What’s Happening?
It depends on what you look at obviously
But even more it depends on the way that you see
—-Bruce Cockburn, Child of the Wind
We have been using this to illustrate and support our discussion of object relations. But this, like most two-dimensional illustrations, does not accurately reflect the situation. So, let’s delve into this perspective from two different perspectives!
The Way that You See
If we adjust the alignment of the three components, we get a better understanding of what’s happening.
The “bigger” person in this image is actually the small one (child) in the horizontal representation of an object relation. The “small” one in this image is the big other, but it is perceived through the child’s mental perspective. In the child’s mind, the other is huge.
The double arrow is actually a looping dynamic in which what is perceived triggers a reaction, which in turn reinforces beliefs about the other and the relationship, perpetuating the reaction and so on and so on…
Imagine the figure above is a lens in a pair of glasses. The lens includes the sense of me, the sense of the other, and the constellation of affect and energy. We spend most of our lives wearing these lenses —not as glasses, not as the lens in our eye, but as a filter in the data stream of mental processing.
The Way We Relate
If we look at this from the perspective of any normal interaction in the world, we get something like this:
All the arrows are looping dynamics. So, the normal state of affairs (relating) involves two people with “triggered” object relations relating to each other as figments of imagination – mental representations from the past.
The internal sense of the relationship, then, is like an ice cream cone.
The cone represents the container or footing involved (rejecting, frustrating, good), the scoops represent the psychic constellation (thoughts, beliefs, ideas, history…), and the flavor is the affective nuclei. All together, they give you a relationship in the present, the “full-bodied” experience of the past – the faces have changed, but it’s the same old story.
The Same Old Story
The story’s the same
The story’s the same
The heart ever hungers
while mind hunts the game
A heart once young as grass in the spring
dries with the lessons a harsh world can bring
Childhood’s innocence ran through the fields
and suffered the trauma that judgment yields
As you grew up and followed directions
spontaneity died from others’ inspections
The story’s the same
The story’s the same
The heart ever hungers
while mind hunts the game
Now that you’re molded like a lump of old clay
your insides turn brittle as you bake day by day
Your face is chiseled in a permanent frown
once green pastures have faded to brown
The body’s a sieve full of old holes
and life a collection of meaningless roles
The story’s the same
The story’s the same
The heart ever hungers
while mind hunts the game
When life is a cup emptied by grief
the heart is readied for famine relief
A single tear falls on parched desert ground
prompted by childhood’s shocking rebound
Pain is a flood like rains in the spring
swelling the heart as new life they bring
The story’s the same
The story’s the same
The heart never hungers
while mining its claim (JH)
The Fly in the Ointment
The irritant, the pest in all of this, is “the self,” that pesky sense of familiarity that keeps buzzing around in the room of experience—what is happening. Here’s a snapshot of a small segment from the timeline of life:
The colors represent different stages in life or streams of experience, with specific object relations that block or distort particular essential qualities. They are the strings in your tangled ball of a psyche.
Each frame of experience contains that pesky sense of self, and because each frame contains the pest, we believe it is part of the picture, but the picture is created in the moment; it’s what is actually happening.
The fly is inserted so fast it seems like it’s part of what’s arising, but it’s not. What is part of what is arising is the a sense of the phenomenology of the body, the mental processes, the energies, and affects. The mental process connects all the historical flies; the memory of that fly in every frame is what creates a sense of self through time.
You see? It’s created. The mind is taking the sense of familiarity and connecting (comparing it) to the billion trillion frames in your story, adding it to the story of a self as an asserted actual entity.
Up Next
Object Relations: Trauma & Healing
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. His newest book, Nurturing Essence: A Compass for Essential Parenting, invites parents to discover the role essence plays in child development. He is also the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.