ARE YOU PROJECTING?

One-sidedness is a problem.

Projection is natural. We all do it.

When someone holds you in a negative or idealized projection, it’s like being buried alive. All the possibilities and complexities of your humanness are reduced to a fixed sentence.

We divide the world into good and bad people because it is far easier than recognizing that all of these qualities live somewhere within us too.

Here are signs you may be projecting onto someone:

• You become locked into a story about someone and refuse to consider any contradictory information, especially from them directly.

• You idealize someone and cannot tolerate seeing their flaws.

• You carry dozens of unspoken expectations about who someone should be, and feel deeply hurt or enraged when they fail to meet those expectations.

• You can only love someone when they are struggling, but their joy or success secretly irritates you. Or conversely, you can only tolerate them when they are successful and upbeat, but disappear when they fall apart.

• You blame someone else for your inability to move forward, love fully, or succeed in what you set out to do

• You refuse to acknowledge someone’s growth because it disrupts your narrative of who they are.

• You cannot tolerate another person’s mistakes because you need them to be infallible to maintain your fantasy of them.

• You repeatedly assume malicious intent without asking clarifying questions or allowing for complexity.

• You feel emotionally addicted to proving someone wrong, bad, selfish, toxic, or superior.

• You secretly envy qualities in another person that you openly criticize or mock.

*You refuse to meet with someone in person to withdraw projections and deal with the messy truths.

*You collect conspirators to buoy your perspective and help you spread negative rumors.

How do we work with projection once we know we are projecting?

First you can just give yourself a big hug and admit you are using another person to deny your own pain and flaws, or your undeveloped attributes,

Over and over again, we must reclaim the parts of ourselves we have splattered onto others.

For example: People tell me often how generous I am, but I know also I can be incredibly selfish. People tell me how helpful I am but I have also been very reckless and unhelpful. We are made up of all things dark and light and knowing that spares others from carrying our disowned parts.

Ask yourself:

What quality in this person most activates me?
Where does this quality live in me?
What need, fear, longing, or wound might be underneath my reaction?
What would it mean to hold a more complex and human view of both them and myself?

Maturity is not seeing people as all good or all bad.
It is learning to tolerate contradiction, complexity, disappointment, humanity, and change in yourself and others.

Starting to unbind yourself from splitting whole people into simplified good or bad parts, is a radical act of world soul tending.

TELL ME IF THIS ARTICLE HELPS
I am needy and I am detached……..

LOVE J