Hey, everybody, welcome to the virtual couch. I'm your host,
Tony Overbay. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist.
And today we are diving into something that you can't unsee once you see it.
And you're going to notice it in your relationships.
You're going to just notice it interacting with somebody at work, at the store.
And I think it's going to change the way you see yourself.
We're going to talk about projection. And I think it's one of those concepts
that people will just say, oh, I think they're projecting.
But if you really stop and say, hey, tell me what you think that means.
I think it's one of those concepts where we kind of have an idea.
But today, you will completely understand the concept of projection.
Before I get started, I would love for you to follow me on everything.
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It's a very fun platform to be able to just share a lot of thoughts,
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just a lot of things that aren't quite enough to put out in a podcast and that
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like that. So check out Substack by now.
Story time. So let me start with two stories from ripped right from my practice
in the last few weeks. And I have, of course, changed details to protect confidentiality.
But these moments were just so perfectly illustrative of this concept of projection
that I could not wait to share them with you.
And I almost feel like a comedian who's been trying out his bits at various
clubs, because these stories made it into a lot of sessions.
And this concept of projection, I know it's been my special interest over the
last few weeks, but let me set the stage.
So picture this, I'm sitting with a couple and I've been working with them for
a very long time and we're almost done with the session.
And I really, I love it when somebody can say, hey, I know this isn't something
that we're necessarily working on in therapy, but can I just ask your professional
opinion? And I say, of course.
And they want to ask me a question about their teenage son. I've had a teenage
son. I've worked with teenagers a lot in the past.
Now, not so much. But she brings up a situation where their son has walked past
a bag of garbage sitting outside his bedroom door for several days.
I've just walked right by it multiple times for days. And she looks very genuinely
confused. And she says, I'm just, I'm curious, can you explain why you think somebody would do that?
And I realized in that moment, if you asked me the same question,
I would have immediately said something like, you know, he probably forgot that
it was there. I have done that with a lot of things.
And it's not that I'm being malicious or I want to cause anyone harm or I'm
not trying to be passive aggressive. I just don't think about it a lot of times.
And I think if I go a little deeper in that, I have ADHD, not as an excuse, just it just is a thing.
And so I know that that is something where I can just be so hyper focused on
something else or impulsive, or I might even be thinking about picking up the garbage.
And then on my way to do that, something else comes up that seems more shiny.
So again, not out of malice, not to make a point, but because I genuinely didn't
see it or it slipped my mind.
And as I'm sitting there, the husband, who also is a card carry member of the
ADHD club and has some nice guy tendencies going on, he's nodding with me.
He's like, oh yeah, no, that's, I would feel the same way.
But then I caught myself and I then did say out loud, but hang on,
I'm actually projecting my own experience onto this situation.
So I'm assuming that your son forgot because I would forget.
But that's my frame of reference. And that doesn't necessarily mean that that's
his reality. That is projection.
And you could see something kind of shift in the room when I said that.
The wife, she literally looked uncomfortable.
And so I said, hey, what's coming up for you? What just happened there?
And she said, I guess I really didn't understand projection, honestly.
Because she said, I could see a situation where I would do something like that.
And honestly, I would be doing it to send a message that I was upset. That was so powerful.
Because there it is, the same behavior, walking past a bag of garbage.
And we essentially have three completely different interpretations.
Based on three completely different internal worlds. I'm thinking he forgot.
The husband is kind of going along with that.
Yeah, maybe he forgot, but he had some other thoughts that he wanted to interject
there as well. And the wife is thinking he's sending a hostile message.
Flash forward to the very next day. I'm in a session and there's a guy that I really enjoy.
He came to me to work on his emotional immaturity and he's really been working
hard on it, but it's not perfect. He's human.
And he's telling me about stopping at a store on his way home from work.
He texted his wife and said, hey, I'm going to stop at the store and I'll be
there in just a little bit.
I'm giving him some praise. Like, well done.
That sounds great. Something you maybe haven't done in the past.
So that's, I know why he was starting to tell me.
Then he got caught on his phone in the parking lot and he was checking social
media, maybe played a game, watched a video and he lost track of time.
So when he finally got home, I think it had been maybe an hour past when he
said he would and his wife was upset. And she said something to the effect of,
how could you do something that you obviously knew was going to hurt me.
Having this concept of projection fresh in my mind, I said, did you have any
intention of hurting your wife when you got distracted on your phone?
And he looked at me like I was nuts. Of course I didn't. I just lost track of time.
But his wife's interpretation was that he knew this would hurt her and he did it anyway.
I just asked him, do you think that she would say something similar to what this first wife said?
And I told that story that she might do something like that deliberately to
show you how hurt she was.
And he said, oh, she literally told me that.
And I said, man, projection.
So these two situations happening back to back, it really crystallized something for me.
And I think it will come into play in how you view yourself in your relationship,
I think helps understand a lot around conflict.
And honestly, I think about being human.
So what is projection? Projection is when we unconsciously take our own thoughts,
our own feelings, our own motivations, our own behavior patterns,
and then we project them, we attribute them, we diffuse them,
we hand them, we project them over onto someone else.
So we essentially assume that other people operate from the same internal framework that we do.
And so what we're doing is we're projecting our inner world onto this person,
like a movie projector casting an image onto a screen, or they become the mirror.
And we all do this, every single one of us. It's not like it's a character flaw.
It's not like something that, oh my gosh, wait, I've caught projection.
It's part of being a human being. Because we only understand the world through our own experiences.
You are literally the only version of you that's ever existed,
that's walked the face of the earth.
You've got the whole combination of your nature and your nurture and your birth
order, your DNA, abandonment, rejection, hopes, fears, dreams,
your wounds, your friend groups, how your parents modeled behavior,
experiences of loss, financial circumstances, pets, all of it.
So you look at the world through that very specific lens.
And the challenge is we don't realize that we are even wearing these lenses.
We think we're seeing things very objectively, that this is reality.
