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Why You're Actually Fighting With Yourself (And Blaming Your Partner)—The Psychology of Projection · The Virtual Couch

0:23
Hey, everybody, welcome to the virtual couch. I'm your host,
0:25
Tony Overbay. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist.
0:28
And today we are diving into something that you can't unsee once you see it.
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And you're going to notice it in your relationships.
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You're going to just notice it interacting with somebody at work, at the store.
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And I think it's going to change the way you see yourself.
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We're going to talk about projection. And I think it's one of those concepts
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that people will just say, oh, I think they're projecting.
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But if you really stop and say, hey, tell me what you think that means.
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I think it's one of those concepts where we kind of have an idea.
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But today, you will completely understand the concept of projection.
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Before I get started, I would love for you to follow me on everything.
1:03
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1:07
I will tell you, Substack is where the fun is at. So please,
1:11
if you're not familiar with Substack, follow the link in my show notes or Google
1:17
Tony Overbay or Virtual Couch and Substack. I'm putting out a lot of content.
1:20
It's a very fun platform to be able to just share a lot of thoughts,
1:24
therapy themes of the day,
1:25
just a lot of things that aren't quite enough to put out in a podcast and that
1:29
I maybe haven't spent enough time to generate a reel or a TikTok video or anything
1:34
like that. So check out Substack by now.
1:37
Story time. So let me start with two stories from ripped right from my practice
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in the last few weeks. And I have, of course, changed details to protect confidentiality.
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But these moments were just so perfectly illustrative of this concept of projection
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that I could not wait to share them with you.
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And I almost feel like a comedian who's been trying out his bits at various
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clubs, because these stories made it into a lot of sessions.
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And this concept of projection, I know it's been my special interest over the
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last few weeks, but let me set the stage.
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So picture this, I'm sitting with a couple and I've been working with them for
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a very long time and we're almost done with the session.
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And I really, I love it when somebody can say, hey, I know this isn't something
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that we're necessarily working on in therapy, but can I just ask your professional
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opinion? And I say, of course.
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And they want to ask me a question about their teenage son. I've had a teenage
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son. I've worked with teenagers a lot in the past.
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Now, not so much. But she brings up a situation where their son has walked past
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a bag of garbage sitting outside his bedroom door for several days.
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I've just walked right by it multiple times for days. And she looks very genuinely
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confused. And she says, I'm just, I'm curious, can you explain why you think somebody would do that?
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And I realized in that moment, if you asked me the same question,
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I would have immediately said something like, you know, he probably forgot that
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it was there. I have done that with a lot of things.
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And it's not that I'm being malicious or I want to cause anyone harm or I'm
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not trying to be passive aggressive. I just don't think about it a lot of times.
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And I think if I go a little deeper in that, I have ADHD, not as an excuse, just it just is a thing.
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And so I know that that is something where I can just be so hyper focused on
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something else or impulsive, or I might even be thinking about picking up the garbage.
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And then on my way to do that, something else comes up that seems more shiny.
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So again, not out of malice, not to make a point, but because I genuinely didn't
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see it or it slipped my mind.
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And as I'm sitting there, the husband, who also is a card carry member of the
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ADHD club and has some nice guy tendencies going on, he's nodding with me.
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He's like, oh yeah, no, that's, I would feel the same way.
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But then I caught myself and I then did say out loud, but hang on,
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I'm actually projecting my own experience onto this situation.
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So I'm assuming that your son forgot because I would forget.
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But that's my frame of reference. And that doesn't necessarily mean that that's
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his reality. That is projection.
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And you could see something kind of shift in the room when I said that.
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The wife, she literally looked uncomfortable.
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And so I said, hey, what's coming up for you? What just happened there?
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And she said, I guess I really didn't understand projection, honestly.
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Because she said, I could see a situation where I would do something like that.
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And honestly, I would be doing it to send a message that I was upset. That was so powerful.
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Because there it is, the same behavior, walking past a bag of garbage.
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And we essentially have three completely different interpretations.
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Based on three completely different internal worlds. I'm thinking he forgot.
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The husband is kind of going along with that.
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Yeah, maybe he forgot, but he had some other thoughts that he wanted to interject
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there as well. And the wife is thinking he's sending a hostile message.
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Flash forward to the very next day. I'm in a session and there's a guy that I really enjoy.
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He came to me to work on his emotional immaturity and he's really been working
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hard on it, but it's not perfect. He's human.
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And he's telling me about stopping at a store on his way home from work.
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He texted his wife and said, hey, I'm going to stop at the store and I'll be
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there in just a little bit.
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I'm giving him some praise. Like, well done.
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That sounds great. Something you maybe haven't done in the past.
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So that's, I know why he was starting to tell me.
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Then he got caught on his phone in the parking lot and he was checking social
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media, maybe played a game, watched a video and he lost track of time.
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So when he finally got home, I think it had been maybe an hour past when he
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said he would and his wife was upset. And she said something to the effect of,
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how could you do something that you obviously knew was going to hurt me.
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Having this concept of projection fresh in my mind, I said, did you have any
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intention of hurting your wife when you got distracted on your phone?
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And he looked at me like I was nuts. Of course I didn't. I just lost track of time.
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But his wife's interpretation was that he knew this would hurt her and he did it anyway.
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I just asked him, do you think that she would say something similar to what this first wife said?
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And I told that story that she might do something like that deliberately to
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show you how hurt she was.
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And he said, oh, she literally told me that.
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And I said, man, projection.
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So these two situations happening back to back, it really crystallized something for me.
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And I think it will come into play in how you view yourself in your relationship,
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I think helps understand a lot around conflict.
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And honestly, I think about being human.
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So what is projection? Projection is when we unconsciously take our own thoughts,
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our own feelings, our own motivations, our own behavior patterns,
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and then we project them, we attribute them, we diffuse them,
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we hand them, we project them over onto someone else.
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So we essentially assume that other people operate from the same internal framework that we do.
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And so what we're doing is we're projecting our inner world onto this person,
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like a movie projector casting an image onto a screen, or they become the mirror.
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And we all do this, every single one of us. It's not like it's a character flaw.
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It's not like something that, oh my gosh, wait, I've caught projection.
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It's part of being a human being. Because we only understand the world through our own experiences.
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You are literally the only version of you that's ever existed,
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that's walked the face of the earth.
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You've got the whole combination of your nature and your nurture and your birth
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order, your DNA, abandonment, rejection, hopes, fears, dreams,
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your wounds, your friend groups, how your parents modeled behavior,
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experiences of loss, financial circumstances, pets, all of it.
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So you look at the world through that very specific lens.
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And the challenge is we don't realize that we are even wearing these lenses.
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We think we're seeing things very objectively, that this is reality.
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We all have an idea of what
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we would do in these situations when in reality
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we're actually seeing our interpretation of reality
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so i enjoy origin stories and i
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think it's fun to trace back and understand where this comes from
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well it comes from being human beings but the term
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projection was actually introduced by sigmund freud that guy back in the 1890s
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and while we moved past a lot of freud's ideas in modern psychology sure had
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a lot to do with his mom he really nailed this one because he initially described
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it as a defense mechanism where people attribute their own unacceptable thoughts
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or feelings or motives to,
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on to another person. And Freud saw this happen with his patients all the time.
