Projection: Making it Work For You Not Against You
In the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about dating again, whatever that means! I haven’t written about it here but last December, I broke up with my partner of 23 years. We were in life and in business together, so it’s been “a bit of work.” It was my decision/initiation and being here now, I am grateful for the changes.Recently “a man” showed up in my life very peripherally and it’s given me an opportunity to observe how projection works in real time.
Projection is the process of displacing one’s feelings onto a different person, animal, or object. The term is most commonly used to describe defensive projection—attributing one’s own unacceptable urges to another. For example, if someone continuously bullies and ridicules a peer about his insecurities, the bully might be projecting his own struggle with self-esteem onto the other person.
The concept emerged from Sigmund Freud’s work on defense mechanisms and was further refined by his daughter, Anna Freud, and other prominent figures in psychology.1
It’s one of those classic human traits that is so much easier to see in others rather than ourselves. The awareness of projection is also one of those small AND powerful steps that we lovers of consciousness are willing to take so we can be happier in our own lives and cleaner in our relationships. Heaven knows one of the reasons I had stayed long past the expiration date of my previous relationship was my pollyanna-like ability to project my desired traits onto someone that were not actually real. We call this wishful thinking. Bottom line, we can project all kinds of things — negative and positive — and it seems nearly impossible to stop the practice altogether. This recent experience was so stark that it gave me a functional reason to understand more about projection and how to use it for my own insights.I just love when the unconscious becomes conscious.Back to this random person on my periphery. Being in my current state of eight months of mostly solitude and being a person who appreciates other people and enjoys being in relationship, well, I am open to some new possibilities.At first, I noticed how I imagined so many positive traits about this man:“He looks nice.”“He looks kind.”“He looks intellectual.”“He is an artist and works in art - I love that.”And off went my monkey mind to fill in all kinds of other POSITIVE traits. Because if she was going to manufacture something (or someone) out of near nothingness, it was going be damn good. Because I deserve that!I was aware of her and maintained a consistent inner dialog of “we know almost nothing about him. Those things would be nice, and, we know almost nothing about him.” Cue my broken record practice.Then, with a tiny bit more information, something tripped, and inner monkey mind flipped. (‘All or Nothing’ is a specialty of the monkey mind!) Based on one more random observation, here’s what happened next:“He’s probably a womanizer; attractive men are prone to that.”“He must have relationship issues.”“He’s cold and distant.”“What’s the point? Why bother?”So far, these are familiar scripts for many of us and, in the before times, I’d leave it at that. Learn and move on; nothing more to do here. Try not to be too hard on yourself, Rox, for even listening to this little person inside.
Then, AHA!
I realized that these projections can actually be a roadmap for what I want and don’t want in a relationship, should one develop in the future. All of those positive traits I projected? They are exactly what I want in a relationship: kindness, attractive, intellectual, creative in some ways. And all those negative traits? Definitely things I do not want.Instead of criticizing myself for falling into the dark art of psychological projections, I was grateful for what they showed me about my own desires.I’m also grateful to be grounded enough in my own maturity to not act on those projections, desired ones OR unwanted ones. But instead I can see them as aspects of Rox’s Relationship Hologram. They were literal projections, a view of reality in the sense of wants and don’t wants, not to be confused with having anything whatsoever to do with Mr. Mystery Man himself. He showed up merely as a screen to project things against.Does this help? Can you, too, get off your case for doing the normal things that humans do, and then, go further than most do and extract some wisdom? To go deeper in your self-knowledge and use that to enjoy life more?I sure hope so. Let’s feel better, together.