The Candy Dish
Now, let’s talk about our favorite defense mechanisms - denial, projection, and identification. Do you remember that antique dish that Mom used to fill with butter mints for guests? It was the one in the living room that you weren’t supposed to touch. (If it wasn’t a candy dish, substitute your own “do not touch” memory here.) Imagine a time when you had all of your friends over for a round of your favorite board game: Monopoly, Clue, Risk, Scrabble, Life, Which Witch. (Anybody else remember that last one? Sorry, unintentional rabbit hole…) Imagine for a moment that your friends discover said candy dish, and as kids are wont to do, sample the fare. Your best bud unfortunately knocks the dish to the floor, and it breaks. Of course, fear would likely be the first response, but as we so often do, we cover over the fear with a plan. Super glue! The broken pieces are painstakingly reassembled, and the candy is returned to the mended dish. All seems well until Mom gets home.
Mom sees the muddy footprints near the table where the dish is, inspects the dish, and calls you over, front and center. You have to cop to the broken dish, but you instantaneously come up with a new plan. Believing that your best bud may not be welcome in the house if you tell the truth, you tell Mom that the neighbor kid, the one that she made you invite over, was the one that knocked off the dish. You try so hard to convince Mom that it was the neighbor that you even start to believe it yourself. At some point, perhaps weeks later, maybe years later, you may even forget that your best friend actually knocked off the dish.
What’s happened is an example of how we defend ourselves, how we make ourselves what we want to be, through denial, projection, and identification. Not wanting to experience the consequences of a circumstance, you deny the truth about it and project the responsibility of what happened onto somebody else. You (and your friend) now identify yourselves as innocents, and you attempt to get rid of the guilt by placing it outside of yourselves on your neighbor. The truth of the circumstance didn’t change. What you believe about it did; what you want to believe about it changed.
The same dynamic that plays out in childhood continues as we mature - at work, at home, in traffic, and even on the world stage. We can find example after example of denial, projection, and identification just about anywhere we choose to look. Few of us want to be the guilty one, the bad guy. Even more importantly, none of us want to be responsible for the whole of our circumstance. We always need somebody to shoulder at least some of the blame. Doesn’t matter if it is a person, a thing, a country, our body, the universe, even God, as long as we’re not responsible. Projection, again, is the defense mechanism that we employ to get rid of the responsibility of our guilt and the fear of its consequence. Sometimes it is overtly conscious, as in the example of the candy dish. More often than not, projection occurs unconsciously, as we so deeply identify with what projection left behind that we have no conscious memory of what the truth was before projection. Projection is a defense against the truth.
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You have done a very good job illustrating how we use projection to avoid the truth and how powerful projection is.
ReplyDeleteIs the same true when what is projected is Positive? :)
ReplyDeleteSort of, but there is a catch. Indeed, once we undo the guilt, then Love, our True Identity, is reflected on the screen. The catch is that what we think of as positive isn't really Love - nor is it really positive. What we think of as positive is the opposite of negative. It is the result of the same judgment, and it has the same seeming effect in our mind. We'll talk more about this in later posts, but this is an important question, Grace. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI watched myself go through an outburst the other night as I was helping some friends relocate their store. As "i" was having the righteous snit I felt guilty about it for about two hours but I kept reminding myself that as long as I kept treating it like a deliberately broken dish that the pieces would be all over the place but if I just let it pass and keep breathing, my friends would also. The reason for the outburst, the guilt had to just pass through my mind and then be gone. I have to say that the Monday night discussions with the group really helped me catch myself. I have great teachers.
ReplyDeleteBob,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. You remind us of an important part of this process: We aren't asked to deny our guilt. To your point, we are asked to look at it. It is in the looking that we recognize that we no longer want it. Undoing the guilt (forgiveness) is looking at our guilt without judging it, which you describe. Thanks for being our teacher!