Identifying your own patterns

You are the hardest person in this guide to identify. Your own defences feel like plain perception from the inside. Clinicians call such a pattern ego-syntonic, meaning it fits your sense of who you are, so it doesn't register as a problem. The patterns you are most certain you don't have are where to look first.

Your reactions are data about both of you

This turns step 2 of the method from the first chapter, noticing what someone evokes in you, into a routine. After any charged interaction, ask three questions:

1. What exactly do I feel? Name it precisely: contempt, envy, a need to rescue, boredom, a wish to impress, fear of their disapproval.
2. Is this feeling usual for me? If it is foreign and appears only with this person, it is probably information about them. It may be projective identification: they cannot bear a feeling, disown it, and act in ways that make you feel it instead. If it is familiar and appears with many people, it is more likely information about you: your transference (an old relationship colouring this one), your schema (a core belief formed early), your complex (an emotionally charged sore spot).
3. What would acting on it confirm? If the pull is to attack, rescue or withdraw, and doing so would complete their expected story, decline the role and watch what happens.

Where your patterns show

• Disproportionate irritation. A trait in someone else that bothers you far more than it bothers others usually belongs to your shadow, the parts of you that don't fit your self-image and so get disowned. Jung's rule of thumb: what we can't stand in others often lives in us, unlived or disowned.
• The same ending with different people. If the story keeps ending the same way with different casts, the common factor is you. Look for repetition compulsion (recreating a painful early situation), a life script (an unconscious plan for your life formed in childhood), or a schema you keep acting out. You may surrender to the old belief, or overcompensate by acting as its opposite.
• Contempt and superiority. These usually defend against envy or shame. When you catch yourself looking down, ask what the other person has that you want, or what they show you about yourself that you'd rather not see.
• Your derailer under load. A derailer is a strength that turns destructive under pressure (see Work and organisations). Notice what you become when tired, threatened or powerful. The people who work most closely with you have seen it.
• What your worth depends on. Find the domain where a loss would hit hardest: performance, approval, being special, being good, being needed. That is where you will be least objective about yourself and others.
• Your move when contact breaks. When someone goes quiet, do you pursue, withdraw, or do both in turn? That shows your attachment strategy, the way you learned early to keep important people close (see Attachment, development and family systems).

The traps of psychological knowledge

• Labels as weapons. Diagnosing a partner or colleague mid-argument ("you're being narcissistic") ends the inquiry and starts a fight. Keep labels for your own thinking, and in conversation describe behaviour.
• Identification as I–It. Analysing someone is itself a way of treating them as an object, what Buber called I–It (see the previous chapter). Used all the time, it stops you meeting people at all, and they feel it. Name the pattern, then put the guide down and be in the room with them.
• Insight as armour. Fluent self-analysis with no change in feeling or behaviour is intellectualisation, a defence that swaps thinking for feeling. You will know insight is real when your behaviour changes, not when your explanation improves.
• Psychology as bypass. Understanding why someone hurt you doesn't mean you have dealt with being hurt. The same goes for spiritual frameworks, where it is called spiritual bypassing. Understanding has to come after feeling, not instead of it.
• Identifying while flooded. Mentalising, your capacity to read behaviour in terms of thoughts and feelings, collapses under strong emotion. A judgement you make while angry, hurt or infatuated is a draft. Make it again the next day.

A practice

Once a week, take one interaction that stayed with you. Write down what happened, what you felt, three explanations for the other person's behaviour, and three for your own. Then name the one test that would tell them apart. Within a few months the method from the first chapter becomes automatic, and you will identify your own patterns as readily as other people's.