About aggression, projection and the picture of the world

Continuing the theme of aggression.

Following what was said above, it is worth pointing out that this very process of awareness of aggression has its pitfalls. More precisely, I will tell you about one main pitfall, which concerns how a person lived all this time. You live like this, you don’t even notice how much you despise everyone, for example. I have developed a clear system for identifying “friend or foe.” The insider is me, and the strangers are everyone else. Well, it’s not like that, of course, in an exaggerated way, let’s say, these intonations and these words UNIQUELY indicate that you are criticized and despised. And you’re fine with that. Well, it’s familiar and understandable. Everything is in its place. Then, as a friend, you decided to go to therapy, and the insidious psychotherapist will catch you once, twice, three times, you will observe, that means, together with him, how not only do you recognize aggression where there is none, but also no, no, and kick anyone, including the therapist. And you wonder. What if all this time you weren’t seeing reality at all, but something of your own? What if all these people who feared, accused and avoided you were right somewhere, and you can’t even understand where exactly? This can be very scary. It may seem that the cuckoo is slowly starting to fly away. Because the usual bonds on which the world stood suddenly begin to fall apart.

That is, the problem here is not only in aggression itself, which is slowly beginning to seep into consciousness. The problem is that the picture of the world is beginning to collapse, but a new one has not yet been delivered. At this stage, you want to return everything back, but it’s no longer possible, and here some restrained support may be needed to soften the contact with reality and help form new guidelines and develop new skills. Because all those old mechanisms were adapted to solve problems on their own, and in the world of people, it turns out that it is impossible to independently understand exactly what someone else meant, without the ability to somehow clarify the information. And this is precisely what man has not learned. Did you just kick me on purpose or did it just happen? What does this sideways glance of yours mean, that you despise me or that you have a headache? Now, have I stepped on your foot too much? Oh, sorry, I probably went too far here. Something like this.

Well, the second pebble is smaller, but more insidious, it concerns the projection and that’s all. Suppose we discussed that a person does not notice his own aggression, but attributes it to others and even imperceptibly provokes them into aggression, so that the picture of the world matches reality. One can assume that, they say, a person will realize his aggression and find himself in a world of fluffy bunnies who have never shown any aggression in their lives, but have only suffered because of unfair projections on themselves.

But things may be more complicated. Projective identification is a very sticky thing. And in general, we don’t necessarily project something bad onto each other, not just aggression. But we quite easily accept such projections and can actually “absorb” them. If, let’s say, two partners live together, and one, in his perception, steadfastly projects his inner fighter onto the second, and then also provokes the partner to this same aggression. The second, accordingly, regularly finds himself in a position where he begins to growl at the first, not realizing that he is growling not by his original nature, but because of the machinations of the damned projective identification — he is constantly pushed a little to growl more. If he is still internally especially susceptible to such provocations, then what do we have? And that’s right, we have the consolidation of such a role model in relationships. The second partner can chronically take on the role of a fighter and go growling at the first, no longer as a result of provocations, but simply out of habit.

Now let’s imagine that the first, that is, the golden man, went to psychotherapy and began to intensively integrate and realize his aggression. Now he realized how he had been projecting and provoking his partner all this time. He comes home with this new knowledge, but his partner doesn’t know! He growled out of habit, and still growls. And the first one experiences a break in the pattern. It seems like I have already realized everything and am not provoking anyone, but they keep offending me. And magic happens: his own tendency to see aggression where there is no aggression is layered on top of a situation where the other person is actually aggressive DUE to long-standing provocations of the first, but not even directly because of them, but because of habit, because of chronic role-playing. distribution (as we say, chronic transfer), due to accumulated irritation, in the end. And here, no matter how the first one tries to realize his aggression, this may not affect the second one. Each partner needs to regain their feelings and return their projections to the other. This may require everyone to reflect and voice, acknowledge their own contributions to the abusive climate, acknowledge that damage to the relationship, accept their own responsibility, and take steps to correct it. This is where it can be very difficult to resolve this knot without couple therapy. They can then learn to communicate in new ways.