Responsibility Symmetry 👐

When we’re unable or unwilling to deal with our own state, we recreate it outside of ourselves.

• I’ll fix your feeling of sadness, rather than dealing with my discomfort that you’re sad. 
• I shout my boundaries so you’ll uphold them—because I don’t trust myself to
• I can’t relax my body, so I seek out stimulation (social media, intense movies, etc) (hat tip to Relateful Camp Presenter Forrest Wilson)
• I’ll save the world, because I don’t know how to deal with my personal insignificance
• I invest in things I don’t care about because being with the truth of how much I love threatens my sense of independence.

This is a functional way to practice stuff we’re not good at yet: I’ll give you advice about your business that I can later apply to my own. It’s a way we learn. We can’t yet hold in our self-identity so we recreate: Recreation is activity done for enjoyment. But it limits what we love in ourselves and others, keeping us under the thumb of our defenses (against what we’re avoiding). We end up overextending our attention at others, underextending it for ourselves, as one process.

This is another way of saying projection makes perception, which is the same as saying defenses do what they’re designed to defend against, which is the same as saying there’s only one happening—separation is a construct that creates the one-who-separates-and-perceives as much as it does the-things-perceived.

If there’s anything new I’m adding here (probably not—Freud, Jung, and so many mystics have said it thousands of times before me), it’s that I think there’s a symmetry. “If I can’t handle X, I’ll create X’ externally”. When I’m lucky enough to notice this happening in my experience, it seems almost like a conservation law in physics, where the energy of avoidance must be preserved somewhere in the system. There seems to be a proportionality—the amount that I’m blaming the world for its injustice seems equivalent to the amount I’m not taking responsibility for myself / the amount I’m taking too much responsibility is equivalent to my unwillingness to face the world’s injustice. ← These may sound like opposites, but from this frame they seem like the same meta-process.

This symmetry highlights two ways to reverse it (since being one, either side of the mirror is a viable place for chance)—if we want to embrace more and get more in touch with the fullness of what’s available in existence: (1) Noticing my attraction/aversion to something outside, I can turn my attention inward instead, and start the process of learning to love the unloved in me. Or (2) noticing what seems unlovable in me, I can look at how I externalize that, and learn how to love and boundary that.

With love, Jordan