We all have an idea of what
we would do in these situations when in reality
we're actually seeing our interpretation of reality
so i enjoy origin stories and i
think it's fun to trace back and understand where this comes from
well it comes from being human beings but the term
projection was actually introduced by sigmund freud that guy back in the 1890s
and while we moved past a lot of freud's ideas in modern psychology sure had
a lot to do with his mom he really nailed this one because he initially described
it as a defense mechanism where people attribute their own unacceptable thoughts
or feelings or motives to,
on to another person. And Freud saw this happen with his patients all the time.
If somebody was angry, but they couldn't acknowledge their anger,
they would instead perceive that everyone around them is angry.
If somebody was struggling with their own impulses, then they would see those
impulses in others, and then they would judge them harshly for it.
And Freud's daughter, Anna, followed in his footsteps.
And so she took this and she expanded on it. And then she included projection
as one of the major defense mechanisms in her work in what was called ego psychology.
So what she recognized was that we develop these defenses, not because we're
broken, but because we're trying to protect ourselves from uncomfortable truths
about our own inner world.
Because we need to see it as rainbows and unicorns and not like we might have
this part of us that we just really don't want to look at.
Freud was focused on projection as this pathological defense mechanism.
But now modern psychology recognizes that projection happens on a spectrum, as so many things do.
There's an extreme version where somebody completely denies all of their own
feelings and they attribute them entirely onto others.
And I'll give you some examples of this as we go along in the episode today.
But there's also this everyday kind of garden variety projection that we are all doing.
So Carl Jung took this concept of projection even further, and Jung liked to
talk about how we project our shadow, the parts of ourselves that we haven't
integrated or the parts that we haven't acknowledged onto other people.
So the things that trigger us the most intensely in others, often those are
the reflections of something that we haven't dealt with within ourselves.
So what Jung meant by integrating the shadow, integration doesn't mean to get
rid of those parts of ourselves, these parts that we have buried deep inside.
It means first acknowledging them, accepting them as part of who we are,
and then learning how to bring them into our conscious awareness.
It'll get a little woo-woo here, but I promise it'll deliver.
Acknowledging them, bringing them into our consciousness instead of suppressing
them and keeping them hidden in the darkness and ignoring them and pretending
like they aren't even there.
For example, if you have always seen yourself as a really nice person who never
gets angry, I resonate with this one.
Your shadow might contain all that unexpressed anger and resentment.
So integration would mean acknowledging, you know what, actually,
I do get those emotions. I do get angry.
I do sometimes have aggressive impulses. And that's part of being human.
So, once you integrate that, it doesn't mean now I'm going to go around and
be angry and impulsive, but it means you stop projecting it onto others.
You acknowledge it. It's a part of you and you have no bad parts.
You stop seeing everybody else as angry or aggressive while denying it in yourself.
Because all of a sudden I can notice, oh, I am a little bit angry about this. I am pretty frustrated.
Oh, I'm still alive. That didn't ruin my whole self. or another example,
if you've always prided yourself in being responsible and very disciplined,
your shadow might contain these desires for spontaneity and pleasure and even some recklessness.
And I see this one often where somebody just feels like they are just too responsible, too buttoned up.
They would let everybody else down. They worry about what other people would
think, but they have the side of them that they don't ever acknowledge.
And it can come out in a big kind of way if it continues to be suppressed.
So integration means acknowledging those desires exist, even if you don't act on them.
So without integrating these parts, you might find yourself judging people who
are spontaneous, are pleasure-seeking, but then secretly, and you may not even
be willing to admit this, kind of envy them, or you're at least viewing it with fascination.
What we cannot integrate, what we can't acknowledge, what we can't accept, we project.
What we can't acknowledge in ourselves, we see and judge harshly in other people.
And then there's been more recent research in social psychology that's shown
that projection also serves a cognitive function.
If you remember, our brains are these prediction machines. They are constantly
trying to figure out what is going to happen next.
That certainty, we desire it. We crave it so much because it really would make things pretty easy.
Also, it would knock out a little bit of the spontaneity and the zest or the spice of life.
But we want to know. We want to know what's happening next. And part of that
is what are people thinking?
What are they going to do? And to make those predictions, we use the most readily
available data we have, our thoughts, our feelings, our motivations.
It's not malicious. It's pretty efficient, actually.
But it's also really inaccurate, especially when we're dealing with somebody
who has a completely different internal world than we do, like everyone else on the planet.
We're going to zig now, and I'm excited about this next part.
I want to first connect to a phrase I'm hoping you have heard before.
I often say it, so then I had to go do a little digging only to find out it
is not actually a phrase. the phrase as I think of it is methinks thou dost protest too much,
Here's a fun fact. People get this quote wrong. It turns out it's a line from
Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the line is actually, the lady doth protest too much, me thinks.
And I'm not a big Hamlet person, but it's spoken by Queen Gertrude,
and it's when she's watching a play within the play, and one of the characters
is making these overly elaborative promises about her loyalty.
But apparently what Shakespeare actually meant by protest is not quite what
we mean today. In Elizabethan English, protest meant to declare or affirm strongly
not to object or complain.
So Gertrude is actually saying this lady is making promises that are so big,
so excessive, so over the top, they kind of feel sus, as the kids say. Suspicious.
She's trying too hard to convince us. Now, kind of interesting because over
the centuries now this phrase has come to mean more what we understand in modern
psychology, that when someone is excessively vocal about opposing something,
it often reveals their own internal struggle with that very thing.
This is projection cranked up to an 11. This is Young's shadow being projected
outward with such intensity, such ferocity that it actually starts to become
a crusade for the person.
This is what happens when we can't integrate a part of ourselves and we have
to wage war against it and others. We are so scared of it. We're so repulsed by it.
And unfortunately, I've seen this pattern play out in some of the most heartbreaking ways.
Let me take you back to my early days as a therapist. I think it really connects
with this idea of the shadow and projection.
And honestly, I think it is one of those experiences that fundamentally shaped how I practice today.
So when I first became a therapist, which was over 20 years ago,
I worked as a trainee and then as an intern for a number of years for the LDS
Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in their LDS Family Services department.
It was a part-time gig. I also had a computer hardware company where I imported
hard disk drive duplicators with custom firmware that was used in a lot of computer
forensics and medical imaging applications.
That was paying the bills, but honest to goodness, I loved being a therapist.