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If somebody was angry, but they couldn't acknowledge their anger,
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they would instead perceive that everyone around them is angry.
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If somebody was struggling with their own impulses, then they would see those
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impulses in others, and then they would judge them harshly for it.
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And Freud's daughter, Anna, followed in his footsteps.
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And so she took this and she expanded on it. And then she included projection
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as one of the major defense mechanisms in her work in what was called ego psychology.
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So what she recognized was that we develop these defenses, not because we're
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broken, but because we're trying to protect ourselves from uncomfortable truths
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about our own inner world.
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Because we need to see it as rainbows and unicorns and not like we might have
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this part of us that we just really don't want to look at.
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Freud was focused on projection as this pathological defense mechanism.
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But now modern psychology recognizes that projection happens on a spectrum, as so many things do.
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There's an extreme version where somebody completely denies all of their own
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feelings and they attribute them entirely onto others.
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And I'll give you some examples of this as we go along in the episode today.
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But there's also this everyday kind of garden variety projection that we are all doing.
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So Carl Jung took this concept of projection even further, and Jung liked to
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talk about how we project our shadow, the parts of ourselves that we haven't
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integrated or the parts that we haven't acknowledged onto other people.
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So the things that trigger us the most intensely in others, often those are
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the reflections of something that we haven't dealt with within ourselves.
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So what Jung meant by integrating the shadow, integration doesn't mean to get
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rid of those parts of ourselves, these parts that we have buried deep inside.
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It means first acknowledging them, accepting them as part of who we are,
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and then learning how to bring them into our conscious awareness.
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It'll get a little woo-woo here, but I promise it'll deliver.
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Acknowledging them, bringing them into our consciousness instead of suppressing
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them and keeping them hidden in the darkness and ignoring them and pretending
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like they aren't even there.
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For example, if you have always seen yourself as a really nice person who never
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gets angry, I resonate with this one.
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Your shadow might contain all that unexpressed anger and resentment.
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So integration would mean acknowledging, you know what, actually,
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I do get those emotions. I do get angry.
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I do sometimes have aggressive impulses. And that's part of being human.
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So, once you integrate that, it doesn't mean now I'm going to go around and
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be angry and impulsive, but it means you stop projecting it onto others.
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You acknowledge it. It's a part of you and you have no bad parts.
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You stop seeing everybody else as angry or aggressive while denying it in yourself.
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Because all of a sudden I can notice, oh, I am a little bit angry about this. I am pretty frustrated.
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Oh, I'm still alive. That didn't ruin my whole self. or another example,
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if you've always prided yourself in being responsible and very disciplined,
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your shadow might contain these desires for spontaneity and pleasure and even some recklessness.
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And I see this one often where somebody just feels like they are just too responsible, too buttoned up.
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They would let everybody else down. They worry about what other people would
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think, but they have the side of them that they don't ever acknowledge.
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And it can come out in a big kind of way if it continues to be suppressed.
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So integration means acknowledging those desires exist, even if you don't act on them.
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So without integrating these parts, you might find yourself judging people who
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are spontaneous, are pleasure-seeking, but then secretly, and you may not even
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be willing to admit this, kind of envy them, or you're at least viewing it with fascination.
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What we cannot integrate, what we can't acknowledge, what we can't accept, we project.
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What we can't acknowledge in ourselves, we see and judge harshly in other people.
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And then there's been more recent research in social psychology that's shown
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that projection also serves a cognitive function.
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If you remember, our brains are these prediction machines. They are constantly
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trying to figure out what is going to happen next.
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That certainty, we desire it. We crave it so much because it really would make things pretty easy.
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Also, it would knock out a little bit of the spontaneity and the zest or the spice of life.
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But we want to know. We want to know what's happening next. And part of that
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is what are people thinking?
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What are they going to do? And to make those predictions, we use the most readily
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available data we have, our thoughts, our feelings, our motivations.
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It's not malicious. It's pretty efficient, actually.
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But it's also really inaccurate, especially when we're dealing with somebody
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who has a completely different internal world than we do, like everyone else on the planet.
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We're going to zig now, and I'm excited about this next part.
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I want to first connect to a phrase I'm hoping you have heard before.
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I often say it, so then I had to go do a little digging only to find out it
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is not actually a phrase. the phrase as I think of it is methinks thou dost protest too much,
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Here's a fun fact. People get this quote wrong. It turns out it's a line from
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Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the line is actually, the lady doth protest too much, me thinks.
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And I'm not a big Hamlet person, but it's spoken by Queen Gertrude,
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and it's when she's watching a play within the play, and one of the characters
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is making these overly elaborative promises about her loyalty.
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But apparently what Shakespeare actually meant by protest is not quite what
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we mean today. In Elizabethan English, protest meant to declare or affirm strongly
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not to object or complain.
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So Gertrude is actually saying this lady is making promises that are so big,
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so excessive, so over the top, they kind of feel sus, as the kids say. Suspicious.
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She's trying too hard to convince us. Now, kind of interesting because over
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the centuries now this phrase has come to mean more what we understand in modern
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psychology, that when someone is excessively vocal about opposing something,
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it often reveals their own internal struggle with that very thing.
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This is projection cranked up to an 11. This is Young's shadow being projected
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outward with such intensity, such ferocity that it actually starts to become
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a crusade for the person.
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This is what happens when we can't integrate a part of ourselves and we have
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to wage war against it and others. We are so scared of it. We're so repulsed by it.
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And unfortunately, I've seen this pattern play out in some of the most heartbreaking ways.
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Let me take you back to my early days as a therapist. I think it really connects
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with this idea of the shadow and projection.
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And honestly, I think it is one of those experiences that fundamentally shaped how I practice today.
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So when I first became a therapist, which was over 20 years ago,
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I worked as a trainee and then as an intern for a number of years for the LDS
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Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in their LDS Family Services department.
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It was a part-time gig. I also had a computer hardware company where I imported
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hard disk drive duplicators with custom firmware that was used in a lot of computer
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forensics and medical imaging applications.
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That was paying the bills, but honest to goodness, I loved being a therapist.
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I mean, I genuinely loved it in a way I've never experienced with work before
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and continue to look at that as the greatest career change that I could have ever experienced.
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So in that role with LDS Family Services, I found myself working with primarily three types of clients.
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The first two I talk about often, guys struggling with turning to coronography
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as an unhealthy coping mechanism, reach out to me, path back, recovery.
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But the other one was people who are navigating faith crisis,
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faith deconstruction, faith journeys, and that is still one of the populations
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I love working with the most.
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But then the third group I saw regularly, and this is the one that's really
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relevant with this exact point about the shadow and projection,
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were people that were coming into counseling because they were struggling with
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what was called then, and I don't know if they still use this term now,
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SSA, same-sex attraction.
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And I can honestly say that either I missed the memo or some training.
