Defenders of the Heart
Managing the Habits and Attitudes That Block You from a Richer, More Satisfying Life
Defuse Your Weapons of Mass Projection
Pro-jec-tion ( pro-JEK-shun ): Attributing your own unacceptable, shocking or embarrassing thoughts, feelings and impulses to someone else in order to relieve your anxiety about them.
The place where we've conducted our therapy practice for years—the land of make-believe—is a city that you love to hate and sometimes hate yourself for loving. Los Angeles is a company town and its entertainment industry dominates our popular culture. While it can enthrall, captivate and amuse, it also has that dark and seamy side we're all too familiar with from the tabloids. It seems that most of the population can't get through the day without their fix of TV and Internet bulletins about the shenanigans of young Hollywood stars.
On a daily basis, we have names you'd recognize from the world of entertainment coming through our doors—actors, writers, and directors—as well as the below-the-line people (as they're called in the business), all those workers who make the movies come alive. One thing we can tell you for sure is that the glamorous, famous and wealthy are no more immune to Defenders of the Heart than you are. In fact, this industry nicely lends itself to illustrating our next Defender: Projection.
Movie projectors beam light rays and film print onto a wide screen. A whole story plays out in front of you. And like the movie projector, you too beam your own light and inner print onto your life's screen. Your feelings—your internal world—are enacted before your eyes. By “internal world,” we mean your motives, thoughts, and feelings—both wanted and unwanted—all those parts of you that live inside your conscious and unconscious mind.
As you are the movie projector of your own life, people around you, both intimates and mere acquaintances, become the screen for your projections. They then turn into the unknowing recipients of those parts of yourself that you just can't tolerate. And, subsequently, you interact with them as if they do indeed possess those unwelcome characteristics you've dismissed from yourself. In order to help you rid yourself of these unwanted motives and impulses, Projection has come to the rescue. It, like all Defenders, is a way of making sure that your conscious awareness is protected from negative, anxiety-producing feelings.
If the movie-screen analogy doesn't work for you, another graphic way to envision this unique Defender is to picture a garbage pail. Imagine that you need others to be the receptacle for the emotional refuse you can't even bring yourself to acknowledge within yourself. You use them to dump all your garbage into.
We very clearly see this Defender at work in couples. Your garbage-pail partner is stunned by accusations, criticism or blame. Often he or she will say, “Are you kidding me? What are you talking about? Are we in the same marriage here?” Your partner doesn't even know where you're coming from. This “garbage” from you is shocking to him or her. Why? Because it's usually a Projection of something within yourself.
This Defender of the Heart is so insidious that it can ruin marriages faster than a meddling mother-in-law! Our insight into just how menacing this Defender can be has proven useful when we've conducted our marital seminars. With Projection in the forefront of our minds, we've helped couples get a better handle on what their own garbage is and what is their partners'.
We like to start out all of our seminars with a very elementary but profound worksheet that we've found to be fun and eye-opening even for the most sophisticated communicators. For many years we had used a “face” feelings chart for kids we dealt with in therapy. We'd throw up a big poster on the wall with about 30 cartoon faces that represented myriad emotional states. You may have seen these in family-medicine and pediatric offices. We found out that kids aren't the only ones who have a hard time labeling what they're feeling. So we decided to use a feelings-chart handout for individual adults and couples. To our surprise, this simple device became a springboard for helping them get out of their heads and into their hearts .
Taking it to the next level, our use of the chart evolved into measuring how in or out of sync couples are with one another. Partners first check off how many feeling states they've typically experienced within the last six months. Then they look at the chart again and check off the feelings they believe their significant others had been going through over the same period. The last step in this exercise is to sit face-to-face and compare and contrast these worksheets. What is mind-boggling is how each partner often attributes feelings and states of mind to the other person that have very little to do with him or her. Interestingly enough, this opened up a way for us to grab hold of that amorphous Defender of the Heart, Projection, and explore its impact on a marriage.
Looking at You Looking at Me
Cindy and her husband, Jack, came to one of our marriage seminars not long ago. Having been married for 12 years, they were looking for some tools to reawaken their passion for one another. They probably weren't expecting that getting a handle on this particular Defender of the Heart would be the key.
Cindy was a 43-year-old office manager at a major insurance company. She was a spunky, athletic person who always had something kind to say about everyone. Her idea of dealing with life was to be constantly on the go, on her cell phone with her girlfriends and overextended with community activities.
