Bullying and projective identification

[Depression = 72% of members]

I just lost my whole text of a draft because my login timed out.  I know sometimes if I login it's there, but I think I clicked "refresh" or "back" or something.

It was really good.  Reading about projective identification (dumping unwanted qualities into another person), introjective identification (attempt to absorb another's good qualities into oneself) and a reference to "play therapy" reminded me of a bizarre statement made by a former childhood friend - later bully, a statement that I as an adult looking back thought was really twisted until I read about this notion of just how strong the inner psychic tension around these unaccepted emotions and traits is.

It was on the phone with me in grade 1, 2 years before all the stuff really happened against me ("stuff" being name calling, verbal abuse, sometimes physical confinement, always involving at least one of him and his female cousin who I will mention.  I was friends with both of them)

He described a monster that was a fusion of he and I, and it ate his cousin.  I had typed a lot in the previous draft post about a strange rivalry (between them?  or was I the target and didn't know? The two of them eventually ganged up on me, recruiting others, but still sometimes he made up nasty songs about her when she wasn't around?) and the fact that he grew up to be gay, in a small town that was probably not so accepting of those things.  

I will ask my therapist this week but I was also going to ask you guys to brainstorm what you thought it meant.  A boy fusing with a girl to consume another girl?  :)estroying that girl in the process, but also obtaining nourishment (not just killing, eating)?  A person fusing with another person to form a bigger, more powerful creature (a monster) who is then big enough to overpower a third person?

Ugh.

[eeks]

I just lost my whole text of a draft because my login timed out.  I know sometimes if I login it's there, but I think I clicked "refresh" or "back" or something.

It was really good.  Reading about projective identification (dumping unwanted qualities into another person), introjective identification (attempt to absorb another's good qualities into oneself) and a reference to "play therapy" reminded me of a bizarre statement made by a former childhood friend - later bully, a statement that I as an adult looking back thought was really twisted until I read about this notion of just how strong the inner psychic tension around these unaccepted emotions and traits is.

It was on the phone with me in grade 1, 2 years before all the stuff really happened against me ("stuff" being name calling, verbal abuse, sometimes physical confinement, always involving at least one of him and his female cousin who I will mention.  I was friends with both of them)

He described a monster that was a fusion of he and I, and it ate his cousin.  I had typed a lot in the previous draft post about a strange rivalry (between them?  or was I the target and didn't know? The two of them eventually ganged up on me, recruiting others, but still sometimes he made up nasty songs about her when she wasn't around?) and the fact that he grew up to be gay, in a small town that was probably not so accepting of those things.  

I will ask my therapist this week but I was also going to ask you guys to brainstorm what you thought it meant.  A boy fusing with a girl to consume another girl?  :)estroying that girl in the process, but also obtaining nourishment (not just killing, eating)?  A person fusing with another person to form a bigger, more powerful creature (a monster) who is then big enough to overpower a third person?

Ugh.

[Blimblam]

This might help

https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=108384.0

If you think about it we do it all the time we fuse our identity with some larger structure to feel more powerful than our fears.  Slap a few symbols on the structure and a badge of sort and voila.

[eeks]

Thanks Blimblam, I'm not sure if I see the specific triangle roles in this situation but the overall idea of a dysfunctional dynamic makes sense.  

I think the part I struggle with is, I didn't do anything to hurt them on purpose, and as far as I know I didn't do anything accidentally either.  If I'd started a challenge with them then I would have to accept that they might fight back, but when it was aggression (verbal and emotional, but I don't hesitate to call it aggression) that was both unprovoked and always done by at least 3 kids at once I just didn't know how to handle it.  

"Love yourself", everyone says, but I just can't seem to get past the fact that they had, if not the love, the support and protection of one another (that includes the teachers, who if you've read my accounts elsewhere both arguably instigated the bullying and refused to help when I asked), and I didn't.  Self-love seems like kind of a booby prize, like a kind of euphemistic version of "a face only a mother could love"... ."a person only themselves could love"... .

[Blimblam]

Lol. 

I know that feel.  I wasn't bullied much in school becuase I was the bully beater. That's not true because often the biggest bullies were the teachers and me bein the bully beater didn't go over well when I had a bully of a teacher.  But I often feel that way about this mass marketed self improvement version of the idea of self love.  What I reccomend is to wath the film American Beauty.  It is dealing exactly with what you are talking about. His wife is all into that phony bs version of self love but the guy has a sort of nervous breakdown then finds some real deal "self love."   

The issue is when the real thing is self love becomes some sort if catch phrase and appropriated in some sort of book selling marketing fad and it becomes an empty hallow shell pimped out to fatten wallets. So by the time it enters popular culture it feels like Mclove. It turns into freaking McDonald's. You have to understand that the way things are structured that in order to enter the mainstream it has to become McDonald's because that's what the main stream is.