Wishful Thinking

Call it the “Walter Mitty syndrome,” or call it being a pathological dreamer, but those of us who tend to unconsciously making decisions based on what might be enjoyable to our imagination instead of by appealing to evidence, rationality, and reality, tend to present an intoxicating roadblock to a successful relationship for those they seduce into their hyper-romantic world.

You might see how this is similar in mode to the ego defense of fantasy, only this one may occur without an external threat stimulating the defense. It is interesting to consider that there may be a conscious lack of resources stimulating the defense in some cases.

Just imagine times in which you have been wishful - to not be hungry, to have enough money, to not be lonely, or to find love. You might notice a conscious glimpse of your lack of resources - both material and emotional - then turn inward to what is left buried inside you, most of the time not even conscious.

It is then that you might discover more vividly what you believe in, examine your habits both good and bad that you don’t normally acknowledge. You might say, “God help me.” And no matter what you believe, He does help you. You are swimming in your survival instincts and gender instincts, your beliefs and habits of the unconscious. They fill your conscious world now where those lacking resources should have been. At the very least , in this way, God has already helped you. Whether you believe in the Christian God with the white beard, or Universal Love, Allah, Jehovah, or the Greek gods, your world did at least briefly fill up with hope from somewhere you know not of.

Which is eternal, outside of time, like God. It is the unconscious.

Imagine it - your personal boundary which is the shield in you against outside threats, while inside you, a pale, white, ego boundary shows no sign that there is anything existing at all behind its walls. Within you, there is a trickle of blue water left at the bottom of your tank. It is called, “Well-being,” the little you have left after hard times. There is open air in you, and no new ideas, hunger to be filled up, thirst for some life in your world, while little do you know still deeper in you there is a whole world of the imagination, guarded by the figure, Hades, if you are male, and Persephone if you are female.

The two, married gods of the Underworld are the symbolic masters of so much that we nearly forget exist, and which ironically make us, us. When all else fails us, when there is a downturn in our lives, we may lack courage for a time, or nurturing, food and water, shelter even. But there is a shelter deep inside us, in the ego boundary. It is full of the instincts which we share with every other human, as well as those we share with every other of our own gender. It holds our passions that can feed and sustain us when there is nothing else in us but hunger. The passions are vitality itself. The habits which we still indulge are in us too, both good and bad. Our “imprinting,” that kind of hard-coded impression made by others in just the right way, at just the right time, so as to nearly be engraved on our hearts - and responsible for the all-important attachment and bonding that is unique to use by way of our parents (and future loves.)

The first of them we encounter as we turn inward in our trying times, our times of grief and failure, is probably our beliefs. They are described in words: “I believe in love,” or “I believe in my training,” or hopefully arriving in those troubling times of life, at the conclusion, “I still believe in myself.”

We notice the addition of the word, “still,” and there it is, our hope, our wishfulness. Our unconscious has expanded to fill the space that was empty a moment ago, and we enter it, losing touch with whatever harmful things are going on outside, in the foul weather of the emotions out there. Yet ourselves, now filled up with the passions, our instincts and beliefs that pour out and into us from the unconscious; they now yearn for us to be fed, to finally win our heart’s desire. Like Tantalus, we are so very close to those things in life that we need to be happy. They are just outside our boundary, thos ethings we hope for.

Those resources we need are not just material. They are spiritual, emotional, intellectual. They are written in the clouds of what we imagine should, or could be just outside the personal boundary, rather than there being the monsters we have encountered, and which are sure to still be waiting there.

You have heard of children “being afraid of monsters under the bed.” This wishfulness, this is the hope that the things that threaten us are in fact not real, and that they might not even be there anymore if we take another peek. Just like the child looking under his bed.

The defense mechanism of wishful thinking is a source of great ire to others who buy into their very heart-felt plans for the future. “We’ll get married and live in Tuscany,” they might say, when in fact the reality is that we are moving into a mobile home somewhere affordable in Pennsylvania. “I’ll give you six children and every day will be like a dream,” they might say, when the end result is in reality, more like the nightmare of the family court system.

Many women will immediately spot this defense as having been something they have encountered in men before, and it’s possible that gender bias influences this, since many men appear to give a pass to this defense in women, early on in the dating process. Lo and behold, the defense will matter greatly to them as they reach this very serious stage of courtship, where our individual and joint decisions really do carry the weight of potential bankruptcy or at times are even of a life and death nature.

When we indulge only in wishful thinking instead of the act of doing, or striving for our goals with our hands and legs, when we reach out into the unknown, the world at large that we do not control, we may feel foolish, a kind of Parcival in the tale of the Fisher King, we may find that those resources that we wished so desperately for, like winning the lottery, or the hand in marriage of that divine-appearing creature, we find that the reality of them is the thing that was actually lurking behind them all along. That monstrous thing that we discover when we finally have the gut-felt experience of, “Be careful what you wish for. You may just get it.”