Introjects In Our Lives

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

To begin with, each of us has a great many of these attitudes - introjects. The sources of attitudes are very different: first - parents, grandparents, then a kindergarten teacher or nanny, teachers at school, friends. Classmates. A great source of introjects is media and advertising.

In general, from all sides, rules and advice literally fall into our life, how we can live it - this very life of ours - correctly

Of course, there are very useful introjects: be careful with a knife, with electricity, do not grab hot things with your bare hands.. You can continue this series on your own.

But there are very dubious attitudes that have both supporters and opponents of this rule.

Well, for example, the well-known introject that "a good child is a child who obeys parents, behaves decently, does not argue with dad and mom …". Is he good or not? Should I follow it or not?

Let's add here also those introjects that are not perceived by us as a kind of rule laid down in us by someone and accepted by us consciously. After all, such introjects seem to be an immutable law, an axiom, and it would never even occur to you to consider it from the point of view of whether it is useful to you specifically or not.

How to figure out what kind of introjects we have, how do they work for us and in our life?

Well, quite crudely, the scheme is as follows

1. Write down, or rather, constantly write down on a sheet of paper with a list everything that seems to you to be some kind of rule of life. For example: wash your hands before eating; you need to get a higher education; money (friends, family, love, career, etc.) is the most important thing in life; the less you know the better you sleep; all men … - all women …; water should be drunk only boiled … and so on. Write it down as a statement

2. When a statement is written on paper (or on the phone in Notes), you carefully "examine" it, think it over, not really delving into where you got it from - this is secondary. The main thing is to understand, to realize that the attitude exists, exists as a fact, and you live with it.

3. Try to understand how the installation works. What does it give to do, and what exactly does it interfere with. That you don't do it because of her.

4. The next very important understanding is the understanding that this attitude once served as your protection. It is very important to realize this. Well, so as not to immediately "throw" her from the list of their rules of life. Look, suddenly and now it performs its functions of protection, suddenly it is useful to you even now.

5. How to deal with attitudes whose usefulness has been questioned? Try to change the mechanism of the installation. For example, if you have a "don't tell anyone about yourself" attitude, then try to start talking and see what happens to you.

The fact is that by deciding that the installation is wrong, and removing it from your life rules, you can lose more than gain

6. And only after making sure that the setting hinders you more than helps you, replace it with another, more suitable one. Instead of “don't tell anyone anything about yourself” - “Talk about yourself only when you want to, and only to those who want to”. In practice, it will look like this: find the circle of people to whom it is not very dangerous to say something - and speak. Reserving the right to be silent in cases where there is no special trust in people.

Afterword:

Why, then, do you need a specialist, you ask, if you can do it all yourself?

The fact is that not all of your introjects can be found on your own. And a specialist - a psychologist, a psychotherapist - is a specially trained person to help you see what you yourself cannot see.

Jean Marie Robin said it perfectly: “I am the only person in the world who cannot see his own ass”.