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I had an incredible clinical supervisor at the time, or actually it just didn't
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feel right as a human being to have somebody come in and there was a part of
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me that was supposed to change them.
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Even if they were coming in saying, you must change me.
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And despite this being 20 years ago, the message to the therapist,
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or at least to this therapist, me, was meet the client where they're at and support them.
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Don't try to change them. Don't do any conversion therapy or anything like that.
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Just be with them in their experience. Where do they want to go?
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You're right there beside them because who am I to know what it feels like to be that person?
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And that's one of those profound things that I've carried through to this day
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that is so helpful as a therapist.
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So I primarily saw guys who were hesitant to admit that they were gay.
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They had tried to pray the gay way. They went on missions for the church,
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hoping it would go away if they did that.
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They were hoping it would get lost in the jungles of Africa somewhere.
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They were overachievers.
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There were often people that struggled with obsessive compulsive personality
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disorder, or religious scrupulosity, religious OCD, hoping that they could somehow perfect it away.
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Many of them married women in hopes that that would be the thing that finally
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got rid of their same-sex attraction.
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But at least for the dozens and dozens and dozens of guys that I worked with,
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none of that worked because they were gay and that was okay.
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They've been gay their entire lives.
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And a recurring theme in those sessions was hearing about hitting puberty and
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their friends became interested in cheerleaders at the football game.
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And my clients would routinely think, holy cow, I think I'm more interested
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in the football player and then thinking that something's wrong.
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And then they started to pretend to be someone that they weren't.
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This is the shadow in its most painful form. It's a core part of who you are
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that you've been taught is unacceptable, shameful, wrong.
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And when we can't integrate that part of ourselves, when we can't bring it into
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the light and say, this is part of who I am, we suffer deeply.
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The LGBTQ plus issue was truly one that started me on my own faith deconstruction
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as I started to help others navigate their own faith deconstructions,
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especially those that were struggling with this same-sex attraction.
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Because the fact that they were struggling with it and not learning to accept it or embrace it.
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Because I spent hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of hours talking one-on-one
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with these guys who were continually feeling like they were doing their own
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lives wrong and that to do it right,
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according to people who did not know what it felt like to be them,
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they needed to not think the way that they thought and not feel the way that they felt.
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And I've thought often when I look back now and apply this lens of projection
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onto those clients and onto their experiences, is I see it pretty clearly that
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they would often hear others say, and these are well-meaning people,
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bless their hearts, assuming good intentions, but they would say things about
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how, you know, we all have our challenges.
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For some, it's food. For some, it might be alcohol.
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For some, it might be not digging into my scriptures enough.
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I even heard on more than one occasion, because I love chocolate,
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but someone who was gay being told by somebody who genuinely meant well, you know.
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I really struggle not to eat chocolate, but I know that that isn't good for me.
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So I know exactly how you feel being in a mixed orientation marriage,
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being married to someone that you don't have any connection or desire with,
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which even on a side note, I remember one of the first time somebody talked
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about being a chocoholic and that must be the same as an alcoholic.
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I don't think it is, but I can say without exception that I never had a client
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in any of these situations where somebody is saying, I know exactly how you
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feel, say, you know, I really felt seen and understood.
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Maybe trying to not eat popcorn is the same as trying to deny my sexuality.
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But that well-meaning person was projecting onto my client because they weren't
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struggling with their sexuality.
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They were assuming that, well,
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if I was, I would be able to handle it just like I do with chocolate.
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Only they weren't being told that eating chocolate was a one-way ticket to eternal
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hellfire and damnation.
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They weren't being told that their craving for chocolate meant that there was
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something fundamentally broken about them.
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And they weren't being told that if they had just enough faith,
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they wouldn't want chocolate anymore.
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They weren't being told to marry someone who hated chocolate in hopes that it
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would cure their own chocolate cravings.
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The projection was, I struggle with something I'm supposed to resist.
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Therefore, I understand your struggle with something you are supposed to resist.
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But the challenge is, were they even supposed to resist it? Or were they supposed
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to integrate it and accept it.
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The experiences weren't even remotely equivalent. The stakes weren't the same.
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The shame wasn't the same. The cost of giving in wasn't even in the same ballpark.
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So what I witnessed over and over were people projecting their own manageable
19:58
struggles onto somebody else's entire identity.
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And in doing so, they were minimizing, dismissing, and fundamentally misunderstanding
20:05
what that person was actually experiencing.
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And here's where it gets even more complex and honestly more heartbreaking.
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Here's where Jung's concept of the shadow and Shakespeare's observation about
20:14
protesting too much come together in maybe it's a Shakespearean tragic kind of way.
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We see this pattern play out dramatically in public life, particularly around the LGBTQ plus issues.
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There is a phenomenon where individuals who are most vocally and aggressively
20:30
opposed to things like LGBTQ plus rights and identities are later discovered
20:35
to be struggling with their own sexual orientation or their gender identity.
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And at that time, I remembered these two things that were big in the headlines.
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And it was when I was really working with a lot of clients that were struggling
20:47
with the same-sex attraction.
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2006-2007. First, Ted Haggard. In 2006, Ted Haggard was the president of the
20:53
National Association of Evangelicals, and that was a position of significant
20:56
influence representing millions of conservative Christians.
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He was a very powerful voice against same-sex marriage, against LGBTQ plus rights,
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particularly preaching about what he called the sin of homosexuality.
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Then a male escort came forward, revealing that Haggard had been paying him
21:13
for sex and buying methamphetamine for him for years.
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And Haggard initially denied it. And then he eventually admitted to sexual immorality
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and even acknowledged his struggles with his sexuality.
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Or anytime I travel or fly, and I asked somebody about this this morning,
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they are, I think in their late twenties and they don't remember this at all.
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But when I fly, and if I have to go into a bathroom stall to take care of things,
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I pay particular attention to where my feet are.
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You might know where this one's going if you remember this at the time.
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Larry Craig, a U.S. senator from Idaho who had a long voting record that was
21:47
opposing LGBTQ plus rights.
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He voted against adding sexual orientation to hate crime protection.
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He opposed same-sex marriage, and
21:55
he consistently positioned himself as a defender of traditional values.
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Now, in 2007, he was arrested in a Minneapolis airport bathroom in a sting operation
22:02
targeting men seeking sexual encounters with other men.
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Apparently, they would slide a foot over and if they touched feet, I guess that was code.
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He pled guilty to disorderly conduct, but he later tried to withdraw the plea
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and he famously declared, I'm not gay. I've never been gay.
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And I'm just bringing those two things to light because I remember them well at the time.
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Especially dealing with people that were struggling with their gender.
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So I want to be really clear here.
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These aren't just stories about hypocrisy, although there is definitely that element,
22:30
but from a psychological perspective, and especially from my perspective of
22:34
having spent hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of hours with men struggling
22:37
with the exact same internal conflict, what we're witnessing is projection at
22:42
its most desperate and tragic.
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This is what happens when somebody's shadow becomes so threatening that they
22:48
can't even imagine integrating it. So they project it outward and then they declare war on it.
