A study by academics at the psychology departments of the Universities of New York and Harvard demonstrated that certain parts of the brain (the amygdala and the posterior cingulate cortex to be precise) light up when we are meeting people for the first time. Not only that, they tend to light up more when we are formulating knowledge about that person that falls into a consistent pattern. In other words, our brains are wired in such a way as to prefer consistency when we are forming impressions about people. I.e. we are deploying a filter early on; we are starting to sacrifice anything that may appear paradoxical or inconsistent, in order to draw a coherent judgment.
That then takes us to the world of psychotherapy and the more recent genre of the self help website. To understand this further, to my mind, we have to go to the bookshelf and brush off the cobwebs from the likes of Freud and Jung. While some of the findings of early psychoanalysis have been more controversial than others, some have certainly stood the test of time. The description of one of our most fundamental defence mechanisms – projection – is one of them.
As I teach within the Sileotherapy self help website; we all possess within us numerous traits and aspects that we find hard to carry. This occurs whenever the trait evokes a sufficiently strong feeling within us – in a positive or negative way. Whenever the feeling reaches a certain threshold that makes it difficult to carry inside, we throw it onto someone else and carry round the feeling as if it’s about them instead. It’s a lot easier to carry that way. Strong feelings of love and hate, anger or attraction, usually have some roots in this process.
This study, very interestingly, seems to verify anatomically, the existence of this phenomenon. When we first meet people, the truth is, we know very little about them and – with few exceptions - it will be at least several more encounters before we can form anything like a fair picture. Nevertheless, on day one, we seem to be in the business of conjuring an image that already feels consistent and so, in some way, complete. How is this possible? It must be our old friend projection coming into play. The consistent impressions we are filtering through are facilitating our own projection needs.
Basically, we are filling in the blank canvas before us with our own inner colouring pencils.
