Painful Projections

[jblaurie]

Hey fdr people I'm Jason

This is my first post on here but I've been listening to Stef's videos on youtube for some while now...

I'm having trouble with (at least what I think is) projection. I've been working on self knowledge for over a year and I'm slowly piecing everything from my childhood back together. The whole time though, I've focused on the shit things that everyone else is doing and a lot about my emotional defenses. I have only until now stopped and thought about the effects of my own actions on other people feelings. For example, latley I had gotten fed up with how a majority of my (ex)friends could not be trusted around each others girlfriends. In the past a few times they have slept with each others girlfriends, yet still look each other in the eye and pretend like they are friends. I always felt uneasy when I would bring a date and could 'sense' what ticks over in their minds. I would sit at home and get so angry about it! Anyways I just stopped hanging around those people and then suddenly occured to me (and i know this sounds silly) that I think like that too and have done those things! It's like I had blocked it out of existance! I think the whole time I was so angry at them was my way of projecting what I had done onto them and rejecting them for it. I wrote my old friend a letter finally acknowledging what I did was really mean and I'm sorry I hurt his feelings. I didnt seem to hate them so much after that even though they still did things that were mean as well?

So the problem now is if I detect a nasty characteristic in someone I kind of get half stuck between not liking them for it, but at the same time questioning myself to why I identify and react to that charactistic so well?I have a hard time trusting people intentions a lot of the time

 

 

My background:

Im 26 now. I'm an only accidental child raised by a single mother. At age 5 we moved into a house with my grandparents and uncle. He is nearing 50 now and still lives at home with my grandma. My mum and him would constantly fight. My mum was always angry, raging and very controlling. My uncle was more passive agressive and manipulating. To my uncle I was a means of hurting my mum. Both of them would propagandise each other to me and have fights 'about' me in front of me. This one time my mum was ordering me to do something and my uncle flipped out and started smashing all my toys screaming 'this is what you fucking do to him!' I ran and hid crying. Neither of them even spoke about or acknowledged what they did afterwards and just swept all my broken things up in to a bigger box. Things changed after that and my mum became more fierce in her rage attacks, she beat me once and I ran out into the kitchen crying and my grandparents just stood there staring. My uncle came over and starts patting me on the back saying 'there there' in a weird tone almost like he was happy his comforting me could be used to gain leverage against my mum.

The first times this happened I remember crying in terror, but the weird things is after a while I used to almost feel excited in anticipation of another fight. I think I almost wanted them to suffer. I once hid in the garden with a tape recorder so I could listen to it again later? I wanted to play it to my friends from school but tape went missing the next day, I guess my uncle found it.  I think I became pretty emotionally numb after that, no real sense or concience or feelings at all, I would daydream a lot and escaped into a fantasy wold of computer games. We moved away when I was 11. I hated my mum and didnt want her anywhere near me, I felt sick if she even touched me and spent the rest of my time living there with a brick wall put up between us. 

Thankfully I don't speak to them anymore

[Elias Tate]

Tremendously sorry for what you experienced growing up, it's great to see that you are, in as much as your post is, sane, contemplative and caring. This fact alone is very inspiring and i think it's worth it for you to reflect on this for a moment and it would not be inappropriate to take pride in this.

As for the projection, perhaps other members may have more insight than me. What i will say though, is that every inch of self awareness helps, because the more you stop to notice some of your own defensive or maladaptive behavior patterns, the stronger this reflex to check in with yourself and analyse your own behavior becomes. And this awareness spreads to other areas of life.

 

It's clear that being adept at something makes you more sensitive to it. Writers are more picky about what books they like the longer they have been writing, and any english speaker could more easily tell a brittish accent from an australian accent than a french speaker could. You are probably sensitive to your ex friends slimy behavior because, having done it, you understand it intuitively. This is a vestige of a darker time in your psychological history perhaps, but it is a strength too because it means you don't have to learn the hard when when you're dealing with someone like this.

 

You say you have a hard time trusting people's intentions a lot of the time, so this raises a question: are the people you are mistrusting in fact trustworthy? put another way: is your

 

 

mistrust accurate or inaccurate?

Is it just a general nebulous mistrust, or does it seem to be triggered by something?

 

[jblaurie]

Thanks for taking the time to replyI think you make a good example of this with what you said about writers being picky about books they like. I can relate this to a lot of things I do.

Your question really left me thinking about why I wrote I have a hard time trusting peoples intentions. The thing is there is people I'm trusting every day so I don't think it is a generalised mistrust. I realised when I was writing that I was mostly thinking about one particular friend. I always felt his idea of friendships were purely for his own self interest. Lower self esteems as a means to reflect back his grandiosity. For some reason I must have blocked this memory out but I now clearly remember him openly telling me how If he could become friends with one of my collegues at work he could convince him to move in to their spare room so they could use him to build their new renovations. I think that is enough evidence to make someone question a persons good will. I think my constant 'self checking' of this was a way of now wanting to accept and trying to invalidate the fact this guy is probably not a good friend.Thanks, your kind words helped me realise something new

[Joe the Hobo]

You are really on the path here old chap, the path of self knowledge! It's refreshing to see someone peicing things together and what I think you have touched on in your first post, regarding yourself, is a degree of hypocrisy. Yes that's bad but of course, once we become aware of such things we can alter our behaviour in response to the realisation that we were being a bit shitty Many people exhibit this, like the christians who claim to be all about peace and love but have you read the bible? Christ! It's the opposite! I've been similarly hypocritical in the past, claiming to like unusual/weird people but then ostracising certain individuals who were still slightly normal or who did not conform to my idea of weridness. Of course I see my own hypocrisy now. It's all an important part of self knowledge, awareness of our own hypocrisy: do we walk the talk? Carry on the good work.