When Cindy met PR man Jack, it had been love at first sight. However, it was five years before they tied the knot. Jack, 45, being the more subdued of the two, was sometimes hard to read. They were jogging partners, but it was apparent that his heart was really into staying home, hanging out and going to poker nights with the boys. Their different styles never seemed to get in their way and over the years they learned to tolerate and appreciate their differences. Ever since they'd been in their 20s, it was evident to everyone, including Jack and Cindy themselves, that they danced to the beats of different drummers. But that had never gotten in the way of their romantic/sexual life. Back then, they were dancing the “horizontal cha-cha-cha” with great ease!
When Cindy was 34, she and Jack were ready to have the baby they'd been talking about for years. Organized and methodical, she had this baby journey all mapped out (or so she thought): she'd get pregnant that year, have the child at that perfect age of 35, and take the summer off work. Jack was on board. As was Cindy's style, she approached the making of a baby with great enthusiasm and anticipation, letting the whole world know what was to come.
After about a year and a half with no baby, some of Cindy and Jack's sparkle was diminishing. They went to see a fertility specialist with high hopes. But after six years, thousands and thousands of dollars spent, and too many disappointing heartaches to count, the couple made a conscious decision to stop the process of trying to have a child. They both were unable to wrap their heads around the idea of adoption, but together were resolute that their lives could still be meaningful and happy without a baby.
About a year later, Cindy and Jack signed up for our seminar focusing on couples who have been married more than ten years and are invested in keeping their marriages alive and vital. It covered questions of sex, communication, finances, children, and “Where do we go from here?” when a couple has been together that long.
Although Jack and Cindy came to our group with the primary intention of spicing up their sex life, the face tool was quite revealing. Not only did it uncover feelings that had been buried, but it also shed light on what was now making it difficult to get into the rhythm of that old “cha-cha-cha.”
Both Cindy and Jack had been through hell over the past few years; the decision not to have a child had left them with deep scars. Although they were united in their acceptance of being a child-free couple, it was to be expected that some profound individual feelings remained.
We handed out the face charts and divided the participants into intimate groups of two or three couples. Cindy and Jack began to talk about feelings they thought they'd already expressed and worked out, as well as those they were unacquainted with and had kept buried inside. What surfaced within the confines of this exercise was both fascinating and scary. Cindy had been feeling that since their baby decision, Jack had grown colder and more distant, as well as more irritable, mean, and critical. She felt that her husband didn't love her the way he used to. She believed that she had remained the same toward him.
Then, using our faultfinding tool, Cindy reflected on the faults she'd found within Jack. She saw him as uninterested in sex with her, not as affectionate, and less available to engage in conversation.
Reflecting on her own three fingers pointing back at her, she asked herself: Do any of these faults have anything to do with how I feel about myself? And she had to answer honestly: Yes. Cindy began to search inside herself for the faults she found in Jack. She asked herself: Am I cold? Am I distant? Am I irritable? Am I critical? Am I unlovable? Answering yes to each of these questions motivated Cindy to pose the next one: How am I demonstrating this toward Jack?
Cindy was stunned and embarrassed as she gained clarity. What she had been experiencing as coming from her husband was mostly originating within herself. Much of it was her “garbage.” Although Jack was visibly saddened and disappointed about their struggle with infertility and the financial toll it had taken on their lives, Cindy hadn't been aware of the enormous emotional toll it had taken on her.
Cindy felt betrayed by her body. Seeing Jack as more distant and less available to love her was actually a reflection of her deep belief that she must have been unlovable. After all, didn't she fail as a woman, as a nurturing partner, by not being able to give the two of them a baby? Being such a capable person, Cindy had allowed herself no room for failure. Her unexplored self-criticism and self-loathing had taken up residence in Jack's world—or so she believed. Her Projection played itself out in her thinking that he was guilty of everything that she had been guilty of feeling about herself all along. True, Jack was quieter and more subdued than his usual self; he had been going through his own grieving process. But, in fact, he'd had a hard time connecting with Cindy because she'd been pulling away from him. She'd been protecting him from her internal critic and her “unlovable self.”
Jack had become the screen upon which Cindy could cast those harsh critical feelings about herself in order not to have to look at them. He became her garbage pail.