I mean, I genuinely loved it in a way I've never experienced with work before
and continue to look at that as the greatest career change that I could have ever experienced.
So in that role with LDS Family Services, I found myself working with primarily three types of clients.
The first two I talk about often, guys struggling with turning to coronography
as an unhealthy coping mechanism, reach out to me, path back, recovery.
But the other one was people who are navigating faith crisis,
faith deconstruction, faith journeys, and that is still one of the populations
I love working with the most.
But then the third group I saw regularly, and this is the one that's really
relevant with this exact point about the shadow and projection,
were people that were coming into counseling because they were struggling with
what was called then, and I don't know if they still use this term now,
SSA, same-sex attraction.
And I can honestly say that either I missed the memo or some training.
I had an incredible clinical supervisor at the time, or actually it just didn't
feel right as a human being to have somebody come in and there was a part of
me that was supposed to change them.
Even if they were coming in saying, you must change me.
And despite this being 20 years ago, the message to the therapist,
or at least to this therapist, me, was meet the client where they're at and support them.
Don't try to change them. Don't do any conversion therapy or anything like that.
Just be with them in their experience. Where do they want to go?
You're right there beside them because who am I to know what it feels like to be that person?
And that's one of those profound things that I've carried through to this day
that is so helpful as a therapist.
So I primarily saw guys who were hesitant to admit that they were gay.
They had tried to pray the gay way. They went on missions for the church,
hoping it would go away if they did that.
They were hoping it would get lost in the jungles of Africa somewhere.
They were overachievers.
There were often people that struggled with obsessive compulsive personality
disorder, or religious scrupulosity, religious OCD, hoping that they could somehow perfect it away.
Many of them married women in hopes that that would be the thing that finally
got rid of their same-sex attraction.
But at least for the dozens and dozens and dozens of guys that I worked with,
none of that worked because they were gay and that was okay.
They've been gay their entire lives.
And a recurring theme in those sessions was hearing about hitting puberty and
their friends became interested in cheerleaders at the football game.
And my clients would routinely think, holy cow, I think I'm more interested
in the football player and then thinking that something's wrong.
And then they started to pretend to be someone that they weren't.
This is the shadow in its most painful form. It's a core part of who you are
that you've been taught is unacceptable, shameful, wrong.
And when we can't integrate that part of ourselves, when we can't bring it into
the light and say, this is part of who I am, we suffer deeply.
The LGBTQ plus issue was truly one that started me on my own faith deconstruction
as I started to help others navigate their own faith deconstructions,
especially those that were struggling with this same-sex attraction.
Because the fact that they were struggling with it and not learning to accept it or embrace it.
Because I spent hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of hours talking one-on-one
with these guys who were continually feeling like they were doing their own
lives wrong and that to do it right,
according to people who did not know what it felt like to be them,
they needed to not think the way that they thought and not feel the way that they felt.
And I've thought often when I look back now and apply this lens of projection
onto those clients and onto their experiences, is I see it pretty clearly that
they would often hear others say, and these are well-meaning people,
bless their hearts, assuming good intentions, but they would say things about
how, you know, we all have our challenges.
For some, it's food. For some, it might be alcohol.
For some, it might be not digging into my scriptures enough.
I even heard on more than one occasion, because I love chocolate,
but someone who was gay being told by somebody who genuinely meant well, you know.
I really struggle not to eat chocolate, but I know that that isn't good for me.
So I know exactly how you feel being in a mixed orientation marriage,
being married to someone that you don't have any connection or desire with,
which even on a side note, I remember one of the first time somebody talked
about being a chocoholic and that must be the same as an alcoholic.
I don't think it is, but I can say without exception that I never had a client
in any of these situations where somebody is saying, I know exactly how you
feel, say, you know, I really felt seen and understood.
Maybe trying to not eat popcorn is the same as trying to deny my sexuality.
But that well-meaning person was projecting onto my client because they weren't
struggling with their sexuality.
They were assuming that, well,
if I was, I would be able to handle it just like I do with chocolate.
Only they weren't being told that eating chocolate was a one-way ticket to eternal
hellfire and damnation.
They weren't being told that their craving for chocolate meant that there was
something fundamentally broken about them.
And they weren't being told that if they had just enough faith,
they wouldn't want chocolate anymore.
They weren't being told to marry someone who hated chocolate in hopes that it
would cure their own chocolate cravings.
The projection was, I struggle with something I'm supposed to resist.
Therefore, I understand your struggle with something you are supposed to resist.
But the challenge is, were they even supposed to resist it? Or were they supposed
to integrate it and accept it.
The experiences weren't even remotely equivalent. The stakes weren't the same.
The shame wasn't the same. The cost of giving in wasn't even in the same ballpark.
So what I witnessed over and over were people projecting their own manageable
struggles onto somebody else's entire identity.
And in doing so, they were minimizing, dismissing, and fundamentally misunderstanding
what that person was actually experiencing.
And here's where it gets even more complex and honestly more heartbreaking.
Here's where Jung's concept of the shadow and Shakespeare's observation about
protesting too much come together in maybe it's a Shakespearean tragic kind of way.
We see this pattern play out dramatically in public life, particularly around the LGBTQ plus issues.
There is a phenomenon where individuals who are most vocally and aggressively
opposed to things like LGBTQ plus rights and identities are later discovered
to be struggling with their own sexual orientation or their gender identity.
And at that time, I remembered these two things that were big in the headlines.
And it was when I was really working with a lot of clients that were struggling
with the same-sex attraction.
2006-2007. First, Ted Haggard. In 2006, Ted Haggard was the president of the
National Association of Evangelicals, and that was a position of significant
influence representing millions of conservative Christians.
He was a very powerful voice against same-sex marriage, against LGBTQ plus rights,
particularly preaching about what he called the sin of homosexuality.
Then a male escort came forward, revealing that Haggard had been paying him
for sex and buying methamphetamine for him for years.
And Haggard initially denied it. And then he eventually admitted to sexual immorality
and even acknowledged his struggles with his sexuality.
Or anytime I travel or fly, and I asked somebody about this this morning,
they are, I think in their late twenties and they don't remember this at all.
But when I fly, and if I have to go into a bathroom stall to take care of things,
I pay particular attention to where my feet are.
