found stepping out of that professional role, both in my community and within myself, has been liberating. Ironically I am now deeper seeing and kinder to myself and to others.
Huge topic! Feels like the meat of the individuation process. I feel like projection happens first and mostly at home and it’s quiet and insidious, often covered up by niceness or dutiful parenting that stems from trauma and rigid systems like religion and even school/academia but it’s harmful and it makes differentiating really challenging when coupled with other factors like neglect which is like pointing to a black hole. Very hard to navigate what is what inside in this combo. When immature parents don’t do their own healing work within (and most don’t due to fear but also costs) it seems to make for a forced development (or not) in middle age for the next generation. I think we see it in society with men who internally blame their wives for their own unhappiness and dominate through passive aggressive and betraying behavior because they have been taught to believe they are superior to women and that her job is to fix and fulfill him. I think they’re projecting their mothers (what they didn’t get in childhood) and they go for younger ones because they are usually easier to dominate due to developmental stages of life. It’s a terrible feeling to be in relationship with someone who is needy and unaware of these projections and I think it requires space from parents (hence the strong desire to leave home in adolescence) and other relationships too in order to recalibrate back to your own energy.
As a recently retired psychotherapist (4 years), it has been a great relief not to be a professional nice person. Of course clients will project onto us what they might need to heal, but it is a great relief to break through that projection. I found that the breaking through often gave a good surge of energy to the therapy.
This immediately made me think of the “black sheep” character / trope. I’m currently working on a story about the benefits of family therapy, will definitely be including your insights.
So insightful and well-timed in my life, too. The idea that we assign others--or self-assign roles to ourselves--within the system is *fascinating.* The more conscious awareness we bring to the idea that we're assigning these roles, the more (I believe) we can develop fluidity and freedom from getting locked in to one. That women are the cultural scapegoat -- and canary in the coal mine, as you aptly put it -- is something I'm writing more and more about.
This blew my mind as it’s helping me see where my codependency comes from, too. I’m sending this piece to my therapist so we can unpack it in next week’s session.
As always, thank you so much for your work. 🫶🏽
What would you recommend if you’ve seen this play out in your extended family for decades? How would you convince a seemingly codependent “patient” of the larger forces at work, especially as everyone is getting old and there is a clinging to the “known” as a life raft even as symptoms become more and more acute? Can an outside observer (family member) productively intervene?
Yes, I am thinking a lot about this too right now, as I enter my own threshold of Sacred Union. The external union reflects the internal, the internal the external. What does a healthy union process look like? I am brought to MLvF's Projection & Re-Collection. To recollect/withdraw the projections one has stockpiled on their partner ('both' parties) and assume responsibility for the behaviors in the other that one finds annoying, irritating, unacceptable, reprehensible, disappointing. Post-withdrawal, then shared responsibility, or co-responsibility, co-acknowledgment, Eye of the Thymus, becomes possible (intoxicatingly so! A true relational ekstasis). So many amazing threads here~
Wow! What a powerful insight. So helpful. I've been doing shadow work for a while now and this seems to be another dimension of that. Both in terms of intimate relationships and in terms of our relationship to the collective. Thank you!
This seems to me a subtle but deeply intriguing mechanism. I remember, when I was married a long time ago, I had a persistent vision of a person made of shadow clinging to my back. At the time, no matter what I did, I was i error, and was punished for it. I realized intuitively it seemed to be my wife's shadow that she'd put onto me. For reasons that might be obvious, the marriage didn't last very long. I wasn't as grounded in Jungian theory at the time, but I understood enough to literally see that.