Contact and Resistances to Contact
- contact, lifeblood for growth
- contact is made by seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and moving
- effective contact = interacting with nature and with other people without losing sense of individuality
- Pre-requisites for good contact: clear awareness, full energy, and the ability to express oneself
- tendency to uncritically accept others’ beliefs and standards without assimilating them, congruent with who we are
2.
Projection
- disown certain aspects of ourselves by assigning them to the environment
3.
Retrojection
- turning back to ourselves what we would like to do to someone else or;
- doing to ourselves what we would like someone else to do to us
e.g.
if we lash out and injure ourselves, for instance, directing aggression inward
that we are fearful of directing toward others.
4.
Deflection
- process of distraction, so that it is difficult to maintain a sustained sense of contact
- by overusing of humor, abstract generalizations and questions rather than statements
- blurring of differentiation between the self and the environment
- no clear demarcation between internal experiences and outer reality
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