Family Time
Henry today. Did you get some time to spend with your family this summer? It can be both as wonderful or a terrible experience. What tends to happen is that we arrive “home” expecting good things and then we find that very little has changed. Everything seems to be the way it used to be. How can that be, since years go by and things basically change all the time?
What tends to happened to us is that we find ourselves falling into old patterns, and our loved ones are acting in old patterns as well. What is going on?
Part of what is going on is we do come to our families with a history. In fact, we have certain very specific expectations which we place on our family members and they on us. Dr. C. G Jung tells us that one of the one of the basic things that happen between ourselves and others is that we throw out on them, and they on us these expectations. The way this works is that these expectations are projected onto each other in the same way that the old fashioned movie theater projected a picture from the back of a theater to the screen. In other words we project certain things out on family and then act as if that is the way they are and they do the same to us. We all see mostly what we’re expecting to see, not what’s really there.
This process of projection not only happens when we go home for a visit but also with our own immediate families. So if we are going to actually meet our family members, we have to be willing to try to break through these projected images and have an actual relationship, so the person for who they are, not who we believe they are. I hope that can happen to you.