You might know where this one's going if you remember this at the time.
Larry Craig, a U.S. senator from Idaho who had a long voting record that was
opposing LGBTQ plus rights.
He voted against adding sexual orientation to hate crime protection.
He opposed same-sex marriage, and
he consistently positioned himself as a defender of traditional values.
Now, in 2007, he was arrested in a Minneapolis airport bathroom in a sting operation
targeting men seeking sexual encounters with other men.
Apparently, they would slide a foot over and if they touched feet, I guess that was code.
He pled guilty to disorderly conduct, but he later tried to withdraw the plea
and he famously declared, I'm not gay. I've never been gay.
And I'm just bringing those two things to light because I remember them well at the time.
Especially dealing with people that were struggling with their gender.
So I want to be really clear here.
These aren't just stories about hypocrisy, although there is definitely that element,
but from a psychological perspective, and especially from my perspective of
having spent hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of hours with men struggling
with the exact same internal conflict, what we're witnessing is projection at
its most desperate and tragic.
This is what happens when somebody's shadow becomes so threatening that they
can't even imagine integrating it. So they project it outward and then they declare war on it.
If I think about the clients that I work with, so many of them have spent years,
sometimes decades, trying to pray away, perfect away, marry away something that
was core to who they were.
The internal conflict was excruciating. The shame was crushing.
The feeling of being fundamentally broken, fundamentally wrong.
Fundamentally unacceptable was unbearable, even to the point where some would take their own lives.
And that's never okay.
It's not okay for somebody to project onto someone else that you need to be a different way.
There's even a remote chance it can lead to something like that.
When something is that unbearable to acknowledge in ourselves,
it's so tragic that that person feels this need to project it outward and attack
it and attack anybody who embodies it.
So these individuals like Haggard and Craig and countless others in similar
situations were so unable to
integrate this part of their shadow that they waged these external wars.
They protested too much because they were trying to convince themselves as much
as anybody else, even to the point where they were okay,
and maybe they weren't okay with, but they were willing to see something happen
that was ultimately detrimental to someone's life who embodied this thing that
they could not acknowledge in themselves,
that they found it psychologically safer to crusade against those people than
to acknowledge, I might be one of those people.
It is so much easier to make it about other people's sin than to sit with your
own internal experience.
It's easier to judge and condemn from a distance than to look in the mirror
and actually offer yourself compassion.
When we cannot integrate a part of ourselves, when we find it too threatening
or too shameful or too contradictory to our identity, we project it outward and we attack it there.
The louder the protest, the more desperate the crusade, the more likely it is
that we're fighting something within ourselves that we can't yet face.
And what is so tragic about that, all that energy,
all those emotional calories spent on external warfare, all those years spent
crusading against something could have been spent on the actually much more difficult,
but much more courageous work of acceptance and integration of bringing the
shadow into the light of acknowledging this is part of who I am and it's okay.
And it turns out it really is.
I think about my clients from 20 years ago, the ones who eventually came to
a place of self-acceptance, who stopped trying to change something unchangeable
about themselves, who integrated their shadow rather than projecting it onto everybody around them.
Those were the ones who found peace, not easy peace, not uncomplicated peace,
but genuine, internal, real, everything's going to be okay. Peace.
The ones who stayed stuck in this cycle of shame and projection, they suffered.
And unfortunately, they often made others suffer too.
Let me share a story from my practice that I think shows how projection works
in more everyday situations. And this is something that I've seen this version of this.
Several times. I was working with a couple and they had gotten into a significant
fight right before the wife had to leave for a work conference that was in a faraway state.
She was hurting from the argument and she felt like her husband had primarily
been at fault. He'd been dismissive. He shut down the conversation.
He really refused to engage.
But true to her pattern, she found herself wanting to reach out,
wanting to fix it, wanting to be the one that says, hey, I'm sorry,
wanting to make sure he was okay.
But this time she was trying to be more differentiated, more grounded,
trying something different.
And she'd been working in therapy on not always being the one to do the repair,
to go rescue, especially when she didn't feel like she was the one that had
caused the lion share of the damage.
So she told herself, if he wasn't willing to have this uncomfortable conversation
before I left, then I'm not going to be the one to reach out.
I'm going to hold this boundary.
So they don't talk while she's gone pretty much the whole trip.
And she was miserable. Conferences were already pretty exhausting.
She was walking around with this weight on her shoulders, checking her phone
to see, has he reached out? And he didn't.
So when she got home, she was emotionally drained. She was still hurt,
but also hoping that maybe they could finally talk.
And one of the first things that he asked her is he said, hey,
did you hook up with any guys on the trip?
She was blown away. She said that thought had not even entered her peripheral
consciousness. She felt very misunderstood, unseen.
She had spent the entire trip thinking about him, about their marriage,
about whether they were going to be okay, would they make it through this.
She felt so bad about not rescuing. The idea of being with somebody else was never a thought.
And she said, especially with how emotionally raw I was, she said it was so
far from her reality that the question felt like it came from a completely different planet.
But if we kind of look at what's fascinating from a projection standpoint,
when she asked him why he would even ask that, he got really defensive and said,
well, I mean, you weren't talking to me. You were gone for three days.
How was I supposed to know what you were doing?
So I might just bring gentle awareness to another possibility.
And this is what we then explored in therapy. Was he telling on himself?
Because you see, projection doesn't always mean we've even done the thing that
we're accusing somebody else of. Sometimes it just means we've thought about doing it.
So when he was angry about the marriage, when he was sitting at home feeling
abandoned and hurt, did his mind go to, you know what?
Screw it. I'm just going to go hook up with some random person.
Or did he find himself having fantasies or intrusive thoughts about escaping
the pain of the relationship through some kind of sexual distraction?
And then because those thoughts felt threatening or shameful because they contradicted
his image of himself as this devoted husband, as the person that is always there
for her, maybe except for when he's not, he projected him onto her.
Because again, it's psychologically easier to accuse your partner of thinking
about infidelity than to acknowledge that maybe you were thinking about it.
This is a defense mechanism.
His brain is essentially saying, these thoughts are too uncomfortable for me
to own, so I'm going to attribute them to her instead.
