Everyone Around Me Is Evil
Henry here. The way things work, according to Dr. C.G. Jung is that we all have a mask that we present to the world. The mechanic has his/her overalls, the teacher his/her professional clothes, the doctor his/her lab coat, the painter his/her paint covered smock, and on and on and on.
So in our short hand way we use our clothes, what we drive, where we live, what clubs and churches we join, etc. communicate to others, who we are, what we do and what we are like. We all have a mask, what Dr. Jung called our persona (after the masks that Greek actors wore). We need our persona and we need others to have theirs.
For example, it is not wise, as one person I heard of, to leave our therapist office and start telling all our troubles to the gas tank attendant, and expectantly wait for them to give us their answers to our life concerns. Personas are useful unless they are too tight.
We develop our persona to project an image of who we are but also to tell others who we are not. Over the years, especially in childhood we learned that there were certain parts of our personalities that our parents or other significant persons did not like. These characteristics we learned to hide from others. Over time we generally forgot that we had these qualities and they became our shadow.
Our shadow qualities are not necessarily all bad, but they are parts of us that our parents in particular did not like. If they liked a household where no one showed any anger, we never showed any anger. The tragedy is that we automatically think that anger is always bad, and we are pretty much totally out of touch with our own anger. This means that there is a split in our personality. Naturally this anger has to go somewhere so we project it out on others. Most of the time that is where our shadow ends up, projected out on someone else.
So the short version is that anything we don’t like about ourselves, we see in other people, distrusting and disliking them. We’ve all seen this in other people and maybe even in ourselves, but in the next few days, I’ll talk about how it happens in politics, between countries.