A real rough looking man brought the topic of projection up in the meeting today. It was nothing new. I’ve probably attended hundreds of meetings, where this was talked about by members of different groups. But, for some reason it came back to me, when I got home.
Not that it’s germaine, but I think the root meaning from the Latin would be to throw to or forward. Something like that. So, anyway, when we project, we are throwing something in our minds to someplace out there ahead of us. Someplace where we are not at the moment.
Having my own experiences with this and listening to others for so many years, my guess is that we are all prone to projection. It usually came to me, when I had something I “had” to do. Some obligation or some crisis in my life. The circumstances, which would put me into this kind of thinking, were available to me, when ! I sat down to think. I had nothing else to do except think.
What would usually happen is that it was like throwing a harpoon into the darkness of tomorrow, with a line attached to it, which would pull me along with the momentum of the thought hurled before me. I was so attached to the thought that I would become tangled up in the line and couldn’t let go. Or wouldn’t. It would end up becoming an obsession. It was like a song I would hear and couldn’t get it out of my mind. And that phrase “out of my mind” is appropriate.
Someone once described what happens, when you plan for a vacation and you end up thinking of what it would be like to be where you were going. They said that what usually happens, when you finally arrive at your destination, that it becomes anticlimatical. It’s no fun, because you were already there a few months before you arrived.
The problem with people like us is that we probably never project anything positive. We are probably already into negativity before we began the process of projecting. Not for nothing did our sponsors tell us “don’t think”! Another thing I was told was that anticipation, or expectations, are a downpayment on a resentment.
All of this begins with my failure to remember what I had been told right from the beginning; stay in the day. Stay right where you are. My day has enough to occupy me for now. If I’m really practicing this program, I have enough to do and keep me occupied. Tom once told me that if I was bored, it was because I wasn’t taking action, like looking at the step I was on at the moment. I think it’s dissatisfaction with where I am at the moment that starts this action forward…or backward. A psychologist once told me that the man, who has one foot i! n yesterday and the other in the future is in peril of falling on his butt. He said it’s what drives us crazy.
Guilt, pride fueled by fear, is the result of thinking about our past failures. I believe that projection is taking the past and pushing it into the future, so that we can obtain the same results. Both are unrealistic and hardly sober thinking. I have forgotten about a relationship with God. I’m isolated in my thoughts from those around me. I need an attitude adjustment. I need help.
Meetings, talking to a friend or a sponsor, talking to God and listening in meditation are the healthiest thing I can do, when I’m stuck in projection. After all, I didn’t come here to drive myself into misery. I came here for relief from where I was.