Then I can actually be righteously angry rather than sitting with my own shame or my own confusion.
And the painful part is his projection actually created a new wound because
she comes home from that trip already hurt from the original argument.
She's already exhausted from holding this boundary that felt terrible to hold.
And now she's being accused of something that didn't even cross her mind.
So the projection kind of added insult to injury.
When we worked through this in therapy, when he was able to acknowledge that
maybe the question came from his own insecurities, immaturity,
his thoughts rather than anything that she'd actually done.
It was a pretty profound moment of recognition. It was uncomfortable,
but it was honest and really vulnerable.
She could see that his accusation wasn't really about her at all.
Here's another example that I think really illustrates how projection can show
up before we're even consciously aware of it.
And I think this one was so interesting because I look back on this.
And I said the words projection. I made those mouth sounds, but I can look back
on this now and understand that, man, it really was, there was so much projection happening.
I worked with this couple and the husband had grown up with an alcoholic father
and he was really abusive.
He was a destructive alcoholic. So this guy's childhood was marked by violence,
unpredictability, financial chaos.
All of it was connected to his dad's drinking.
So he grew up with this absolute conviction that alcohol was, it was poison.
It was something that he will never do. People who drank were weak,
that he would never touch it.
And for decades, he didn't. And he was very proud of himself for it.
It was part of his identity.
But he was grounded. He didn't seem to overtly judge or mock others.
But internally, he said, that is not me. I'm not like my father. I don't drink.
So his wife, she just came for a check-in. It took a couple of sessions to get
there, but then she said she noticed something strange happening over the past year or so.
Her husband had started talking about alcohol a lot, but not in a,
I'm struggling with this kind of way, but it was in this, almost,
she said, a judgmental kind of obsessive way.
It started small. They watched a TV show and he'd say something like,
can you believe how much people drink?
Like, why do people feel the need to have alcohol, to have fun?
Or they'd be at a restaurant and he would comment on how expensive the wine
list was, where he'd never really looked at that before with this tone of just
this disbelief or this disdain.
Then it escalated. He started seeking out opportunities to comment on other people's drinking.
They'd be out on a date, and he would notice somebody across the room who appeared
to be a little bit tipsy. And then he would fixate on them, and he would make
comments through the entire meal.
Look at that guy. I mean, he can barely stand up. Can you believe?
What would that be like to be his wife, to have to drag him home?
How does somebody even let themselves get like that? It's just so pathetic.
His family, they must be so embarrassed.
And his wife described it as this uncomfortable intensity.
Like he couldn't look away. He couldn't stop talking about it.
And this was coming from a guy who, until recently, barely mentioned alcohol at all.
It just wasn't on his radar because he had dealt with it by avoiding it.
So she initially thought maybe he was triggered by something.
Maybe he had heard from his dad because they had been estranged.
Maybe something had reminded him about his childhood, but something about it felt off to her.
It felt less like a trauma response and more like she just couldn't put a name on it.
And then she found a stash. She was looking for something in the garage.
She found a box hidden behind some camping equipment and inside were a lot of
empty bottles and a half full bottle of whiskey.
When she confronted him, he broke down. He had been drinking for almost a year.
He'd been sneaking drinks in the garage, stopping at bars on the way home,
having a couple of beers before going home from work, buying airplane bottles
of liquor and drinking them in his car and parking lots.
And what is so textbook about this form of projection, his obsessive commentary
about other people's drinking was pathologically his way of managing his own
relationship with alcohol before he was ready to consciously acknowledge it.
Because if you think about it, he couldn't say to himself, hey,
I started drinking. I don't even know how to feel about that.
I have no idea what happened because that would have shattered his entire identity
because he'd built his self-image,
his sense of self on not being like his dad, on being above it,
on having conquered this demon by just simply refusing to engage with it.
But something had shifted and maybe it was stress.
Maybe it was unresolved trauma that was finally catching up with him.
Maybe it was just curiosity, but he'd started drinking and his psyche couldn't
integrate it. It was just too threatening.
So instead, his unconscious mind found another way to process it.
He projected these internal struggles onto everybody around him.
So when he fixated on the drunk guy at the restaurant, he wasn't really seeing that guy.
He was seeing himself or his fear of what he might become.
So when he ranted about how pathetic people who drink are, he was trying to
convince himself that he, but he wasn't one of them, even though he was actively drinking in secret.
The excessive judgment, the protesting too much, there's your defense mechanism.
It was his psyche's way of saying, see how much I hate drinking?
See how much I judge people? a drink that proves I'm not like them, right?
But of course, it didn't prove it at all because it actually revealed the opposite.
The intensity of his focus, the obsessive quality of it, the way he couldn't
seem to let it go, those were signs that the alcohol had become psychologically
central for him, even though he wasn't consciously acknowledging his own use.
This is projection functioning as a kind of psychological pressure release valve.
He couldn't contain the tension of, I'm drinking, but I built my entire identity on not.
So that tension leaked out sideways. It came out as judgment on others.
It came out as hypervigilance about other people's behavior and this compulsive
need to distance himself from those people, even as he was becoming one of those people.
And what was so heartbreaking about it is that if he had been able to acknowledge
his drinking earlier, if he had been able to say or have the courage to say,
hey, this is crazy, I'm struggling with this thing that I swore I would never
do, he could have gotten help.
He could have talked to his wife. He could have gone to therapy,
dealt with whatever was driving him to drink in the first place,
but the projection kept him stuck and it kept him focused outward instead of looking inward.
It created this painful paradox, this irony where the very thing he was most
vocal about opposing was the thing he was secretly doing.
When we eventually worked through this in therapy, he had to address,
there were a lot of layers.
His relationship with alcohol, his unresolved trauma from his childhood,
his shame about becoming his dad,
his use of projection as a defense mechanism, and it was a lot of work.
But one of the breakthroughs came when he could finally see the pattern,
that when he could recognize that his obsessive judgment of other drinkers was
a mirror showing him something he wasn't ready to see about himself.
The lady, or in this case, the gentleman, doth protest too much.
And his protest was telling us exactly what he was trying so hard to deny.
