From the author: The article will be useful to those who are undergoing psychotherapy or reflecting on the phenomena of their psyche. A person has to deal with the internal content of the psyche, he is essentially locked inside his experience and even is unaware of the degree of distortion of the perception of reality. This is discovered in a session when such a phenomenon as TRANSFERENCE comes to life, when fantasies of internal reality (due to negative experiences of the past) distort the real reality of relationships. I first became acquainted with the phenomenon of distortion of the perception of reality when I was trying to understand the term “reality tunnel " I couldn’t understand this term, but my supervisor gave a vivid metaphor: imagine a bark beetle that gnaws a tunnel in a tree trunk and talks about how the world works. He feels absolutely sure that the world is a tree, what if you want to survive, he must bite into the trunk, that there are enemies around him, he must fight them, he must hide from them. He does not see the sun, butterflies, the sky, does not feel anything from the world that is inaccessible to him, because he is in a tunnel and fights reality. You see, if you fight reality, then you are always in pain. How to understand about the distortion of the perception of reality? 1) According to the pain of perception. Every time you “pull the old picture” onto the changed reality, it breaks and you experience pain and rage - how unfair it all is! 2) Based on repetitions of situations in your life. Have you seen the movie Groundhog Day? No matter how hard you try to fix everything and do it differently, it turns out “everything is the same as always.” And you are sadly driven to the painful question: what’s wrong with me? But the question is completely different! How is my psyche structured so that it is important for it to be in the fight? When the psyche is filled with internal conflicts, and there is no skill in recognizing internal reality, then it is much easier to find something/someone to be afraid of/to fight with in external reality. The inner world is projected into the outer world and struggle/avoidance begins. That’s when everything immediately happens falls into place, because how to survive in this struggle have you learned since childhood? Your defensive strategies are on guard like vigilant sentries, ready at any moment to lower your visor and rush into battle... But since this does not solve the problem, it seems to the person that he is constantly being pursued. Any external threat is much more understandable, and therefore more adaptive, than unrecognizable anxiety inside. Any external confrontation is more bearable than confrontation with oneself. What is so unbearable for the psyche? OUR OWN FEELINGS! Imagine a little person who is completely dependent on an authoritative adult, his loss means death, so the child will, with all his might, come up with strategies to adapt to any pretentious habits of the authoritative object. If the object was critical, unaccepting or abandoned whenever real ones showed up feelings, then it is much more profitable for a child to become bad, guilty and begin to “correct” than to say: how much I hate you! After all, the loss of an object is a disaster. Where did the feelings go? Nowhere. They are still within you, guarded by vigilant sentries. Exactly at this point the fight starts! So as not to again face the feeling of abandonment With unbearable melancholy and loneliness, when you are criticized and not accepted With pain, again to be unimportant and unnecessary in the eyes of someone who is very important to you With a feeling of your “BAD” and guilt, because again an important other is angry with you with helplessness, impotence and dependence, to find yourself again under someone’s power, because this threatens with unbearable humiliation, which will empty everything inside like a hundred-ton roller... The fear of being abandoned and abandoned is so scary that it pushes you to be the first to leave the relationship, firstly, so as not to become attached, but also, so that it doesn’t hurt when they quit (an axiom of personal experience). It seems that it is easier to fight a visible and persecuting enemy all your life than to face grief and other feelings that you once could no longer cope with. You just forget that “there.