The Other as a Mirror

Despite having been in Jungian Analytical Therapy for years, I still continued to believe, at least in part, that my trigger was about the other person. In psychological terms, we might say: I didn’t fully see through my projection.

Projection is becoming a buzzword, and if you ask me, that’s a good thing. It is important that we learn this word and know what it means. So what is projection?

As human beings, we carry all aspects of being human within us as potential. At the same time, we grow up in very different circumstances. One person grows up with a parent who has problems of their own, another with an absent parent, and someone else with a parent who is far too available or overly accommodating. This does something to you as a child. It shapes your inner life. Your unconscious and your consciousness.

Suppose you grow up with a parent who struggles with anxiety. What you experience as a child is a parent who is often anxious in response to things. You see it. You hear the words and thoughts that come with it. And you feel the emotions, the fear. Nervous systems notice and respond to one another. You feel the fear too, on a bodily level. And if the fear was already there when you were in the womb, the imprint is even greater. Then you spent nine months living in this parent’s fear.

You grow up. And at some point, you start finding the fear burdensome. You decide that enough is enough with the fear inside you. You are no longer going to allow it. You decide not to be afraid anymore. In Jungian terms: the fearful part is banished to the shadow of the psyche. To the basement or attic I wrote about in my previous article. And there the fearful part continues to live, but in suboptimal circumstances. There, the part remains young, childlike, primitive, undeveloped…

At some point, you are an adult. You meet someone you love. This person is somewhat more anxious than you are. And in moments when the other person experiences more intense fear, you are deeply affected. You find the fear in the other person difficult and want your partner to stop experiencing it. You start advising, trying to solve things, helping, putting things into perspective, and offering different perspectives. You say: let that fear go. What you are actually saying to the other person is: do what I did, banish the fear to some remote corner of your psyche. In short, the fear in the other person has to go. But only because you want that person to have a good life, of course! At least, that’s what you think.

We think it is about the other person’s suffering. That is what we tell ourselves. And there it is again: that part of us that seems to understand things outside ourselves much better than what is happening within us. What we are called to do, however, is make a translation. And that translation sounds simple, but can be quite difficult: the outside often reflects something from within.

Often, the fear in the other person has to go because the fear in you once had to go. The fear in the other person is, after all, a brutally honest mirror for a part of yourself that is still alive somewhere, but very crippled. So really, it is about a part of you.

And your inner part, the fear in this case, knocks on the door through circumstances in the outside world. From your own reaction to fear, you can infer how threatening you experience fear to be. You can learn to see that you banished this part and that, in that place, it received none of your attention. That by doing so, it did not disappear or become resolved. On the contrary. It became a bigger problem. It began to live a life of its own in that basement.

In psychology, we sometimes say that a complex has become autonomous. From that basement, it has much more power over you than you realize. It acts autonomously from there, without the intervention of your consciousness. And that is not a place we should strive toward in a world that so desperately needs us, as human beings, to become more conscious of what lives within us.

So we have a path to walk. And that path comes down to what I wrote about the inner family in my previous post. Attention, recognition, space, and unconditional love. Staying with the fear that lives within you, just as you would stay with a child who is afraid. Being curious about it. Wanting to get to know it. Knowing that this is the only way. That trying to erase it will ultimately only create more suffering. And that mirrors will always appear in this life. Precisely because there is, within us as human beings, a tendency toward wholeness.

As I wrote before: as human beings, we carry all aspects of being human within us as potential. We do not have to cut off parts of ourselves. We do not have to exclude any parts. Instead, we may move openly through life. So that we can become more and more fully human.

That, if you ask me, is life’s invitation.

Haye.