So these examples from public figures crusading against LGBTQ plus rights while
secretly struggling with their own sexuality to the wife being accused of infidelity
that she never considered to
the husband fixating on other people drinking while he's hiding his own.
They all show us the same psychological mechanism at work.
Projection is how we manage internal conflicts that we're not ready to face.
It's how we externalize things that we can't internalize, that it's too painful.
And the more intense the projection, the louder the protest,
the more it often reveals about what's happening beneath the surface.
So when you find yourself having an unusually strong reaction to something,
when you can't seem to let something go, when you are protesting loudly and
frequently about somebody else's behavior, it's worth asking,
what am I not ready to look at directly?
Because that awareness, that willingness to turn the mirror around,
that's where the growth starts to happen.
That's where we stop being ruled by our projections and we can start being honest,
at least to ourselves, about our own struggles.
And that honesty, that is the beginning of freedom. Hey, everybody.
I am back from my halftime break. I don't know why podcasts can't have a halftime.
If you are watching this on YouTube, then I wanted to just bring gentle awareness
that now I am donning a virtual couch zip-up hoodie.
And I only bring that up because I had shared an episode with a friend a long time ago.
And he said, you know, it was a little distracting that you basically had a
wardrobe change two or three times throughout the episode.
And that was very true because it was an episode that I had done part of it
from my office in Arizona, part on day one of being in California,
finished it up on day two of California and had a different,
a different shirt each day.
But coming back from the halftime break, another plug for mindfulness,
because as I started recording this, I just, thank goodness,
happened to look over and see on my, my mixing board.
There's one button that needs to be pressed.
And when it is not pressed, I record no sound and I have.
Probably done two or three episodes, full episodes. One of them was well over an hour.
And then when I went to, to put it in my editing software, it had no sound.
And that is such a mindfulness practice to notice.
I'm noticing that I would have liked the sound to have been on and also noticing
that I don't want to rerecord the episode. Also using some magical thinking.
Does the universe or God himself not want this episode to air,
which I don't think I'm that special.
So I have each and every time gone back and like I just did,
I think I did about five minutes, noticed that the light is on.
Now I've looked over two or three times and I don't, I know I don't have OCD,
but boy, that checking thing can be a real thing.
But here we are, we are back to now what I am viewing as part two of the projection
episode, but for you, probably no break in the action.
But let me give you some rapid fire examples of what projection looks like in
everyday relationships, because I really, I think getting some reps in will
help just solidify what projection is.
So see if any of these sound familiar. So example one, your partner forgets
to text you during the day and you immediately think, oh, they're pulling away from me.
They don't care anymore, but here's the projection.
You never forget to text when you care about somebody. So you're projecting
that standard onto your partner.
So that means to you that if they aren't texting you, then that must mean that they don't care.
But the reality might be that they were in back-to-back meetings or quite frankly,
their brain just doesn't work the same way yours does around communication.
And this has been one that has been very real in my own relationship where I
will send a text out every day. Hey, thinking about you.
And I have done the thing where I've been needy and clingy and nice guy syndrome-y
and sending these covert contracts to my wife on occasion that,
uh, Hey, it would be nice to get a little, little text during the day.
That's very clingy, very needy energy. Would it be nice? Absolutely.
But I now understand that that is not her being not even passive aggressive,
but aggressively saying, oh, that's what you want.
Well, it's off the table then. But I know that I am.
Like checking in, saying, Hey, thinking about you. I hope you're having a good
day. What's everything like?
And that is, that is me. And one time when I was talking to my wife about this
concept, she said, Oh, I don't want to bother you.
And I'm saying, Oh, bother away. That would be great.
So we're both projecting onto the end of the relationship. What we think is, I guess the right way.
Example two, your partner suggests ordering takeout instead of cooking and you
feel criticize, like they're saying, you're not doing enough around the house, the projection.
You might suggest ordering out when you're frustrated that somebody isn't pulling
their weight. So you assume that that's what they're doing.
They might just be tired and craving Thai to go or Thai chili to go.
Not an advertiser, but that would be fine.
There's one near my house here in Arizona.
Reach out, please. Yellow chicken curry. Holy cow.
Example three, your partner is quiet on the drive home and you are convinced
that they're angry with you.
So you start reviewing all the game tape, everything you did that day,
trying to figure out what you did wrong.
Hey, is that okay? Did I do something wrong? The projection.
When you're quiet, it's often because you're upset and you don't want to say
anything and you want your partner to know that I'm upset.
But your partner might just be mentally exhausted, decompressing.
They might just not be thinking about a whole lot right now.
They might be thinking about something that is completely unrelated to you.
For example, number four, your partner doesn't laugh at your joke.
I know this one well, and you think they think I'm dumb. They don't like my
humor. They don't respect me.
The projection, maybe you judge people's intelligence by their sense of humor.
So you assume that they are not laughing. So therefore they think that you are
not very smart, but they could have been distracted.
Maybe they didn't hear the punchline. Maybe your humor styles are different,
or you have been in this relationship long enough.
Google repetitive acoustic stimuli.
You are somewhat just a form of a white noise machine when you speak.
Or example five, your partner spends money on something for themselves and man,
you are just hurt. This one has come up often in therapy.
It's like they're being selfish. They're not thinking about the family,
the projection, because when you spend money on yourself, you feel guilty,
like you are being selfish.
So you project that guilt onto them and interpret their purchase as darn near
a hostile act, but they might just be practicing some healthy self-care and
they don't care the same guilt narrative that you do.
So hopefully you see the pattern in each one of these examples,
we're taking our own internal rulebook and we're assuming everybody else is
playing by the same rules.
I know I have mentioned this in other podcasts, but I think you'll see why.
There's a famous commencement speech by David Foster Wallace called This Is Water.
And first introduced to me by my good friend, Rob.
And it's just so powerful. If you haven't listened to it, I highly recommend you hit pause.
I will put a link in the show notes. Go find it and listen to it.
But it starts with a simple story. Two young fish are swimming along and they
meet an older fish swimming the other way.
And he just nods at them in passing. Morning, boys. How's the water?
And the young fish swim on. And eventually one looks at the other and he says, what the heck is water?
Now, I love this story. And honestly, at first I really didn't understand it,
but it's because it perfectly captures what happens in therapy or life or what
we're talking about with projection.
