In childhood, our parents tried to protect us from bad company and suspicious friends. The people around us really influence us, and they are our reflection. What does your mirror show of friends and loved ones?
«Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are» is a very accurate definition. If you want change, take a look around. Maybe you will notice how your problem is supported by the environment. Child therapists often see the child become the expression of the family’s symptoms. Therefore, they work not only with the child, but also with the family as a system. But this is also true for adults: the circle of our communication affects us.
To test this, draw your social atom. Put a dot in the center, and place relatives, colleagues, friends around. Triangles for men and circles for women. Determine the distance from the center in accordance with the volume of communication: place the person closer to the center, the more time you spend with him.
Now think about who and how influences you in this atom, who supports your problem, and who contributes to its solution or is an example of its solution.
Those who come to therapy often describe their environment as similar to themselves. For example, if you have an inferiority complex and you narcissistically defend against it by devaluing and idealizing others, you will be surrounded by characters who act the same way. The fisherman sees the fisherman from afar, and the complex, against our will, creates a suitable environment that will allow it to remain unchanged and look normal, ordinary. Therefore, he gathers around him those for whom such behavior is the norm.
But now let’s look at our «I» more closely. Even when alone, we continue to have conversations with others, proving our case. The psyche is dialogical. Others influence us both from the outside and from the inside. We are made up of other people, and not just parents. If we start looking for the individual in our «I», then we will find that there is nothing of this kind there, and all our peculiarity is only in a random set of the collective.
Remember the song «From what, what are our girls (boys) made of»? Indeed, we are made of the collective. Our «I» before we begin to realize it, is a set of parental and cultural stereotypes, mechanisms. Jung equated such a «I» with the Person — a mask behind which the collective unconscious is hidden.
Only as we grow older do we get the opportunity to consider these mechanisms and decide whether we like them or we can refuse them. Jung called this process individuation and believed that only as a result of individuation can the real «I» arise, after we question the Persona and start asking the most important question: «Who am I?»
But perhaps we shouldn’t be upset. Why bother with this tedious and often neurotic Persona who is so desperate to isolate herself and is tormented by her inadequacy? Perhaps, having realized its collective nature, we can finally exhale and begin to enjoy life without judgment and rigid defense of its interests. Perhaps, having felt a connection with others, we will feel the deep meaning of a holistic being and our destiny as part of a vast world.