Pathology and Projection

In the earlier article “Eruption of Consciousness”  I spoke of the effort that it takes to keep ourselves apart from the consciousness that dreams bring to us. Here is an early dream that illustrates this point:

A DREAM: I am in a school yard with a bunch of kids. I see a man approaching who appears dark and hostile to me. I ask him to stop but he keeps advancing. I am scared for the kids and threaten him. He still does not stop and I pick up a softball sized rock and as he approaches I hit him in the head. He falls over dead with his skull smashed in. I run to call the police. I look back to see if the kids are okay and I see that the man is moving.

It is not a passive process the way that we keep ourselves apart. I had a story in the dream about protecting the children but the man had said nothing and actually done absolutely nothing to justify my reaction. I was the dark and violent one not him.

In working this with Christa I go to see the dark side of my caretaking, the dark side of playing the hero. In my first dream I saw how lost I was from my boy self and I saw that I was in a hostile relationship to this part of me. Yet I did not get the amount of will it took to keep this dynamic going. I did not really get the depth of the will and hostility that was required by me, to keep myself  apart this way.

I had things in the world that I was angry about. I was a politically active person and felt justified in the anger I felt in relationship to the wars in Central America, to ecological destruction etc. It was a hard pill to swallow to consider that maybe I was just an angry person regardless of the horrible things that were happening in the world.

I was just leaving a marriage to a woman with a lot of anger and it was hard to let in that maybe I chose her because of that anger and that I then used this to cover my own anger. An anger that while not as volatile was just as intense. I remember her once in the middle of a fight describing me as having a suit of chinkless armor on. I knew in that moment that she was right. I may have thought that I managed my anger better but it was no less cold or aggressive than anyone elses.

The issue was deeper than anger though. Both my anger and my caretaking were part of a dynamic related to what we call pathology. The will that we each have to keep us apart. Really, the caretaking and anger were flip sides of this dynamic. As long as I could caretake others I didn’t have to face my fear that I felt in this dream.  Easier to live in this pathological reality than to consider what it would be like to stop playing my game. Easier really to just eliminate the man without a thought, without a single question.

So began a battle to look at myself honestly and to really look at what kept me hooked into these pathological dynamics. This blog is intended as an overview of what I have learned in that battle and where I am still cutting the threads to this pathology.

Bill St.Cyr 11/20/11