So many of us are swimming through life completely unaware of the water,
which is, I think, those default settings, those automatic thoughts and those
reactions that we don't even question because they are so familiar to us.
So we are like those young fish and we're not even realizing that we're swimming
in our own interpretations rather than experiencing an objective reality,
a right, a truth, a right versus a wrong.
So Wallace goes on to say in that speech, the most obvious important realities
are often the ones that are the hardest to see and to talk about.
And I think this is precisely what I mean when I try to sell my clients on it.
It's okay. You don't know what you don't know.
It's not your fault that you don't notice the water. None of us do without help.
It goes back to how often people say, I should not have done this.
I should have known better.
Again, nobody likes to be should on, but even more important,
you didn't know. It just was. You were in the water. You weren't aware of the water.
That happened. Stop beating yourself up about the past.
That is a waste of emotional calories. Now, being aware of what happened in
the past, learning how to accept the things that happened in the past.
How can I learn from the things of the past? Absolutely wonderful.
And that is helping you move forward.
Ruminating, beating yourself up and saying, how could I not have known about the water?
It is not helpful. Here's the reason why. Because you didn't.
Now you do. So check that out. That's amazing. It's wonderful.
And I think here's what Wallace is getting at in his speech and why it ties
so perfectly into projection that we have these default settings,
these unconscious ways of interpreting the world around us. How could we not?
It is our experience, our default setting.
And Wallace says that is talking about default settings.
Our default setting is to be deeply self-centered, not in some narcissistic
malicious way, but in the sense
that we are the absolute center of our own experience, our own universe.
Everything we perceive comes through the filter of our own needs,
fears, desires, and interpretations.
Wallace gives an example of how Wallace talks about being stuck in traffic or
waiting in a long line at the grocery store after maybe a frustrating day at work.
Our default setting is to think, and maybe it's not think, but just be in this
space of, this is about me.
These people are in my way. Don't they understand what my day has been like?
This is all happening to me.
We automatically interpret the world through this lens of our own urgency,
our own frustration, our own narrative.
But here's what I would love to invite you to consider. What if the person driving
slowly in front of you isn't just trying to ruin your day?
What if they just got some pretty terrible news at the hospital?
They're driving carefully because they are in shock.
What if the woman who cut you off in the parking lot has a sick child at home
and is desperate to get back.
One of the person taking forever at the checkout counter is so lonely and I
have talked to people like this that that small exchange with the cashier is
the only human contact that they'll have today and they want to hang on to every single second of it.
The point is that these alternative stories are definitely true.
It's that we don't actually know.
The point isn't that these alternative stories are definitely true.
The point is that we don't actually know. We're making it up either way.
When somebody now speeds by me, cuts me off in traffic, my favorite thing to
say is, man, maybe that guy's having a baby.
And I hope you can see the humor there.
Because I don't know why that person had to go 100 and something miles on the
freeway and cut me off and bob and weave in and out of traffic.
Ever see the movie Speed? Keanu Reeves, Sondra Bullock back in the day?
Maybe if his car goes below 100, he blows up. I don't know.
Again, we're making it up either way. And our default setting is to make it
up in a way that centers our own experience in a way that centers around our
own experience and it often casts others as these obstacles or these antagonists in our story.
This is projection in its most fundamental form. We're projecting our own sense
of urgency, our own frustration, our own narrative onto everybody around us.
We just do that. We're assuming they operate with the same awareness that we
have or that we have of ourselves with the same awareness of us that we have
of ourselves. They're not.
They're actually the center of their own experience. They're swimming in their
own water, completely unaware of ours.
David Foster Wallace argues that the real value of education,
and I would add the real value of therapy, the real value of personal growth,
of interacting with other humans, isn't just learning facts.
It's learning how to think, how to self-confront, how to step out of your own
sense of self, how to learn how to be aware of your ego.
You can keep your hand over here on the side of your ego and say,
hey, down boy, but I want to really try to learn to connect with this person.
And yeah, you're going to get defensive ego and say, wait, are they criticizing
me? No, no, it's not all about you.
It's learning how to think. We're becoming conscious of the water that we're swimming in, man.
And I have wanted to throw a joke in here at some point. If we're both swimming
in the same water, something about the bathroom, but.
This is more about it's developing the awareness to step back and question our
own automatic interpretations. And this is hard work.
I love that Wallace is really honest about this. He says, learning to think
in this way, to consciously choose how we interpret our experiences rather than
just running on these default settings requires constant vigilance and effort.
It's not something you do once and then you're done. It is a daily practice of awareness.
So we've come to my favorite point of the podcast. What have we learned today?
Let's bring it all together so today we've explored projection and
it's this universal human tendency to attribute our own
thoughts and our own feelings and motivations and behavior patterns to
everybody else it shows up in everyday
situations it is all around us whether we're interpreting a bag of garbage as
a hostile message or a partner's dissatisfaction as deliberate cruelty and hopefully
you've heard today that there are these extreme examples where people crusade
very loudly against the very things they're secretly struggling with themselves themselves.
And how projection operates is both a defense mechanism and a little bit of a cognitive shortcut.
Or basically our brain's way of trying to make sense of a complex world using
the only data it has, our own internal experience.
The key is that we are all swimming in water that we don't even know is water.
We are all interpreting reality through our unique combination of nature,
nurture, birth order, DNA, wounds, experiences, abandonment, hopes, fears, dreams.
Whether or not we agree that a cat is
narcissistic and most of the
time we're actually completely unaware that we're doing it
we think that we we're the one we see objective reality
when we're actually seeing our own projections we're looking into a mirror here's
the cool part though once you start to see the water you can't unsee it once
you recognize projection in yourself you create space for something different
you begin to create space for curiosity instead of certainty instead of criticism,
instead of telling someone else what they must think or feel,
because that is a me thing.
I think they think this way. I think they feel this way kind of because that's
how I feel or that's how I think.
No, you're making space for curiosity. We're letting go of certainty.
We want it. We would absolutely love to be mind readers, but you create space
for actual connection instead of just reacting to your own interpretations.
Often the person that you're interacting with, often the person you're interacting
with doesn't even have to say anything because you're projecting all over them.
