Lily in her summer dress
Fifi Flower's Painting of Lily in her dress
When I posted the lovely picture of Lily on Facebook I never expected Fifi to turn it into a perfect painting. Isn’t my girl a gorgeous model? This isn’t Lily’s first portrait by Fifi. She did one of Lily back when she was just a puppy. Merci, Fifi!
I hope your weekend is filled with lovely friends, unexpected surprises, bright coloured blossoms, summer dresses and puppy dog kisses. Lily wishes you treats and tummy rubs.
One of the first assignments I remember being assigned in grad school was to write a paper on a person on whom I had a negative or shadow projection. Let me just clarify what what this means in case it has been a while since you took Psych 101. A negative projection would be the ego projecting aspects of itself that it has decided are ugly, unattractive or otherwise unacceptable onto another person since the ego cannot tolerate to see these aspects in itself. How one knows it is a shadow projection versus ordinary dislike is that when one is having a shadow projection one isn’t mildly annoyed—-one is highly emotional, inflamed or even crazed by a certain behavior or person. The more there is a lot of feeling around a person or behavior the more likely that there could be some shadow projection going on.
As soon as I heard the assignment I was sure who I was doing my Shadow projection paper on. See there was this guy, this S.N.A.G.( In case you don’t know what a S.N.A.G. is—it is a Sensitive New Age Guy) and I have never been a big fan of this archetype of man. Truth be told, S.N.A.G.y guys drive me cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs (no, I don’t really want chocolate flavored cereal– it is just that they make me crazy). This Snaggletooth made me especially crazy. You see he didn’t call himself by his Christian name. No, that was far too mainstream. He didn’t go by a longtime childhood nickname. He didn’t shorten his name from Michael to Mike or from Jonathan to John or Robert to Bob. No, no, no. This guy decided that it would be a good idea for him to give himself a new name just for his grad school experience. This is item number 122 that I wish I was making up. He chose to name himself after a thing in nature. I would tell you what that things is but then he might find this post and he would know that he was my Shadow projection and I am too kind of a gal to want him to ever know how crazy he made me ( even if it was just a projection).
The things that drove me crazy about him were many (not just his name that made him sound like a 1962 Hippy who took too much Peyote and smelled of too much Patchouli ): There was the fact that he was ALWAYS smiling. ALWAYS. And it wasn’t just an ordinary smile—it was one part cat-who-ate-the-canary and one part “I have achieved enlightenment and I smile at you in a way that says that I have pity and have Buddhic compassion for your non-enlightened state”. Every time I saw him smile I would meet this part of myself that I wasn’t very familiar with, it would think things like, “what the hell are you smiling at” and it would amp up its antipathy and anger if it had received too many smiles from him in one day and think things like “I’d like to knock that smile off your face.” I know—not a pretty part of myself to meet. I was pretty embarrassed of my projection and I tried to hide it the best I could. But “Thing that exists in nature” did not make it easy for me. He carried a guitar everywhere he went. He wrote songs that he felt the need to share with the class. He wore tie-dye. And he was ALWAYS smiling at me.
Mostly I just tried to stay away from him. Only he would, in the classroom setting, out of the blue read pieces of poetry as if he was Dante and everyone in the room was Beatrice. He usually chose a Rumi poem which seemed to have magical properties that would disarm the most militant professor into “giving space” for his poetic non-sequiturs. And to be fair, many people seemed to enjoy “Thing that exists in nature”. I felt something closer to nausea every time I saw him grab for his guitar.
So when the paper required me to look at what it was exactly about Mr. SNAGtastic that was like myself, I wasn’t at all pleased. Writing about him was the fun part; writing about myself was the hard part. Seeing how I was projecting onto him and discovering what I had in common with this guy was about as much fun as a relay race of a root canal followed by a 500 dash sprint to a colonoscapy followed by a swan dive into an afternoon of line waiting at the D.M.V.
Ugh, not enjoying this. This is still not fun. So what exactly do I have in common with this guy? Well, I am a BIG smiler. BIG. I smile a lot. I smile at everyone. I smile at people I know and people I don’t know and cats and dogs and even architecture. I smile a lot. I have even gotten some grief for my smiling. Once when I was walking down the street in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic some stranger shouted at me “You are really ugly when you smile”. That incident happened almost two decades ago and yet sometimes when I feel moved to smile I think of this guy who was likely one of the guys who graffitied ”Yankee Go Home” on assorted public canvases throughout the city.
I think that like “Thing that exists in nature”, I am often not feeling so very happy under all my friendly smiles. I think that I was seeing in him that under all those teeth and poetry and songs that might best be saved for his friends who work at the Renaissance Faire, I think I could see his anger, anxiety and depression behind his happy face. My anger at him was really my anger at myself for all of the times that I would put on a good face and a bright smile to mask what was really going on inside.
I am not blind to the irony that on my blog I now go by a name that exists in nature; I call myself Belette on this blog, which means weasel in French. I chose a pen-name for the anonymity it provided. I use that name as a way to protect myself. Perhaps that what he was doing. Maybe somehow using his real name made him feel vulnerable and in using the goofy made up name he felt more free to be himself.