22:55
If I think about the clients that I work with, so many of them have spent years,
22:58
sometimes decades, trying to pray away, perfect away, marry away something that
23:03
was core to who they were.
23:04
The internal conflict was excruciating. The shame was crushing.
23:08
The feeling of being fundamentally broken, fundamentally wrong.
23:12
Fundamentally unacceptable was unbearable, even to the point where some would take their own lives.
23:17
And that's never okay.
23:20
It's not okay for somebody to project onto someone else that you need to be a different way.
23:24
There's even a remote chance it can lead to something like that.
23:27
When something is that unbearable to acknowledge in ourselves,
23:30
it's so tragic that that person feels this need to project it outward and attack
23:34
it and attack anybody who embodies it.
23:37
So these individuals like Haggard and Craig and countless others in similar
23:41
situations were so unable to
23:43
integrate this part of their shadow that they waged these external wars.
23:46
They protested too much because they were trying to convince themselves as much
23:49
as anybody else, even to the point where they were okay,
23:52
and maybe they weren't okay with, but they were willing to see something happen
23:58
that was ultimately detrimental to someone's life who embodied this thing that
24:04
they could not acknowledge in themselves,
24:05
that they found it psychologically safer to crusade against those people than
24:10
to acknowledge, I might be one of those people.
24:13
It is so much easier to make it about other people's sin than to sit with your
24:17
own internal experience.
24:19
It's easier to judge and condemn from a distance than to look in the mirror
24:22
and actually offer yourself compassion.
24:26
When we cannot integrate a part of ourselves, when we find it too threatening
24:29
or too shameful or too contradictory to our identity, we project it outward and we attack it there.
24:35
The louder the protest, the more desperate the crusade, the more likely it is
24:38
that we're fighting something within ourselves that we can't yet face.
24:41
And what is so tragic about that, all that energy,
24:44
all those emotional calories spent on external warfare, all those years spent
24:47
crusading against something could have been spent on the actually much more difficult,
24:52
but much more courageous work of acceptance and integration of bringing the
24:56
shadow into the light of acknowledging this is part of who I am and it's okay.
24:59
And it turns out it really is.
25:01
I think about my clients from 20 years ago, the ones who eventually came to
25:04
a place of self-acceptance, who stopped trying to change something unchangeable
25:07
about themselves, who integrated their shadow rather than projecting it onto everybody around them.
25:11
Those were the ones who found peace, not easy peace, not uncomplicated peace,
25:16
but genuine, internal, real, everything's going to be okay. Peace.
25:21
The ones who stayed stuck in this cycle of shame and projection, they suffered.
25:26
And unfortunately, they often made others suffer too.
25:29
Let me share a story from my practice that I think shows how projection works
25:32
in more everyday situations. And this is something that I've seen this version of this.
25:37
Several times. I was working with a couple and they had gotten into a significant
25:41
fight right before the wife had to leave for a work conference that was in a faraway state.
25:46
She was hurting from the argument and she felt like her husband had primarily
25:49
been at fault. He'd been dismissive. He shut down the conversation.
25:52
He really refused to engage.
25:54
But true to her pattern, she found herself wanting to reach out,
25:57
wanting to fix it, wanting to be the one that says, hey, I'm sorry,
26:00
wanting to make sure he was okay.
26:01
But this time she was trying to be more differentiated, more grounded,
26:04
trying something different.
26:05
And she'd been working in therapy on not always being the one to do the repair,
26:09
to go rescue, especially when she didn't feel like she was the one that had
26:12
caused the lion share of the damage.
26:15
So she told herself, if he wasn't willing to have this uncomfortable conversation
26:18
before I left, then I'm not going to be the one to reach out.
26:21
I'm going to hold this boundary.
26:23
So they don't talk while she's gone pretty much the whole trip.
26:26
And she was miserable. Conferences were already pretty exhausting.
26:29
She was walking around with this weight on her shoulders, checking her phone
26:32
to see, has he reached out? And he didn't.
26:34
So when she got home, she was emotionally drained. She was still hurt,
26:37
but also hoping that maybe they could finally talk.
26:40
And one of the first things that he asked her is he said, hey,
26:43
did you hook up with any guys on the trip?
26:45
She was blown away. She said that thought had not even entered her peripheral
26:49
consciousness. She felt very misunderstood, unseen.
26:53
She had spent the entire trip thinking about him, about their marriage,
26:56
about whether they were going to be okay, would they make it through this.
26:59
She felt so bad about not rescuing. The idea of being with somebody else was never a thought.
27:06
And she said, especially with how emotionally raw I was, she said it was so
27:09
far from her reality that the question felt like it came from a completely different planet.
27:14
But if we kind of look at what's fascinating from a projection standpoint,
27:18
when she asked him why he would even ask that, he got really defensive and said,
27:22
well, I mean, you weren't talking to me. You were gone for three days.
27:24
How was I supposed to know what you were doing?
27:26
So I might just bring gentle awareness to another possibility.
27:29
And this is what we then explored in therapy. Was he telling on himself?
27:32
Because you see, projection doesn't always mean we've even done the thing that
27:36
we're accusing somebody else of. Sometimes it just means we've thought about doing it.
27:39
So when he was angry about the marriage, when he was sitting at home feeling
27:42
abandoned and hurt, did his mind go to, you know what?
27:45
Screw it. I'm just going to go hook up with some random person.
27:48
Or did he find himself having fantasies or intrusive thoughts about escaping
27:51
the pain of the relationship through some kind of sexual distraction?
27:54
And then because those thoughts felt threatening or shameful because they contradicted
27:58
his image of himself as this devoted husband, as the person that is always there
28:02
for her, maybe except for when he's not, he projected him onto her.
28:06
Because again, it's psychologically easier to accuse your partner of thinking
28:09
about infidelity than to acknowledge that maybe you were thinking about it.
28:12
This is a defense mechanism.
28:14
His brain is essentially saying, these thoughts are too uncomfortable for me
28:17
to own, so I'm going to attribute them to her instead.
28:19
Then I can actually be righteously angry rather than sitting with my own shame or my own confusion.
28:24
And the painful part is his projection actually created a new wound because
28:29
she comes home from that trip already hurt from the original argument.
28:32
She's already exhausted from holding this boundary that felt terrible to hold.
28:35
And now she's being accused of something that didn't even cross her mind.
28:39
So the projection kind of added insult to injury.
28:42
When we worked through this in therapy, when he was able to acknowledge that
28:45
maybe the question came from his own insecurities, immaturity,
28:48
his thoughts rather than anything that she'd actually done.
28:50
It was a pretty profound moment of recognition. It was uncomfortable,
28:53
but it was honest and really vulnerable.
28:57
She could see that his accusation wasn't really about her at all.
28:59
Here's another example that I think really illustrates how projection can show
29:03
up before we're even consciously aware of it.
29:05
And I think this one was so interesting because I look back on this.
29:08
And I said the words projection. I made those mouth sounds, but I can look back
29:12
on this now and understand that, man, it really was, there was so much projection happening.
29:17
I worked with this couple and the husband had grown up with an alcoholic father
29:20
and he was really abusive.
