I looked further into magical thinking and found out there’s a part of it that leeks into the adult life, without us being conscious about it. Sometimes we will project our fantasy on real people in our lives.
We feel a longing for a person or a relationship that we desperately need, to heal us, to help us be safe and calm. We feel connections to people who we can imagine doing this for us, or from who we desperately want this closeness and love. We’ll fit them into an ideal we have in our head, project feelings they have for us, virtues they have, who they are as a person, how safe they are, and we’ll get attached to the ide of this being ‘destiny’ or 'soulmates’. We feel like it’s inevitable, it’s right, it’s the only thing that makes sense. And any flaws they might have, will either be invisible, excused, or explained away as unimportant, because of course you accept this person wholeheartedly.
We do this because we survived the first part of our life in pain and danger, and what pulled us thru was the magical thinking. So we dream that we’ll have all of this pain made up for; that there’s a miraculous friendship or relationship out there waiting for us, waiting to heal us. And if we get out, or even just a little freedom from our captive space, and we’re still feeling abandoned, people around us are uncaring, uninterested, or even completely unsafe predators, it’s too much to survive thru. It’s not what we survived the abuse for. It means we still can’t relax, can’t process anything, can’t get to feeling loved or safe at all. And we even can’t do anything about it.
Magical thinking gives us something to do; a goal, a hope to hold onto. It makes us believe happiness is within reach, our desired future will happen, we only have to invest incredible amount of patience, loyalty, persistence, self-managing so we endure all the bad our 'special’ people put us thru, and we’ll get our love, we’ll feel safe at last. We’ll even try to become their fantasy, and give them anything they could have dreamed of, in hope we’ll get ours too.
People who do not have good intentions will often happily play into this, because we’re ready to put up with anything, do anything for them, accept anything, project only the best most shiny features on them, and we’ll never give up on them regardless of how badly we’re treated and ignored. All they have to do is let us keep our fantasy, our hope that keeps us going. It’s how we don’t see red flags, keep hope for a future that will never be what we need, and stay in unsafe situations, believing this is safe, this is love, this is learning, it’s what’s good for us, it will make us who we need to be.
Magical thinking is designed to keep us alive thru the worst hell in life, and it’s not a shameful, stupid thing we do. Nobody can live a life without hope, without trust that they will be loved. Predators who take advantage of that, who not only encourage it but even build up this fake future so we believe them, and bond to them, are exploiting and using a traumatized person who is trying desperately to find a reason to live. It’s cruel, cowardly, and disgraceful. If we had a genuine safe, loving and kind person in our lives, the magical thinking would be unnecessary. We project safety and love because we can’t endure the reality of being unsafe, abandoned, and alone all over again. We went far past our limits for enduring that.
