Sans Fig Leaf
w
"Projectionist"
30 May, 2007
"Forget all the crap they told us in Sunday school," a friend once said to me. "Nothing is going to work in your life until you let the anger out. No sunshine, no brotherly love, no compassion can take root until you admit you're angry."
When I asked what he thought I was angry about, he said something along the lines of, "You've got so much to be angry about, I can't begin to list it all." Then he went ahead and tried to list anyway: disappointment, loneliness, frustration. He had examples of experiences I'd gone through which he thought had been crushing defeats to my hopes and dreams.
There were a two major problems with his thesis. The first was that about half the events he mentioned hadn't happened to me. Some of thems were things that had happened to mutual friend. Others I wasn't sure about. The second problem was that the events which had happened to me, hadn't been that disappointing. Yes, there had been disappointments, but there had also been triumphs and lucky breaks.
We had been friends for many years and I owed him a lot. He had been one of a small group of people who befriended me at the time during my teen years that I was at my lowest. So even though what he said didn't make any sense to me, I listened, asked questions, and tried to give his notion a fair chance.
But the harder he tried to convince me that my life had been nothing but a series of failures and disappointments, the clearer it became that he wasn't really talking about me.
He was angry and frustrated about all sorts of things that had happened (or had failed to happen) in his life. He was in his mid-twenties. He had had to drop out of college due to some family problems. He'd been engaged to his high school sweetheart only to have it called off. He'd gotten engaged to someone else, and she'd called it off. One of his best friends from early childhood had died in a car crash.
He was so angry and frustrated that he had tried to kill himself. He had come close enough to succeeding that he'd spent weeks in the intensive care unit of the local hospital, then been transferred to the mental health ward for a few months. Now he was in an outpatient program trying to piece his life together.
When I told him I wasn't angry, he said, "Stop fooling yourself. Everyone is angry and disappointed. Because life isn't easy and we're all selfish at heart." He repeated again and again how much repressed anger he could see boiling around inside me.
It's probably clear by this point in the story that my friend was projecting his problems onto me. Since repressed anger and frustration seemed to be the source of many of his problems, repressed anger and frustration must be everyone else's problem, too.
His therapist had given him a tool: identify his anger, express it, take action to change the situations that led to the anger, and learn to let the anger go. The tool made him feel better and gave him a sense of control. But like the cliche about a person who has nothing but a hammer seeing every problem as a nail, it didn't always work the way he hoped it would.
Projection is more often a defense mechanism. The person using it takes bad feelings they have about themself and focus them on another person. It can be a sort of rationalization. "Yes, I drink a bit more than I ought," the person may say, "but that guy over there, his drinking is completely out of control." In other words, it could be worse, so it isn't really a problem.
Even a person who is ready to admit to their problem may use projection to feel better about themselves. "Yes, I have a problem, but so does him and him and her."
I decided to take his concern as a compliment. I decided that he cared enough about me that he wanted to protect me from an unpleasant experience. He didn't want me to wind up in the hospital as he did.
I don't know that his motive was so pure. I don't know if he knew why he had brought it up. It didn't really matter. I chose to take it in the better light. I heard him out. I explained that I didn't think his assessment was entirely accurate. I promised him that if I ever found myself feeling the way he described, I would seek help.
He accepted my promise and dropped the topic.
Human problems are complicated things. Even when we are sure what is bothering us we often don't know how to fix it. Even when we're certain about what we want, sometimes getting it fails to satisfy. We've all heard tales like that or experienced it for ourselves.
What a lot of people don't notice is the flipside. Sometimes we get something completely different than what we went looking for, and it turns out to be, if not exactly what we needed, at least helpful.
I like to think that's what happened with my friend. He came into the conversation hoping I would agree, hoping that I would need his help. Maybe he desperately needed to be needed at that time.
I didn't agree with his assessment. I didn't take any help right away, but I didn't reject it, either. But maybe saying that I would ask for his help when I needed it was close enough to being needed to get him through that moment.
Sometimes, that's all any of us need.
trifles, to be sure; but, scattered along life's pathway, the good they
do is inconceivable.
--Joseph Addison
.