If reality is a hallucination created by the brain from our environment, biological processes, and learning history, then one cannot escape the questions of whether one’s apprehension of reality is correct, and to what extent that matters. While our neurosystem is able to build a coherent sense of “ego” that believes itself to be consistent across time and experience, practice in self-observation leads us to begin to see all the inconsistencies and vacillations that occur throughout at day.
My personal favorite these days is making plans. When I make plans, I feel excited about them—but they’re far away. When it’s time to do the plans, some days I spend the morning hoping they’ll be canceled. If they’re not and I do the plans, I usually end up thankful that I did. In these sentences I’ve used “I” to denote the brain-body-bucket that had all these experiences, but with so much vacillation there does not seem to be a consistent character to that “I”.
At times our “I” becomes what Internal Family Systems would become “blended” with parts, each of whom have their own distinctive worlds and subpersonalities. That blending could be momentary or pervasive. At times I might be blended with a part that feels sensitive to rejection, and perceives in those around me all these signs of rejection. Maybe that part of me is right—these are little rejections. Or maybe it’s projecting its rejection fear onto others.
Either way, when that rejection-sensitive part runs the show, I’ll respond to these with all of my rejection “stuff.” These reactions often tend to foster greater experiences of rejection in me, either because they gravitate toward rejecting people or they wear down my loved ones into finally rejecting me. When in that rejection-sensitive part, we may have the same conversations with the same people, seeking the same reassurance that they’re not rejecting, but find the conversation never lands, which exhausts everyone.
These experiences of rejection, and all the thoughts and sensations that go with them, are in some sense actually occurring within the organism of the self. Whether the other person believes they are rejecting or not, the person “in” rejection experiences all the pain of it.
Where growth and maturation happens is whether that person can be with the pain but not identified as the pain—to see that what they feel is real and valid, but the story about the pain may not be. When we agree with the story, then we have to fix the story, but the story is not the pain. The story might be “My partner secretly hates me,” no matter how often the partner provides evidence to the contrary, until they get wearied of explaining themselves and show even the mildest moment of impatience that confirms the story for that part.
If we can be with the feeling without trying to fix the story, if we can get access to the consciousness that surrounds and is greater than the part, we are in touch with a greater selfhood that helps the pain of that part to move and heal. Perhaps this pain is activated by an actual rejection, perhaps not, but either way what we need to heal is presence and supportive people in our lives who can validate our feelings but give us space to work through the stories.
Jung often spoke of synchronicities, and the Jungian therapists I have worked with and admired often speak to these moments when we make contact with the greater Self and either heal or free ourselves from the complex, which seems to transform reality itself. After years of anger, I finally forgive my sibling, and then they call me out of the blue. I work through fear and decide I’m ready to step into power, and suddenly an opportunity arrives to do it.
Perhaps there is a mystical dimension of this, or perhaps having freed ourselves of that particular painful hallucination we are ready to see a greater field of reality. Perhaps these opportunities were already there and we weren’t ready to see it. Perhaps we live in a field of social energy and intuitively sense when openings arise. No matter what, it’s really cool when it happens.
As the phenomena of “gaslighting” and “spiritual bypassing” become more popularly understood as a form of abuse, I find myself often reflecting on the relationship between these behaviors and the psychoanalytic defenses. Projection, repression, denial, bypassing, and other defenses may be said to be a form of self-gaslighting—constructing reality in a way that denies or mitigates certain troubling truths.
At the same time, these defenses lend themselves quite easily to deployment as gaslighting tools against people. I suspect that is one reason I see them less widely used in popular discourse. Popular connotations around the defenses are that such experiences are “not real” or not valid in a meaningful way. One can imagine the enlightened guru saying, “You’re just projecting your anger onto me!” after spending ten minutes telling you how shameful your behavior has been and how un-enlightened your objections are.
I notice that the intrapersonal, intrapsychic model of spiritual growth and development that seemed so prominent since the 1970s, which gave rise to The Secret, seems to be giving way in younger generations toward a more external attention to systems and abuses of power. Now talking about how freeing one’s self of a projection lead to a new job opportunity would be met with the valid counterpoint that focusing only on the internal process ignores the material systems in which one lives. To ignore this allows us too easily to blame people for “manifesting” their misfortunes and focus exclusively on the personal.
This is a view that Jung himself critiqued in his long essay “Answer to Job.” In this excerpt, Jung speaks of Job being allowed to suffer and have all of his wealth and family be destroyed, and then having his friends and family wonder what it was he must have done wrong to deserve such suffering:
“Job’s friends do everything in their power to contribute to his moral torments, and instead of giving him, whom God has perfidiously abandoned, their warm-hearted support, they moralize in an all too human manner, that is, in the stupidest fashion imaginable.”
There is no simple answer to whether one is projecting or being gaslit, at least not at present. In a sense, I believe we tend to project onto people who have something in them that we can “hang” that projection onto—meaning there is a little both/and. But then we could also say that to be gaslit, we must allow ourselves to receive the gaslighting—a little both/and.
That both/and is not wholly helpful in working through circumstances on the ground. If one is actively being gaslit, then stopping one’s internal gaslighting is a necessary and healthy step toward breaking away from the abusive relationship. If one is actively projecting, then recognizing the validity of one’s projections but also finding the psychic roots of the projection is a necessary and healthy step toward having a mature relationship with others.
We need both, and we need to fumble our way toward competency in both. We need validating, supportive, safe relationships, and we need internal self-awareness and ability to discern. We need to take risks in having scary communications, and we need clear boundaries. We need the awareness that we live in a context, and we need to remember that we only know that context through our subjectivity.
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