A little girl once asked her mother why she cut the ends off her roast beef before she cooked it. The mother replied that she didn’t know why; she just did it because her mother did. So the little girl went to her grandmother and asked her why she cut the ends off the roast beef. The grandmother replied, “I just did it because my mother always did.”
Finally, the little girl was able to go to her great grandmother and ask, “Great Grandma, why do you cut the ends off the roast beef?” To which her great grandmother replied, “Oh, that’s easy. When I was a little girl, all we had was one pot, and that pot was far too small to fit the entire roast beef – so we had to cut the ends off of it.”
Introjections are ideas that we accept without question. Introjections are one of the defense mechanisms that we use to avoid taking responsibility. For example, many people call others mean names when they feel hurt; but why? Why when someone hurts us do we call that person a mean name? What does that do for us? Why do we do it?
The answer is that we do it because we watched other people do the same thing – and we learned. But what if we questioned that practice? What if we reflected on name-calling and decided that it wasn’t best for us? What if we chose to do something different instead?
What if this week – if or when someone hurts us – instead of calling that person a name – what if we simply express to the other person that what he or she did hurt us?
Or better yet, what if we questioned whether or not the world needs to be exactly the way we want it to be – or whether or not it wouldn’t be best for us to align our expectations with the reality that people cannot always give us what we want…?
Because if we did question that, we might just come to the realization that it’s okay for others to not be exactly what we want them to be.