29:22
He was a destructive alcoholic. So this guy's childhood was marked by violence,
29:27
unpredictability, financial chaos.
29:29
All of it was connected to his dad's drinking.
29:31
So he grew up with this absolute conviction that alcohol was, it was poison.
29:36
It was something that he will never do. People who drank were weak,
29:39
that he would never touch it.
29:40
And for decades, he didn't. And he was very proud of himself for it.
29:44
It was part of his identity.
29:45
But he was grounded. He didn't seem to overtly judge or mock others.
29:50
But internally, he said, that is not me. I'm not like my father. I don't drink.
29:55
So his wife, she just came for a check-in. It took a couple of sessions to get
29:59
there, but then she said she noticed something strange happening over the past year or so.
30:04
Her husband had started talking about alcohol a lot, but not in a,
30:08
I'm struggling with this kind of way, but it was in this, almost,
30:11
she said, a judgmental kind of obsessive way.
30:13
It started small. They watched a TV show and he'd say something like,
30:17
can you believe how much people drink?
30:19
Like, why do people feel the need to have alcohol, to have fun?
30:22
Or they'd be at a restaurant and he would comment on how expensive the wine
30:25
list was, where he'd never really looked at that before with this tone of just
30:28
this disbelief or this disdain.
30:30
Then it escalated. He started seeking out opportunities to comment on other people's drinking.
30:34
They'd be out on a date, and he would notice somebody across the room who appeared
30:37
to be a little bit tipsy. And then he would fixate on them, and he would make
30:40
comments through the entire meal.
30:42
Look at that guy. I mean, he can barely stand up. Can you believe?
30:45
What would that be like to be his wife, to have to drag him home?
30:48
How does somebody even let themselves get like that? It's just so pathetic.
30:51
His family, they must be so embarrassed.
30:53
And his wife described it as this uncomfortable intensity.
30:58
Like he couldn't look away. He couldn't stop talking about it.
31:00
And this was coming from a guy who, until recently, barely mentioned alcohol at all.
31:05
It just wasn't on his radar because he had dealt with it by avoiding it.
31:09
So she initially thought maybe he was triggered by something.
31:12
Maybe he had heard from his dad because they had been estranged.
31:14
Maybe something had reminded him about his childhood, but something about it felt off to her.
31:17
It felt less like a trauma response and more like she just couldn't put a name on it.
31:23
And then she found a stash. She was looking for something in the garage.
31:26
She found a box hidden behind some camping equipment and inside were a lot of
31:31
empty bottles and a half full bottle of whiskey.
31:36
When she confronted him, he broke down. He had been drinking for almost a year.
31:39
He'd been sneaking drinks in the garage, stopping at bars on the way home,
31:42
having a couple of beers before going home from work, buying airplane bottles
31:45
of liquor and drinking them in his car and parking lots.
31:48
And what is so textbook about this form of projection, his obsessive commentary
31:53
about other people's drinking was pathologically his way of managing his own
31:58
relationship with alcohol before he was ready to consciously acknowledge it.
32:02
Because if you think about it, he couldn't say to himself, hey,
32:05
I started drinking. I don't even know how to feel about that.
32:07
I have no idea what happened because that would have shattered his entire identity
32:11
because he'd built his self-image,
32:13
his sense of self on not being like his dad, on being above it,
32:17
on having conquered this demon by just simply refusing to engage with it.
32:20
But something had shifted and maybe it was stress.
32:22
Maybe it was unresolved trauma that was finally catching up with him.
32:24
Maybe it was just curiosity, but he'd started drinking and his psyche couldn't
32:29
integrate it. It was just too threatening.
32:31
So instead, his unconscious mind found another way to process it.
32:34
He projected these internal struggles onto everybody around him.
32:38
So when he fixated on the drunk guy at the restaurant, he wasn't really seeing that guy.
32:43
He was seeing himself or his fear of what he might become.
32:47
So when he ranted about how pathetic people who drink are, he was trying to
32:50
convince himself that he, but he wasn't one of them, even though he was actively drinking in secret.
32:55
The excessive judgment, the protesting too much, there's your defense mechanism.
33:00
It was his psyche's way of saying, see how much I hate drinking?
33:04
See how much I judge people? a drink that proves I'm not like them, right?
33:07
But of course, it didn't prove it at all because it actually revealed the opposite.
33:11
The intensity of his focus, the obsessive quality of it, the way he couldn't
33:15
seem to let it go, those were signs that the alcohol had become psychologically
33:19
central for him, even though he wasn't consciously acknowledging his own use.
33:24
This is projection functioning as a kind of psychological pressure release valve.
33:28
He couldn't contain the tension of, I'm drinking, but I built my entire identity on not.
33:34
So that tension leaked out sideways. It came out as judgment on others.
33:38
It came out as hypervigilance about other people's behavior and this compulsive
33:42
need to distance himself from those people, even as he was becoming one of those people.
33:47
And what was so heartbreaking about it is that if he had been able to acknowledge
33:52
his drinking earlier, if he had been able to say or have the courage to say,
33:56
hey, this is crazy, I'm struggling with this thing that I swore I would never
33:59
do, he could have gotten help.
34:02
He could have talked to his wife. He could have gone to therapy,
34:04
dealt with whatever was driving him to drink in the first place,
34:06
but the projection kept him stuck and it kept him focused outward instead of looking inward.
34:11
It created this painful paradox, this irony where the very thing he was most
34:15
vocal about opposing was the thing he was secretly doing.
34:18
When we eventually worked through this in therapy, he had to address,
34:20
there were a lot of layers.
34:22
His relationship with alcohol, his unresolved trauma from his childhood,
34:25
his shame about becoming his dad,
34:26
his use of projection as a defense mechanism, and it was a lot of work.
34:30
But one of the breakthroughs came when he could finally see the pattern,
34:32
that when he could recognize that his obsessive judgment of other drinkers was
34:36
a mirror showing him something he wasn't ready to see about himself.
34:40
The lady, or in this case, the gentleman, doth protest too much.
34:44
And his protest was telling us exactly what he was trying so hard to deny.
34:48
So these examples from public figures crusading against LGBTQ plus rights while
34:53
secretly struggling with their own sexuality to the wife being accused of infidelity
34:56
that she never considered to
34:58
the husband fixating on other people drinking while he's hiding his own.
35:01
They all show us the same psychological mechanism at work.
35:05
Projection is how we manage internal conflicts that we're not ready to face.
35:08
It's how we externalize things that we can't internalize, that it's too painful.
35:12
And the more intense the projection, the louder the protest,
35:15
the more it often reveals about what's happening beneath the surface.
35:19
So when you find yourself having an unusually strong reaction to something,
35:23
when you can't seem to let something go, when you are protesting loudly and
35:27
frequently about somebody else's behavior, it's worth asking,
35:30
what am I not ready to look at directly?
35:33
Because that awareness, that willingness to turn the mirror around,
35:36
that's where the growth starts to happen.
35:38
That's where we stop being ruled by our projections and we can start being honest,
35:41
at least to ourselves, about our own struggles.
