When you’re caught in the clutches of an inferiority complex, an unresolved father complex, or a self-inflated saviour complex, you’re not interacting with baseline reality.

Projections launch from complexes, and unresolved complexes create reality-overlays which change how you perceive the world based on expectations and assumptions from your unconscious mind.

Complexes can be difficult to understand, but everybody has them and you’re not going to escape them without effort.

If you want to feel more in control of your thoughts and actions, then it’s important to work through the major psychological complexes, which are often responsible for the many trigger-finger projections that we launch into both the external and internal world.

In terms of definitions, a complex is a semi-autonomous psychological system which builds around important themes such as family, safety or worthiness.

Both generalised and highly-specific in nature, psychological complexes are densely interwoven networks of feelings, associations, assumptions and narratives which colour and tilt our perception of baseline reality.

If you keep finding yourself in the same kinds of negatively-charged situations, then there’s a good chance that an unconscious complex is the likely origin of the confusing conflicts that seem to go round in circles

For the sake of visualisation, you can imagine the construction of a complex, such as the Father complex, as a semi-conscious wall which you’ve built over your lifetime.

All major experiences and associations with your father (and all-fathers, in this example) are the red bricks, and the more you stack the red bricks, the more you layer, the more complex the complex.

As you grow up, we gradually build the walls.  

We surround our understanding of masculinity, in this example, with a perceptual wall, and eventually we can’t see over the wall. We can’t see the real men on the other side - our fathers, our brothers, our friends - and all of their words come muffled through the bricks.

The good news is that we can dissolve complex walls, heal old wounds, and create new conceptual narratives, but you need to be careful that you’re not just replacing one wall with another wall.

Don’t overcompensate.

Beware the unconscious swing between pedestalisation and demonisation.

All relationships are inclusive of some kinds of projections, but you eventually get to control the intensity of those projections.

Projections are normal and they happen automatically, but compulsively-charged complexes and projections devastate your relationship to yourself and other people, and the unconscious complex is the likely origin of repeated and confusing internal or external conflicts.

If you analyse and work through your major psychological complexes, through shadow work and deep introspection, you can experience more truthful relationships.

You will encounter fewer confusing conflicts, disappointments and barriers, and experience the safety and stability required for consistent growth through healing and self-actualising relationships.

Examine your experiences and narratives, and reconstruct your worldview with patience and persistence as you dismantle or otherwise rearrange your perceptual walls in a brick-by-brick manner.

If you want to find and integrate your major psychological complexes, then join me inside the Shadow Work Library. You’ll learn all about dissolving your complexes in Module Two.

https://courses.jordanthornton.com/shadow-work-library/

Jordan