Projection

• She’s angry, she accuses me of being angry.
• She’s lazy, she accuses me of being lazy.
• She starts an argument, she accuses me of starting it.

Projection is where the narcissist accuses you of:

• Doing the bad things that they actually did themselves.
• Feeling the bad feelings that they actually feel themselves.

My wife continually accuses me of “being in a mood” when she’s in a mood. She accuses me of being hostile to her while being hostile to me. She accuses me of being selfish while being selfish. She has even accused me of damaging a door handle when it was blatantly obvious that she had damaged it herself.

I can relate

I’m pretty sure I project, but I think my projections are rose-tented. Specifically, I think I have a tendency to paint everything with positive optimism. As a result I think I fail to see the reality. In the case of my marriage I think it prevented me from seeing the horror show that was the reality.
You know how you pass the drunk on the street and instead of seeing a horrible person you start to wonder if he’s really a nice guy behind it all. “Ah, he’s probably harmless” you try to convince your unimpressed friend… or is that just me? hmmmm…

Or when you think that the gardner with the postgraduate degree in medicine who hardly talks to you is really a very nice person talking some time out of his otherwise sophisticated career. You don’t like to think about the possibility he may be gardening due to having served time in prison for something. Or, again, is that just me?

That’s me projecting my nice happy view of the world on people I don’t even know. My opposite narcissist does the opposite. She projects her horrible nonsense onto me and everybody else.

I’ve actually ended up in arguments with my wife defending people I didn’t even know. We were both projecting our own views and biases.

Consequences

• I’m continually accused of things I didn’t do.
• We end up in arguments.
• Attempts to use logic and reason to make my case in the argument are completely futile. I might as well be talking to the wall.
• It contaminates empathy. The person projecting is essentially leaking emotion, they end up reading their own emotions and mistaking it for empathy.
• Projecting distorts a persons perception of reality which is of course the very definition of any mental illness.

Any of that sound familiar?

Confessions

Projections are often confessions. Pay attention.