If she isn’t projecting them onto her “loved ones,” she is turning them against herself.
Living by principles is not living your own life.
It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are.
If you are trying to live by ideals, you are constantly plagued by a sense of unreality.
Somewhere you think there must be some joy; it can’t be all “must,” “ought to,” “have to.”
And when the crunch comes, you have to recognize the truth: you weren’t there.
Then the house of cards collapses.
In trying to live out your principles and ideals, the part that matters the most was lost.
The hideous irony then has to be faced. As one woman put it to me:
I have everything and nothing. By the world’s standards, I have everything. By my own heart’s standards, I have nothing. I won the battle for my precious independence and lost what was most precious to me. I want to love and be loved but something in me is sending love away. I do not understand.
For the person who is living by ideals, the essential problem in relationships usually involves the difference between love and power.
If an individual is being fed and nourished emotionally by the mother or a mother surrogate such as husband, company, Church, ollective values she is probably starving in relation to herself.
She is dependent on the mother and therefore open to manipulation by the mother, vulnerable to her praise or rejection.
She is not nourishing herself and her own feelings are being unrecognized or denied.
She is starving.
She has to perform perfectly in order to be loved.
Her emotional stability is determined by another’s reaction.
On one hand she is being manipulated, on the other she is a manipulator because she has to be in order to be loved.
She cannot depend on a love which accepts her for who she is.
Whether the original manipulators are still in her life doesn’t matter; they are alive in her psyche as complexes and if she isn’t projecting them onto her “loved ones,” she is turning them against herself. ~Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection, Page 61-62
