Carl Jung: Why You Get So Easily Triggered

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Do you ever find yourself extremely irritated or troubled by someone or something within the external world? It could be a certain person, the way they behave, a certain location, idea or concept etc…

“Everything that irritates us about others leads us to an understanding of ourselves.”

• Carl Jung

When we enter into a state like this it tells us more about our own unconscious problems we sometimes cannot see.

That we are instead projecting our internal chaos onto something external that is outside of ourselves.

If you ever catch yourself doing this you might realise that you are doing it out of a desire to be irresponsible of your own personal responsibilities, that you want to use or find something external to blame for your own unhappiness or misfortune.

Carl Jung called this: shadow projection. When we take our own unwanted emotions, feelings or impulses and cast them onto an external victim within the world to avoid accountability and responsibility but to also develop a false sense of grandiosity and pride to bypass their own internal feelings of shame. This type of character is well represent in Dostoevsky’s book: The Underground Man.

We can see this behaviour manifest the most culturally through: misogyny, racism, ethnophobia or any other form of cognitively-biased behaviour or attitude of blame that arises hatred and fear towards someone or something that is not themselves.

For example, I was talking to a client and he had an obsessional hatred towards negatively labelling most people as: “conformists”, how they are a problem not only for society but also for himself as it “limits” his ability to “relate with others”. Yet, when I asked him: “why are you putting all the burden of responsibility and blame onto other people you call ‘conformists’ when it is your own responsibility to change and put yourself out there?”

After saying this and talking about projection he then realised that his own way of stereotyping people as “conformists” is simply a form of shadow projection coming from a place of fear: social anxiety. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIFjkxgBsAk