Copyright 2004-2005 Catherine Shehorn, Ph.D.
All Rights Reserved
Email: CAS54115@aol.com

What is projection? Projection is a defense mechanism. Defense mechanisms are strategies we adopt/develop to help us cope with stress, from the stresses of day-to-day life to the severe stress of trauma. Many defense mechanisms help us protect ourselves from emotional and physical pain during chronic and/or episodic severe stress. Some defense mechanisms can be healthy like using humor to diffuse a tense situation. Projection is an unhealthy defense mechanism because it involves a distorted perception of reality that
interferes with taking responsibility for and solving a person's own problems. In projection, a person projects or attributes his or her own unacceptable feelings, thoughts, and impulses to another person.

A classic example of projection is the battering spouse who tells his or her partner, "It's your fault that I hit you. If you'd known that I wanted hamburgers instead of hot dogs for supper, I wouldn't have had to hit you. If you weren't so stupid, I wouldn't have had to hit
you," rather than taking ownership of his or her own feelings of rage, frustration, powerlessness, etc. Defense mechanisms tend to operate on an unconscious level; we typically aren't aware that we're using them. In contrast, coping strategies tend to be healthy behaviors and ways of thinking that we learn and consciously choose to use to manage stress.

It's fairly common for my therapy clients to project unfinished issues with their parents onto me. Sometimes clients believe I'll reject them if they disagree with me or express anger toward me because a parent rejected them for expressing these feelings. One of my clients has complicated feelings of grief, love and anger at her mother who committed suicide when my client was 12. Sometimes in her therapy sessions, this woman rages at me. We've worked hard to help her understand where her rage comes from. It was a breakthrough when she showed up with a brown paper bag one day and handed it to me. In the bag was a plastic hard hat with "Doc" written on a piece of paper and taped to the front of the hat. She said, "Doc, I know I'm hard on you sometimes. This is for those days when I'm out of control." It was her way of using humor to acknowledge that she projects her anger at her mother onto me sometimes. As she grows more aware of why she does this, she needs to do it less often. As she allows herself to grieve for her mother's suicide, her need to project those unresolved feelings through rage (guess what's almost always under rage like this woman's-sadness, hurt, loss, grief) diminishes as well.

Bosses, managers, supervisors, teachers, and other leaders/authority figures often become the targets of the projections of their employees, students, apprentices, etc. An employee or student may initially idealize the boss or teacher, projecting the "good parent" they wished they'd had onto the authority figure. When the employee/student is corrected, receives constructive criticism, or is disciplined by the boss/teacher, the employee/student becomes a hurt child who takes this feedback as an indictment of his or her value as a person. The boss/teacher goes from being the idealized "good parent" to being devalued as the "bad parent" who victimizes and abuses the student/employee.

The employee/student is no longer operating from his or her "competent adult" self, but is now operating from his or her "hurt, angry child" self. He or she may withdraw from the boss/teacher in fear and suppressed anger or rage at the boss/teacher, unable to see
this authority figure as anything but an abuser. When a relationship comes to a stalemate like this, little can be done to salvage it because the employee/student is stuck in a distorted reality. He or she is unable to see the boss/teacher as he or she really is, nor is the student/employee able to see his or her part in the conflict and insists on making him or herself the boss/teacher's victim (a distortion of reality). This relationship doesn't serve either party because it only replays unfinished dramas and it doesn't promote growth, healing or productivity.

Here's another story that's an example of projection. There was a little girl who was in the fifth grade. Her teacher noticed that the child seemed sad and withdrawn and one day the teacher saw bruises on the child's arm. The teacher asked the little girl to stay after class one day and the teacher asked the little girl about the bruises. The little girl began to cry and flew into the teacher's arms. As the child's sobs subsided, she told the teacher her story.

A year before the little girl's mother's had left the family to pursue another relationship. Since that time the little girl's father had become angry and abusive. He was verbally and physically abusive to the little girl and told her it was because "you're just like your mother." The little girl looked like her mother and had many of her mother's facial expressions and personality traits. The little girl became the target of her father's anger at her mother/his wife for leaving them. Instead of dealing with his anger and grief over losing his wife, this man was projecting his feelings about his wife and her abandonment of him onto his daughter. This prevented both the man and his daughter from doing the work of grieving over the loss of their wife and mother. Further, the father's abuse of his daughter inflicted more trauma on the child and diminished him as a person.

When this man was confronted about his behavior toward his daughter, initially he was surprised at the idea that he was taking his anger at his wife out on his daughter. When he became conscious/aware of what he was doing, his abuse of his daughter ceased. He was able to support his daughter in mourning the loss of her mother and he was able to begin doing his own anger and grief work over the loss of his wife and her betrayal of him. At the time the father was raging at and physically hurting his daughter, he believed that his daughter's demeanor and behavior precipitated his actions. In the moment, the person who is projecting his feelings onto someone else believes that what he is thinking and feeling about the other person is reality; he doesn't realize that his reality is distorted.

Projection is about looking outside yourself for someone or something to blame for your pain. Projection in the extreme is the primary defense used by those suffering from paranoia. We tend to project the parts of ourselves that frighten us or that we deny/don't accept. Where do these scary or unacceptable parts of us come from?

Many times the parts of ourselves that we project come from old tapes (psychoanalysts would call these "tapes" introjects-typically of parents/primary caregivers) that play in our heads and tell us what's wrong with us, how we've failed, how we're likely to fail. Many times these tapes may be the words and/or beliefs of our parents or other authority figures from our past. The things that tend to trip us up are negative messages we received about ourselves, unrealistic expectations that were put on us, or what we were told we could expect from life (almost always negative). They may be things we were told about why we were hurt/rejected/abused/etc. (how it was our fault). Instead of taking these things out into the light and looking at them to see if there's any truth or usefulness to them, to diffuse the power they have over us, and to grieve them and let them go, we hold on to them and hide them away out of a fear that these awful things we believe about ourselves and about life are really true.

But the awful things don't go away just because we hide or deny them. Interactions and events in the present trigger feelings and memories from old traumas and/or set off old tapes. As a result we feel emotional pain. We can react to this pain in a number of ways. We may look for its cause outside ourselves and believe the pain is really just about now, so we look for someone in our present world to blame for our pain. That's projection.

Projection is the opposite of taking responsibility for yourself, your feelings, your choices, and your baggage. Projection is also about giving away your power. Another way we may deal with emotional pain that is triggered for us in our current lives is to go inside, ask ourselves questions like "Is my pain too big for this situation?" or "When have I felt this pain in the past?" or "How old do I feel inside?" (to help you understand what past trauma this pain is from) so that we can understand and own our pain, feel it, grieve it, and let it go. We need to be able to deal with our pain in a healthy, productive, responsible way rather than projecting it onto someone else, because when we project, we don't see the other person and we don't see ourselves. Projection gets in the way of having healthy relationships in the present and it is unfair to the person on whom we're projecting.

When I work with clients in therapy, we deal with the underlying feelings and thoughts that predicate the need for the defense mechanisms such as projection. Once the old trauma issues have been resolved instead of avoided, the feelings have been felt and let go, and the thoughts have been changed to healthy, adaptive ways of thinking, the need for defense mechanisms falls away. When we deal with our pain, we don't need to protect ourselves from our pain. We can feel it, grieve it and let it go.

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