Have you ever felt frustrated at your inability to solve problems in your life?  Do you suffer from depression or anxiety and no matter how much try to deal with these experiences they don’t improve?  Do you try talking to your spouse and no matter how hard you try it doesn’t seem to help your relationship, and often makes matters worse? Are you continually frustrated by the disturbing actions of those around you and feel a constant stress in your life?

This  two-part article examines one of the fundamental reasons why we not only suffer, but continue to suffer without resolution. This first part of the article examines how this happens and why it is so fundamentally difficult to deal with.

To understand the nature of this particular difficulty, let us consider the “Myth of Narcissus” (Ovid) which goes briefly like this.  A beautiful young boy falls in love with his reflection in a pool of water.  The boy becomes so captivated by this reflection that he forsakes everything and everyone, and when he finally realizes that he can never have what he so desperately wants (the beautiful boy in the water) he draws a sword and kills himself.

As commonly interpreted,  this myth is seen as providing a warning against positive self-absorption in which a person is so enamored and absorbed by his or her wonderful self they are incapable of appreciating or caring for others.  But there is a more valuable dynamic portrayed here which is crucial in understanding why we so often struggle in our relationships with others and why the resolution of that conflict is so difficult.

As portrayed in the myth, Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection.  What is essential to understand however is that this young boy falls in love with an image which he mistakenly believes to be real and belonging to another.  Because he erroneously perceived this reflection as being independent of him, he developed a relationship with it characterized by an almost complete loss of awareness of and connection to his own self, and an absorption into the other.

Yet the “other” was more him than he could possibly realize. Even though he was confused about his own perceptions, he didn’t realize it. There was no way to break the illusion.

Had Narcissus understood this to be his own reflection he would had a very different reaction to it.   He might have gazed at his reflection for awhile and been pleased with what he saw, or he may have perhaps become self-conscious of his actions.  But he wouldn’t have lost awareness of himself  in a confused identification with someone who didn’t really exist; someone he actually constructed and didn’t even know he had done it.

So here is the question: “When we are with other people how clearly do we see them for who they are?”   How much do we confuse ”our” perceptions of the other person for who they are and not even realize we are doing this?  Most importantly, “What is the effect of doing this, how does it impact on our relationships”?

The second part of this article looks at how this confusion plays itself out in real life.