35:43
And that honesty, that is the beginning of freedom. Hey, everybody.
35:47
I am back from my halftime break. I don't know why podcasts can't have a halftime.
35:51
If you are watching this on YouTube, then I wanted to just bring gentle awareness
35:56
that now I am donning a virtual couch zip-up hoodie.
36:00
And I only bring that up because I had shared an episode with a friend a long time ago.
36:04
And he said, you know, it was a little distracting that you basically had a
36:08
wardrobe change two or three times throughout the episode.
36:10
And that was very true because it was an episode that I had done part of it
36:14
from my office in Arizona, part on day one of being in California,
36:18
finished it up on day two of California and had a different,
36:21
a different shirt each day.
36:23
But coming back from the halftime break, another plug for mindfulness,
36:26
because as I started recording this, I just, thank goodness,
36:32
happened to look over and see on my, my mixing board.
36:36
There's one button that needs to be pressed.
36:38
And when it is not pressed, I record no sound and I have.
36:43
Probably done two or three episodes, full episodes. One of them was well over an hour.
36:47
And then when I went to, to put it in my editing software, it had no sound.
36:52
And that is such a mindfulness practice to notice.
36:56
I'm noticing that I would have liked the sound to have been on and also noticing
37:02
that I don't want to rerecord the episode. Also using some magical thinking.
37:06
Does the universe or God himself not want this episode to air,
37:09
which I don't think I'm that special.
37:11
So I have each and every time gone back and like I just did,
37:15
I think I did about five minutes, noticed that the light is on.
37:18
Now I've looked over two or three times and I don't, I know I don't have OCD,
37:21
but boy, that checking thing can be a real thing.
37:24
But here we are, we are back to now what I am viewing as part two of the projection
37:30
episode, but for you, probably no break in the action.
37:34
But let me give you some rapid fire examples of what projection looks like in
37:37
everyday relationships, because I really, I think getting some reps in will
37:41
help just solidify what projection is.
37:43
So see if any of these sound familiar. So example one, your partner forgets
37:48
to text you during the day and you immediately think, oh, they're pulling away from me.
37:51
They don't care anymore, but here's the projection.
37:54
You never forget to text when you care about somebody. So you're projecting
37:57
that standard onto your partner.
37:59
So that means to you that if they aren't texting you, then that must mean that they don't care.
38:03
But the reality might be that they were in back-to-back meetings or quite frankly,
38:07
their brain just doesn't work the same way yours does around communication.
38:10
And this has been one that has been very real in my own relationship where I
38:13
will send a text out every day. Hey, thinking about you.
38:15
And I have done the thing where I've been needy and clingy and nice guy syndrome-y
38:19
and sending these covert contracts to my wife on occasion that,
38:23
uh, Hey, it would be nice to get a little, little text during the day.
38:26
That's very clingy, very needy energy. Would it be nice? Absolutely.
38:29
But I now understand that that is not her being not even passive aggressive,
38:34
but aggressively saying, oh, that's what you want.
38:36
Well, it's off the table then. But I know that I am.
38:40
Like checking in, saying, Hey, thinking about you. I hope you're having a good
38:42
day. What's everything like?
38:44
And that is, that is me. And one time when I was talking to my wife about this
38:49
concept, she said, Oh, I don't want to bother you.
38:51
And I'm saying, Oh, bother away. That would be great.
38:55
So we're both projecting onto the end of the relationship. What we think is, I guess the right way.
39:03
Example two, your partner suggests ordering takeout instead of cooking and you
39:06
feel criticize, like they're saying, you're not doing enough around the house, the projection.
39:11
You might suggest ordering out when you're frustrated that somebody isn't pulling
39:15
their weight. So you assume that that's what they're doing.
39:17
They might just be tired and craving Thai to go or Thai chili to go.
39:22
Not an advertiser, but that would be fine.
39:25
There's one near my house here in Arizona.
39:28
Reach out, please. Yellow chicken curry. Holy cow.
39:32
Example three, your partner is quiet on the drive home and you are convinced
39:35
that they're angry with you.
39:36
So you start reviewing all the game tape, everything you did that day,
39:40
trying to figure out what you did wrong.
39:41
Hey, is that okay? Did I do something wrong? The projection.
39:45
When you're quiet, it's often because you're upset and you don't want to say
39:49
anything and you want your partner to know that I'm upset.
39:51
But your partner might just be mentally exhausted, decompressing.
39:55
They might just not be thinking about a whole lot right now.
39:57
They might be thinking about something that is completely unrelated to you.
40:01
For example, number four, your partner doesn't laugh at your joke.
40:04
I know this one well, and you think they think I'm dumb. They don't like my
40:08
humor. They don't respect me.
40:09
The projection, maybe you judge people's intelligence by their sense of humor.
40:13
So you assume that they are not laughing. So therefore they think that you are
40:17
not very smart, but they could have been distracted.
40:19
Maybe they didn't hear the punchline. Maybe your humor styles are different,
40:22
or you have been in this relationship long enough.
40:25
Google repetitive acoustic stimuli.
40:27
You are somewhat just a form of a white noise machine when you speak.
40:33
Or example five, your partner spends money on something for themselves and man,
40:37
you are just hurt. This one has come up often in therapy.
40:40
It's like they're being selfish. They're not thinking about the family,
40:43
the projection, because when you spend money on yourself, you feel guilty,
40:47
like you are being selfish.
40:48
So you project that guilt onto them and interpret their purchase as darn near
40:52
a hostile act, but they might just be practicing some healthy self-care and
40:56
they don't care the same guilt narrative that you do.
40:58
So hopefully you see the pattern in each one of these examples,
41:02
we're taking our own internal rulebook and we're assuming everybody else is
41:05
playing by the same rules.
41:07
I know I have mentioned this in other podcasts, but I think you'll see why.
41:11
There's a famous commencement speech by David Foster Wallace called This Is Water.
41:15
And first introduced to me by my good friend, Rob.
41:18
And it's just so powerful. If you haven't listened to it, I highly recommend you hit pause.
41:24
I will put a link in the show notes. Go find it and listen to it.
41:28
But it starts with a simple story. Two young fish are swimming along and they
41:32
meet an older fish swimming the other way.
41:33
And he just nods at them in passing. Morning, boys. How's the water?
41:37
And the young fish swim on. And eventually one looks at the other and he says, what the heck is water?
41:42
Now, I love this story. And honestly, at first I really didn't understand it,
41:45
but it's because it perfectly captures what happens in therapy or life or what
41:51
we're talking about with projection.
41:53
So many of us are swimming through life completely unaware of the water,
41:56
which is, I think, those default settings, those automatic thoughts and those
42:00
reactions that we don't even question because they are so familiar to us.
42:03
So we are like those young fish and we're not even realizing that we're swimming
42:07
in our own interpretations rather than experiencing an objective reality,
42:12
a right, a truth, a right versus a wrong.
42:15
So Wallace goes on to say in that speech, the most obvious important realities
42:19
are often the ones that are the hardest to see and to talk about.
