Do you remember how you felt during that embarrassing incident as a child? Or is the memory so painful that you unconsciously filed the embarrassment and other feelings associated with the incident in ‘the nowhere box’?

Can you still feel the boredom you felt staring out of the window at school? Did you focus on feeling it, more consciously, later? Or have you filed it in the nowhere box?

Do you remember how terrified you were when you had that nightmare as a child? Did a parent listen to the feelings you felt while keeping you safe or did they help you suppress awareness of it by ignoring or distracting you? Don’t worry. It is still there. It is in the nowhere box.

Do you remember just how furious you were that time when someone who should have known better accused you of committing some trivial childhood ‘offence’. Or did their violent reaction to your initial outburst cause you to shut it down? Don’t worry. The anger is all still there in the nowhere box.

Do you remember how painful it felt when that first girl/boy you fell for didn’t reciprocate? Not really? Don’t worry, it is still there. It’s stored in the nowhere box.

I know someone who was bell monitor during year 8 at school. On 14 occasions throughout the day for an entire school year, he was required to interrupt his lesson, walk to the school office and ring the bell to end one class and start the next. He has never been on time for a social event since for the simple reason that his unexpressed fury at endlessly interrupting what he was doing so that he could do what he was required to do by the school has been suppressed by his fear and now manifests, powerlessly, in being late for virtually everything. All this fear and anger is now in the nowhere box but he doesn’t realize it has been shaping his behaviour ever since.

The most interesting thing about human beings is that they have no idea why they behave the way they do.

And if you tell them that, for most of the time, they are doing what their unconscious fear makes them do, such as attend school, work at a job they hate, or simply comply with an endless series of government regulations and laws, they think you are crazy. Remember the Covid-19 lockdowns? The ‘mandatory’ injections? How many people objected? How many people attended a protest? How many people actually resisted?

The idea that they are not acting out of their own volition just doesn’t make sense to most people. After all, they have spent most of their life choosing their study, their forms of entertainment, their job, their spouse, their place of residence and their holiday destinations. They just didn’t make the most fundamental choices but they don’t even know what these are any more. Life has been reduced to the mundane and the trivial.

The monumental issues related to how the world works, who drives the key institutions that control our lives, the nature of the many threats to our existence – from the threat of nuclear war and the ongoing annihilation of life on Earth to the technocratic prison being built around us – simply fail to register in the consciousness of most people or are consigned to the nowhere box if they do.

The reality is that most people’s entire Selfhood – their capacity to think for themselves, to feel their emotional reaction to what is happening, and then to act out of their own volition – has been buried in their ‘nowhere box’.

So what happens then?

Of course, all of these feelings in the ‘nowhere box’ haven’t gone anywhere. They are stored and, later – sometimes rarely, sometimes occasionally, and sometimes routinely – projected onto other people or events that ‘trigger’ the feelings because of a memory they unconsciously remind the person about. This often leads to completely inappropriate behaviour but for the person experiencing the feelings this is incomprehensible. See ‘The Psychology of Projection in Conflict’.

Projection, for example, can often lead a parent or teacher to misinterpret a child’s behaviour and to blame, and punish, the child for doing something that, in fact, the child believed would get them approval. When I listen to individuals talk of their childhood experience, I routinely hear accounts of times when they were blamed & punished for something they did not do but of which they could not convince their parent or teacher. If an individual is trapped in a projection (because the........

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