Understanding how I experienced certain life events gives me greater knowledge of myself and more detachment from my self-destructive patterns. When I refuse to remember the pain of early experiences – projecting it onto others and making it about them, rather than sitting with it and feeling it myself – rather than resolve the problem, I compound it. This is one way that I pass on pain through the generations. In my inability to sit with my own pain, I ask others to contain it for me through dynamics such as projection. It is identifying in someone else what I should be identifying in myself, displacing a painful feeling by dumping it onto an unsuspecting receiver. This does not allow me to do the inner work I require to be clean and healthy, and it crosses another person’s boundary in an unfair, unhealthy way. My greatest potential for learning is in studying myself with honesty and openness.

I will look honestly at myself.

The wish for healing has ever been the half of health.
Seneca