The Unemployed Alcoholic Blog

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.”
Oscar Wilde.

Carl Jung theorized that whenever you think a bad thought about someone, or you judge them in some negative way (this goes for positives also, but more on that later), you are actually projecting qualities that you hate about yourself onto them (either something that you yourself exhibit, or perhaps an inner urge that you are repressing to appear more well-adjusted than you really are), and you hate them for it instead (the average person would rather hate others than hate the self, because hating yourself would be self-destructive). Try this for a few days, every time you feel ill will toward someone, recognize how your mental projection mechanism has been activated, and see how the quality you are about to react to is actually a feature of yourself… Get it? Now, do not hate yourself, but simply OBSERVE the projection process and short circuit it using this realization… recognize that this feature may be part of your “shadow” and perhaps something you need to work on. Then, try to find something redeemable about the person you were about to project onto, and love them for it. This presupposes, of course, that you have already developed a healthy self-esteem and a love for yourself. If you don’t love yourself, you can’t love others.