Анна Шиман
Draft translation. This text was translated automatically and has not been proofread yet — if something reads oddly, it does.
The psychology of complexes. Introjection and its consequences. What are introjects?
An introject is a concept from the Gestalt approach that explains how a person takes other people’s thoughts and assumptions about life for their own. This happens without any criticism or filters; it is perceived as one’s own, as self-evident and as something that, in principle, needs no rechecking.
Introjects can lie behind many of your depressive states, fears, anxieties, panic attacks and nightmares.
The positive side of this phenomenon is that we use other people’s conclusions in the process of adapting wherever our own experience falls short, or we adopt them from authority figures we recognise. As a way of taking in information, on a global scale this strategy increases our chances of survival.
But there is also a flip side to the coin.
It lies in the fact that taking in information begins in the cradle, when a child has not yet formed even the rudiments of criticism and of understanding who “I” am, nor a conscious understanding of “what is good for me and what is bad”, “what is true for me and what is a lie”. Consequently, from infancy a child takes on trust every word of their elders, whom they perceive as authorities or who at least surpass them in strength and knowledge. First and foremost these are parents, grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles, friends and acquaintances who belong to the family circle. In short, everyone the child often sees at home or when visiting, from whom they hear various phrases, lectures and remarks, and whose reactions to their behaviour or to what is going on around them they see. And the problem is that you do not need much wisdom in your head to lecture a child — the child believes the adults who matter to them by default. Especially the parents. To the child they are like deities. It is impossible not to believe them.
And so, thanks to everything described above, a child begins to unconsciously absorb introjects from adults, taking them for their own thoughts and for the ultimate truth.
Introjects often contain generalisations such as “all people”, “the whole world”, “everyone thinks so / everyone does it”. And later, in a session, a psychologist asks the person: “Who exactly does it?”. And then it turns out that the person cannot say whom they have been measuring themselves against all these years, simply making automatic choices on the strength of the childhood phrase “everyone does it”.
There are also introjects about prohibitions, about dividing things into “black” and “white”, where you may be an intellectual but by no means an emotionally developed person, and in general “never show your feelings to anyone”, “you can only trust your own people”, and so on.
Sound familiar?
There are introjects about obligation, where the phrases carry a clear message. A child is told what they owe and to whom: “a good daughter must be like this”, “a good son must be like that”, “a good housewife must get everything done”, “a good mother must never leave her children’s side”, and so on.
All of this comes from life, from the stories of people who come for consultations and for long-term work.
So what is the problem with introjects?
Introjects do not take into account the particular character and temperament of a personality, its individual traits, which can be brought together in the concept of the True Self. It is like dressing both boys and girls in the same clothes. Perhaps up to a certain age this will leave no trace on a person’s emotional life, but as time passes both the inner world and the hormonal background will start to demand different clothes and different colours — some for girls, others for boys.
Introjects, however, tar everyone with the same brush.
An adult reasons: “I was brought up this way, and I turned out fine” (which, in fact, is not a given) and begins to pass their own experience on to their children. After all, when we make a choice from the True Self, we make it on the basis of our own individual qualities, our true feelings and sensations, relying on our inner voice, on our intuition. And so our choice will match what our inner world wants, its true needs. But if the choice rests on false needs, behind which stands not your own nature but introjects based on someone’s subjective opinion that have nothing to do with reality, then the personality begins to suffer.
For example, if one of the parents does not accept their own irrational side, their emotions, they may start teaching the children that emotions are bad, that they get in the way of life, that they must be hidden, and so on. Someone in the family may have got burnt in business and then spent the rest of their life telling their descendants that you cannot earn money honestly, that the system is “rotten”, and so on. And later the children, guided by these introjects, will not be able to build a business of their own — they will always be expecting a trick from the “rotten” system.
We find introjects in every area of a person’s life.
What can be done about it?
Work on identifying introjects and replacing the old, destructive messages with new, constructive ones that take into account the needs of the True Self — and this will make it possible to live your own life, filled with energy and meaning. First and foremost, this is work with complexes: the father complex, the mother complex, the inferiority and superiority complex, the guilt complex, the resentment complex, the good son complex and the straight-A girl complex, the rescuer and hero complexes. Having worked through these complexes, a person is freed from the frames and limits behind which stand introjects that are often backed only by the subjective opinion of one of the elders or authority figures from your childhood or youth.
We talk in detail about complexes, their influence and how to deal with them on the online course “Freedom from Complexes”.
Once free of the influence of introjects, you deactivate complexes and can freely choose what you want, you can say “yes” or “no” to people based on your own feelings and conclusions, and not because “you must not contradict your elders”, “elders must be respected”, “you must not refuse mum / dad / grandma”. No one disputes that we should respect and love other people, but we also need to remember to respect and love ourselves. Introjects leave no room for that.
That is why it is worth beginning every global change in life with a change in your beliefs, auditing and revising them.
I invite you to do it together!
Petro Oleksandrovych Poliashchenko, teacher at the PSYVISION centre