Also, I think my aversion to SNAGs and all things woo-woo, is that I crave tradition, structure and things that have been tested over time . I find that so much of woo-woo lacks intellect and rigor and ethics and boundaries( things that I am highly invested in). I see a SNAG guy and I see a walking rebellion. I see a boy in a man’s body who will not grow up or get a job or be dependable. I see my Dad, yep…it all comes back to Daddy. My Dad looked very unlike a SNAG. My father was almost always in a suit and the closest he got to Patchouli oil was Aramis. But at heart my father was a child. He was a boy who wanted everything his way and who wanted to be the center of attention. My father didn’t pull out a guitar as a means of garnering attention but he would tell stories and jokes and do whatever he had to do so that all eyes were on him. So much of my anger and outrage at “Thing that exists in nature” was really meant for my father.
Even after unpacking my projection, I can tell you that should I run into “Thing that exists in nature” , the guitar playing and SNAGy song writing would still drive me kookaloo-crazy. A 100-years of psychotherapy and a PhD in the subject could not cure me of that. Objectively somethings are just annoying.
p.s. Dear Thing that exists in nature: I know I can be really annoying too. Me in my J Crew clothes and my smiling and my anti-woo-woo eye rolling. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you wrote your Shadow projection paper about me. I bet you said something in it about my obsession with the Smiths and how I always smell of French fig perfume. So if you are reading this, know that I know that I am not a total delight. Feel free to make fun of me calling myself a weasel. I would understand.
If you are at all interested in the topic of how Shadow projections work, I highly recommend Robert Bly’s Little Book on the Human Shadow. I must tell you that Robert Bly is as as SNAGY as they come—but he does know a lot about projection, Shadow and men who are stuck in boyhood.
A week ago Friday I got a text message from Stephanie that she had a favorite new book that she L-L-L-LOVED and she made sure to inform me that this wasn’t hyperbole and how I had to get the book immediately. The funny thing is that earlier that morning I had been thinking of Stephanie when I was walking Lily. I had been thinking of Mary Pipher’s memoir that she had mentioned twice in previous conversations and wondering if I ought to go get the book instead of reading the four other books that were sitting patiently on my bedside table waiting for me to read them.
There was something about the way that Stephanie talked about Pipher’s book that made me think that she was neither recommending it or not recommending it—rather she was giving me the Cliff Notes for the book. What I remember most about Pipher’s memoir was that she was totally overwhelmed by her fame and how having a successful book almost destroyed her. When you are a want-to-be author of a book it can be nice to read how horrible being successful is (yes, I am a horrible person and if there was a hell I would be going there because I suffer from occasional bouts of envy).
Continue reading ‘This is not the blog post you think it is’
The first knock-offs were not Rolex watches or Prada purses but rather copies of prehistoric caveman conquests. You see, back in the days when cavemen did all their shopping free range/ do-it yourself style it was only the bravest, fiercest and most successful hunters who wore leopard skin and animal teeth necklaces. And the guys with mountain lion molar teeth necklaces had more social cache than any Polo wearing preppy could ever hope to have. The less brave and bold among our ancient ancestors adorned themselves with necklaces made from chicken bones or berries or rocks and through this low-risk accessory they would reveal a lot about their character and capacity to put a Mastodon on the table.
The chickens who settled for wearing chicken bones were less desirable to the most fertile, beautiful and evolved of the gene pool. If you are to take Schopenhauer’s word for it, these pre-historic women were looking for good providers. Such women would find the guys in the goat skin getups to be less desirable than the fierce hunters who were wearing the pelts of predatory animals (that is unless the man had a great sense of humor, were sensitive enough to share their feelings and/or had evolved enough to walk upright).
Continue reading ‘The consequences of counterfeit on self-confidence’
The first time I went to therapy my parents chose a practitioner with less thought then they gave to whom they let touch their Mercedes for tune-ups. They picked a woman who made Dr. Phil look like a skilled and thoughtful clinician( Please note: I am seriously not a Dr. Phil fan and the thing about him being a skilled and thoughtful clinician was what the kids call ‘irony”). The way they found this is nutter-butter-can-of -cashews was that my pediatrician didn’t know what to do for my nightly all-night/every night nightmares and so he sent me to a psychiatrist. He thought she was good because of her seemingly impressive pedigree, and let me let them tell you as they told everyone who asked, “she did therapy on the Prime Minister from Israel”. Even at ten I found this bit of information troubling and logistically dubious as we lived in a beach side suburb in Los Angeles and the Prime Minister from Israel, would by the nature of the job description, have to live in Israel.
My name is Tracey, aka La Belette Rouge. I am a psychotherapist and the author of Freudian Sip @ Psychology Today. I blog about psychology, my therapy, dreams, writing, meaning making, home, longing, loss, infertility and other things that delight or inspire me. I try to make deep and elusive psychodynamic concepts accessible and funny. For more information, click here .
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