True to form, as she tempered her Projection, their marriage got back on a healthy track. Although they'd been through years of pain and disappointment during the excruciating process of trying to have a child, they came out of it stronger and more committed to one another.
One of the most helpful ways to develop greater insight into yourself is to become aware of how you think about others.
Positive Self-Talk
So how do you develop this insight, which will eventually marginalize your Projections? The first step is to cultivate empathy: being able to understand and identify with others' feelings. And how you talk to yourself (your self-affirmations) is a major factor in doing that. The words and statements you use over and over make a huge impact on your view of yourself and the world.
When we've asked patients to write down their perceived strengths and limitations, we're always surprised by how quickly a long list of negative traits surfaces. Even more surprising, it's like pulling teeth to get people to come up with positive ones.
The power of those critical words and negative assessments wreak havoc on your psyche. That disparaging view of yourself can only lead to unforgiving and uncomplimentary ideas about others. And you don't even realize it! It's critical that you find a way not to be critical! Being kinder to yourself will take away the sting of attacking others with your own self-disgust, and your faultfinding will diminish.
So here's how to get out of your own way: make a list of your negative and positive qualities, and then ask yourself these questions:
What are the five traits I like best about myself?
What are the five traits I like least about myself?
How much time do I spend each day focusing on these attributes?
Do I spend more time on the negative or the positive?
Positive self-talk is about turning lemons into lemonade. Or, put another way, it's all about reframing: taking something harsh and turning it around. So now, look at your negative traits and see how you can reframe them. For example:
Negative Self-Talk: I'm a big, fat pig.
Positive Self-Talk: I'm not exactly the weight I want to be, but I'm working on it; and in the meantime, I'm healthy.
Negative Self-Talk: I'm the worst parent for yelling at my kid in front of her friends.
Positive Self-Talk: Raising a teen is tough, and most of the time I pay attention to my voice and tone.
Stay aware. Listen to yourself; catch those negative, destructive patterns of thinking; and replace them with more upbeat, optimistic, constructive, and affirmative beliefs. Positive self-talk quiets disapproving chatter, and self-encouragement helps you feel more secure and diminishes the power of your Defenders.
Finally, don't ever tell yourself anything that you wouldn't tolerate someone else saying to you. We know that's easier said than done, but fake it till it feels real for you. Make sure your internal dialogue is positive, and be gentle with yourself. We always tell our patients: “Be the kind of mother to yourself you'd like to have.” Now that you get the gist of how positive self-talk works and have a better handle on what's been so ingrained and automatic for such a long time, you'll be amazed to find that you no longer define others in the same negative ways.
Still not sure if Projection is your Defender? Perhaps the following will clear it up for you. (Just to warn you, some of these examples might be uncomfortable to confront.)
You Know You've Discovered Weapons of Mass Projection When . . .
. . . you believe that everyone cheats on their taxes because you do.
. . . you force him to break up with you when you're the one who really wants the relationship to end.
. . . you think everything in the media is disgusting because it's so loaded with sexual innuendo.
The Payoff
Projections seem to relieve you of personal responsibility. In the process, they also prevent you from seeing what you really need and then taking charge and moving forward in your life.
It's exhausting to be constantly at odds with those around you because you're hurling your criticisms and judgments onto them. Keeping up that barrage of negative self-talk is, likewise, tiring. In addition, when you stop confounding your loved ones by dumping your garbage on them and finding fault with them, you can turn them into your allies rather than your adversaries. It only makes sense that your heart doesn't need to be so heavily defended when you've got an army of friends, family members, colleagues, and others on your side. Throw in your newfound compassion for yourself and you've now got a support system that will allow you to let your guard down enough to face your uncomfortable thoughts and feelings and deal with them.
When this Defender of the Heart lays down its sword, all that energy will be freed up for other more life-affirming pursuits, including your job, relationships, creativity, passions, and spirituality.
This article is excerpted from the book Defenders of the Heart , by Marilyn Kagan, LCSW and Neil Einbund, Ph.D. It is published by Hay House (November 2008) and available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com
HOME - FEATURES - NEWS - FROM THE PUBLISHER
LETTERS - COLUMNS - MUSIC REVIEWS - BOOK REVIEWS
PLANETARY CYCLES - CALENDAR - ABOUT TLC - CONTACT US
CLASSIFIEDS - RESOURCE DIRECTORY
ARCHIVES - SUBSCRIBE - ADVERTISE - SEARCH