42:22
And I think this is precisely what I mean when I try to sell my clients on it.
42:27
It's okay. You don't know what you don't know.
42:29
It's not your fault that you don't notice the water. None of us do without help.
42:33
It goes back to how often people say, I should not have done this.
42:37
I should have known better.
42:38
Again, nobody likes to be should on, but even more important,
42:41
you didn't know. It just was. You were in the water. You weren't aware of the water.
42:45
That happened. Stop beating yourself up about the past.
42:48
That is a waste of emotional calories. Now, being aware of what happened in
42:51
the past, learning how to accept the things that happened in the past.
42:54
How can I learn from the things of the past? Absolutely wonderful.
42:58
And that is helping you move forward.
43:01
Ruminating, beating yourself up and saying, how could I not have known about the water?
43:06
It is not helpful. Here's the reason why. Because you didn't.
43:10
Now you do. So check that out. That's amazing. It's wonderful.
43:13
And I think here's what Wallace is getting at in his speech and why it ties
43:17
so perfectly into projection that we have these default settings,
43:20
these unconscious ways of interpreting the world around us. How could we not?
43:23
It is our experience, our default setting.
43:26
And Wallace says that is talking about default settings.
43:30
Our default setting is to be deeply self-centered, not in some narcissistic
43:35
malicious way, but in the sense
43:36
that we are the absolute center of our own experience, our own universe.
43:40
Everything we perceive comes through the filter of our own needs,
43:44
fears, desires, and interpretations.
43:46
Wallace gives an example of how Wallace talks about being stuck in traffic or
43:50
waiting in a long line at the grocery store after maybe a frustrating day at work.
43:53
Our default setting is to think, and maybe it's not think, but just be in this
43:59
space of, this is about me.
44:01
These people are in my way. Don't they understand what my day has been like?
44:05
This is all happening to me.
44:07
We automatically interpret the world through this lens of our own urgency,
44:10
our own frustration, our own narrative.
44:12
But here's what I would love to invite you to consider. What if the person driving
44:16
slowly in front of you isn't just trying to ruin your day?
44:19
What if they just got some pretty terrible news at the hospital?
44:21
They're driving carefully because they are in shock.
44:24
What if the woman who cut you off in the parking lot has a sick child at home
44:27
and is desperate to get back.
44:28
One of the person taking forever at the checkout counter is so lonely and I
44:31
have talked to people like this that that small exchange with the cashier is
44:35
the only human contact that they'll have today and they want to hang on to every single second of it.
44:40
The point is that these alternative stories are definitely true.
44:45
It's that we don't actually know.
44:47
The point isn't that these alternative stories are definitely true.
44:51
The point is that we don't actually know. We're making it up either way.
44:56
When somebody now speeds by me, cuts me off in traffic, my favorite thing to
44:59
say is, man, maybe that guy's having a baby.
45:03
And I hope you can see the humor there.
45:05
Because I don't know why that person had to go 100 and something miles on the
45:09
freeway and cut me off and bob and weave in and out of traffic.
45:13
Ever see the movie Speed? Keanu Reeves, Sondra Bullock back in the day?
45:17
Maybe if his car goes below 100, he blows up. I don't know.
45:21
Again, we're making it up either way. And our default setting is to make it
45:24
up in a way that centers our own experience in a way that centers around our
45:30
own experience and it often casts others as these obstacles or these antagonists in our story.
45:35
This is projection in its most fundamental form. We're projecting our own sense
45:39
of urgency, our own frustration, our own narrative onto everybody around us.
45:43
We just do that. We're assuming they operate with the same awareness that we
45:47
have or that we have of ourselves with the same awareness of us that we have
45:52
of ourselves. They're not.
45:55
They're actually the center of their own experience. They're swimming in their
45:58
own water, completely unaware of ours.
46:00
David Foster Wallace argues that the real value of education,
46:03
and I would add the real value of therapy, the real value of personal growth,
46:06
of interacting with other humans, isn't just learning facts.
46:09
It's learning how to think, how to self-confront, how to step out of your own
46:13
sense of self, how to learn how to be aware of your ego.
46:17
You can keep your hand over here on the side of your ego and say,
46:20
hey, down boy, but I want to really try to learn to connect with this person.
46:24
And yeah, you're going to get defensive ego and say, wait, are they criticizing
46:28
me? No, no, it's not all about you.
46:31
It's learning how to think. We're becoming conscious of the water that we're swimming in, man.
46:35
And I have wanted to throw a joke in here at some point. If we're both swimming
46:38
in the same water, something about the bathroom, but.
46:42
This is more about it's developing the awareness to step back and question our
46:45
own automatic interpretations. And this is hard work.
46:48
I love that Wallace is really honest about this. He says, learning to think
46:52
in this way, to consciously choose how we interpret our experiences rather than
46:55
just running on these default settings requires constant vigilance and effort.
47:02
It's not something you do once and then you're done. It is a daily practice of awareness.
47:07
So we've come to my favorite point of the podcast. What have we learned today?
47:11
Let's bring it all together so today we've explored projection and
47:14
it's this universal human tendency to attribute our own
47:17
thoughts and our own feelings and motivations and behavior patterns to
47:20
everybody else it shows up in everyday
47:23
situations it is all around us whether we're interpreting a bag of garbage as
47:27
a hostile message or a partner's dissatisfaction as deliberate cruelty and hopefully
47:33
you've heard today that there are these extreme examples where people crusade
47:37
very loudly against the very things they're secretly struggling with themselves themselves.
47:41
And how projection operates is both a defense mechanism and a little bit of a cognitive shortcut.
47:47
Or basically our brain's way of trying to make sense of a complex world using
47:51
the only data it has, our own internal experience.
47:58
The key is that we are all swimming in water that we don't even know is water.
48:02
We are all interpreting reality through our unique combination of nature,
48:05
nurture, birth order, DNA, wounds, experiences, abandonment, hopes, fears, dreams.
48:09
Whether or not we agree that a cat is
48:12
narcissistic and most of the
48:14
time we're actually completely unaware that we're doing it
48:17
we think that we we're the one we see objective reality
48:20
when we're actually seeing our own projections we're looking into a mirror here's
48:25
the cool part though once you start to see the water you can't unsee it once
48:30
you recognize projection in yourself you create space for something different
48:33
you begin to create space for curiosity instead of certainty instead of criticism,
48:38
instead of telling someone else what they must think or feel,
48:41
because that is a me thing.
48:43
I think they think this way. I think they feel this way kind of because that's
48:46
how I feel or that's how I think.
48:48
No, you're making space for curiosity. We're letting go of certainty.
48:52
We want it. We would absolutely love to be mind readers, but you create space
48:56
for actual connection instead of just reacting to your own interpretations.
49:00
Often the person that you're interacting with, often the person you're interacting
49:03
with doesn't even have to say anything because you're projecting all over them.
49:07
Let me give you three specific takeaways.
49:09
I was thinking about my good friend, Rachel Nielsen, host of the three and 30 podcast for moms.
49:13
I was on her podcast so long ago. She was on mine. I think this was in episode
49:17
20 or 30 and she has these three takeaways.