Let me give you three specific takeaways.
I was thinking about my good friend, Rachel Nielsen, host of the three and 30 podcast for moms.
I was on her podcast so long ago. She was on mine. I think this was in episode
20 or 30 and she has these three takeaways.
And when I would go on her podcast, she would say, all right,
do you have your three takeaways ready?
And I would think, oh crap, I don't, I got to try to make up some right now.
So I try to be intentional every now and again.
But takeaway one, your strongest reactions are usually your very best teachers.
If you have this intense emotional response to something that your partner does
or somebody that you're interacting with does, especially if they seem genuinely
confused by your reaction, that's potentially your projection.
It's your alarm going off.
That intensity is telling you something important about your own internal world.
Why am I reacting this way to what you just said? That is a me thing.
It might not even necessarily be about what's happening in the present moment.
And it's your emotions, your feelings saying, hey, here I am.
You usually ignore me. So I'm going to throw this at you right now.
So the next time you have a strong reaction to your partner's behavior,
give it a little pause before responding and ask yourself, what am I making this mean?
What story am I telling myself about what's happening?
Write it down if you need to. That helps get it out of your brain.
Your brain has this negativity bias and it will spin and spin and spin.
Just the act of naming your interpretation as an interpretation rather than
an objective truth starts to put a little space, creates this psychological
space. Number two, excessive judgment often reveals an internal struggle.
If you find yourself obsessively focused on someone else's behavior,
when you are protesting loudly about something, when you can't seem to let something
go, I'm just saying it's worth examining.
I'm not saying you're the alcoholic. I'm not saying that you're struggling with
your sexuality. The lady does protest too much.
What we judge most harshly in others often reflects something we haven't integrated in ourselves.
So for the next week, pay attention to what triggers your judgment.
When you catch yourself thinking or saying something harsh about another person's
choices or their behavior, get curious.
Instead of staying in judgment mode, ask yourself, why does this bother me so much?
I think about all the people that I work with that are navigating faith journeys,
faith crisis, faith deconstruction, and they can project so much of that person can't do this.
They can't just think this thing that they want or buck against the system.
The projection there is because that would mean that, wait, could I?
Because I haven't. I haven't tried to do that.
So if they're doing it, that's a me thing that I have a struggle with why they're
doing it. Let them, let them do that.
Because what if that means, oh, so actually these thoughts or feelings or emotions
or opinions that I have that I'm stuffing and that person's expressing,
man, I guess I'm kind of frustrated and angry because why couldn't I have the
courage to express my own opinions as well?
That's maybe why it bothers me so much. That might be what my reaction tells
me about my own values, my own fears, my own struggles.
And you don't have to answer the questions definitively. Just asking them and
not being as reactive and judgmental, it starts to shift something internally.
And the last one, separate your observation from your judgment.
That is such a superpower.
In my four pillars of a connected conversation, there's a pre-pillar that is
to separate observation from judgment. It's taken from the work of Marshall
Rosenberg and his book, Nonviolent Communications.
Before we can have a connection with someone, before we can have these connected
conversations, we need to distinguish between what we observe and what we interpret.
Hey, you got here at seven. We agreed on 630.
Observation. You don't respect my time and don't care about me.
Interpretation. Usually a projection.
So practice separating observation from judgment in your daily interactions.
Instead of saying you never help around the house, judgment,
try, hey, I noticed the dishes have been in the sink for a couple of days and
I'm starting to feel overwhelmed.
There's an observation plus your feeling.
Instead of you obviously don't care about the relationship, judgment,
try, we haven't had a meaningful conversation in over a week and I'm missing our connection.
An observation plus your need.
This shift will start to transform your communication. Just remember,
you are not broken. You're human.
Projection is not something wrong with you. It's not a character flaw that needs
to be fixed. It's part of being a human being.
You're not broken for seeing the world through your own lens.
Of course, you're going to see it through your own lens. That's the only way
that we can see the world.
But you can become aware of the lens. You can start to recognize when you're projecting.
You can learn to question your automatic interpretations.
And that awareness, that's emotional maturity, my friends. That is growth.
That's the difference between being controlled by your patterns and emotions
and being able to choose something different by accepting your emotions and
by accepting that these are the patterns that I've been engaging in.
Just please remember, this is the very first time you have been you going through
life as you in this very moment.
Nobody knows exactly what you're experiencing. And the same is true for your
partner, your kids, your friends, everybody around you.
They're also all going through life for the first time as themselves,
swimming in their own water, largely unaware of yours, even theirs.
It's when conflict happens and it will, instead of immediately assuming you
know what the other person meant, what they intended, why they did what they
did. Try getting curious.
Try asking instead of assuming. Try, hey, tell me more about what you're experiencing,
what you're going through, or what you just did there.
Help me understand what was happening for you instead of, here's what I think
you did, or I know exactly why you did that. Because here's the beautiful truth.
When you stop projecting your story onto other people and you start actually
getting to know their story, real connection, real intimacy is possible.
When you recognize that your partner is not deliberately trying to hurt you,
they're just swimming in different water than you are, compassion is possible.
And that compassion for yourself and for others, that's where transformation happens.
That's where relationships shift from being battlegrounds of criticism and judgment
to places of genuine understanding and curiosity.
You don't know what you don't know, but now you know about projection.
Now you know about the water you're swimming in.
Insert P joke there. And that knowledge gives you choices that you didn't have before.
So go out there, pay attention to your projections this week.
Notice when you're assuming instead of asking.
Notice when you're judging instead of being curious.
Notice when you're certain about someone else's intentions. And when you catch
yourself, because you will, do not beat yourself up about it. Just notice it.
Say to yourself, aha, projection, fascinating, interesting, and then choose something different.
This is the work and you're doing it. And I'm proud of you for being here,
for being willing to look at all of this stuff, for being willing to grow.
Thanks for joining me on my journey that I'm projecting all over you guys on the virtual couch.
So until next time, taking us out per usual, the wonderful, the talented Aurora Florence.
Her song. It's wonderful because I promise you life really can be quite wonderful.
Stay curious about the water you're swimming in.
Insert P joke there. Take care, everybody.