49:20
And when I would go on her podcast, she would say, all right,
49:22
do you have your three takeaways ready?
49:23
And I would think, oh crap, I don't, I got to try to make up some right now.
49:26
So I try to be intentional every now and again.
49:29
But takeaway one, your strongest reactions are usually your very best teachers.
49:33
If you have this intense emotional response to something that your partner does
49:37
or somebody that you're interacting with does, especially if they seem genuinely
49:40
confused by your reaction, that's potentially your projection.
49:44
It's your alarm going off.
49:46
That intensity is telling you something important about your own internal world.
49:49
Why am I reacting this way to what you just said? That is a me thing.
49:54
It might not even necessarily be about what's happening in the present moment.
49:57
And it's your emotions, your feelings saying, hey, here I am.
49:59
You usually ignore me. So I'm going to throw this at you right now.
50:02
So the next time you have a strong reaction to your partner's behavior,
50:05
give it a little pause before responding and ask yourself, what am I making this mean?
50:09
What story am I telling myself about what's happening?
50:12
Write it down if you need to. That helps get it out of your brain.
50:15
Your brain has this negativity bias and it will spin and spin and spin.
50:18
Just the act of naming your interpretation as an interpretation rather than
50:22
an objective truth starts to put a little space, creates this psychological
50:25
space. Number two, excessive judgment often reveals an internal struggle.
50:30
If you find yourself obsessively focused on someone else's behavior,
50:33
when you are protesting loudly about something, when you can't seem to let something
50:38
go, I'm just saying it's worth examining.
50:40
I'm not saying you're the alcoholic. I'm not saying that you're struggling with
50:42
your sexuality. The lady does protest too much.
50:45
What we judge most harshly in others often reflects something we haven't integrated in ourselves.
50:50
So for the next week, pay attention to what triggers your judgment.
50:54
When you catch yourself thinking or saying something harsh about another person's
50:57
choices or their behavior, get curious.
50:59
Instead of staying in judgment mode, ask yourself, why does this bother me so much?
51:03
I think about all the people that I work with that are navigating faith journeys,
51:06
faith crisis, faith deconstruction, and they can project so much of that person can't do this.
51:12
They can't just think this thing that they want or buck against the system.
51:17
The projection there is because that would mean that, wait, could I?
51:21
Because I haven't. I haven't tried to do that.
51:23
So if they're doing it, that's a me thing that I have a struggle with why they're
51:26
doing it. Let them, let them do that.
51:29
Because what if that means, oh, so actually these thoughts or feelings or emotions
51:33
or opinions that I have that I'm stuffing and that person's expressing,
51:38
man, I guess I'm kind of frustrated and angry because why couldn't I have the
51:42
courage to express my own opinions as well?
51:45
That's maybe why it bothers me so much. That might be what my reaction tells
51:49
me about my own values, my own fears, my own struggles.
51:52
And you don't have to answer the questions definitively. Just asking them and
51:56
not being as reactive and judgmental, it starts to shift something internally.
52:01
And the last one, separate your observation from your judgment.
52:04
That is such a superpower.
52:06
In my four pillars of a connected conversation, there's a pre-pillar that is
52:10
to separate observation from judgment. It's taken from the work of Marshall
52:13
Rosenberg and his book, Nonviolent Communications.
52:16
Before we can have a connection with someone, before we can have these connected
52:19
conversations, we need to distinguish between what we observe and what we interpret.
52:23
Hey, you got here at seven. We agreed on 630.
52:25
Observation. You don't respect my time and don't care about me.
52:29
Interpretation. Usually a projection.
52:31
So practice separating observation from judgment in your daily interactions.
52:34
Instead of saying you never help around the house, judgment,
52:37
try, hey, I noticed the dishes have been in the sink for a couple of days and
52:40
I'm starting to feel overwhelmed.
52:41
There's an observation plus your feeling.
52:44
Instead of you obviously don't care about the relationship, judgment,
52:48
try, we haven't had a meaningful conversation in over a week and I'm missing our connection.
52:52
An observation plus your need.
52:55
This shift will start to transform your communication. Just remember,
52:59
you are not broken. You're human.
53:02
Projection is not something wrong with you. It's not a character flaw that needs
53:04
to be fixed. It's part of being a human being.
53:06
You're not broken for seeing the world through your own lens.
53:08
Of course, you're going to see it through your own lens. That's the only way
53:10
that we can see the world.
53:11
But you can become aware of the lens. You can start to recognize when you're projecting.
53:16
You can learn to question your automatic interpretations.
53:18
And that awareness, that's emotional maturity, my friends. That is growth.
53:22
That's the difference between being controlled by your patterns and emotions
53:26
and being able to choose something different by accepting your emotions and
53:31
by accepting that these are the patterns that I've been engaging in.
53:34
Just please remember, this is the very first time you have been you going through
53:38
life as you in this very moment.
53:40
Nobody knows exactly what you're experiencing. And the same is true for your
53:44
partner, your kids, your friends, everybody around you.
53:47
They're also all going through life for the first time as themselves,
53:50
swimming in their own water, largely unaware of yours, even theirs.
53:54
It's when conflict happens and it will, instead of immediately assuming you
53:57
know what the other person meant, what they intended, why they did what they
54:01
did. Try getting curious.
54:04
Try asking instead of assuming. Try, hey, tell me more about what you're experiencing,
54:08
what you're going through, or what you just did there.
54:10
Help me understand what was happening for you instead of, here's what I think
54:13
you did, or I know exactly why you did that. Because here's the beautiful truth.
54:16
When you stop projecting your story onto other people and you start actually
54:19
getting to know their story, real connection, real intimacy is possible.
54:23
When you recognize that your partner is not deliberately trying to hurt you,
54:26
they're just swimming in different water than you are, compassion is possible.
54:29
And that compassion for yourself and for others, that's where transformation happens.
54:33
That's where relationships shift from being battlegrounds of criticism and judgment
54:37
to places of genuine understanding and curiosity.
54:41
You don't know what you don't know, but now you know about projection.
54:44
Now you know about the water you're swimming in.
54:46
Insert P joke there. And that knowledge gives you choices that you didn't have before.
54:51
So go out there, pay attention to your projections this week.
54:54
Notice when you're assuming instead of asking.
54:56
Notice when you're judging instead of being curious.
54:58
Notice when you're certain about someone else's intentions. And when you catch
55:01
yourself, because you will, do not beat yourself up about it. Just notice it.
55:05
Say to yourself, aha, projection, fascinating, interesting, and then choose something different.
55:11
This is the work and you're doing it. And I'm proud of you for being here,
55:14
for being willing to look at all of this stuff, for being willing to grow.
55:18
Thanks for joining me on my journey that I'm projecting all over you guys on the virtual couch.
55:23
So until next time, taking us out per usual, the wonderful, the talented Aurora Florence.
55:28
Her song. It's wonderful because I promise you life really can be quite wonderful.
55:32
Stay curious about the water you're swimming in.
55:35
Insert P joke there. Take care, everybody.