Discover Your Psychological Projection

Psychological Projection

What is psychological projection?  Who you think you are; your self-image, ego or id as Sigmund Freud called it is OK with being some things but not OK with being others.  The ego ‘breathes’ by virtue of believing you are an object that is separate from the rest of the world.

In actual fact you are not separate, you are not an object and you are not one particular way.

In order to feel remotely in charge of your life, the ego that you think you are employs a range of strategies and techniques to..

1.  persist the illusion that you are as you think you are

2.  allow you to reduce some of the pain and anxiety

One such strategy is to have you throw a whole lot of assumptions and labels at the people who appear in your awareness.

Pressure at Work

One example that I can give you from first hand experience is feeling that I was coming under pressure from senior people at work.  When I really looked within at the patterns of thoughts I was running and my attitude I could see that I was putting myself under pressure because I had expectations and an aversion to stress.

Yes I needed to work through it but I myself wanted to get it done because;

– I don’t like people waiting for work from me so I rush through it with urgency so I can then feel free again.

– I want people to be happy and impressed with me.

Instead of seeing this clearly and accepting that I myself was creating pressure to get the work done, I projected the source of the pressure onto senior people at work.

Instead of looking deeply within to see the true cause, the self simply finds someone outside of you to attribute the cause.

Assumptions

Next time you are interacting with someone notice how much mind-reading you really do.  What you are doing is assuming you know something about them and about the way they are thinking.  You will be wrong.

Whatever you think is true about their thoughts will be a projection of a thought or attitude that is held by you.

1. Notice you are assuming things about them

2. Be curious about why you are assuming these things

I recall being in a supermarket and a man spilled some peanuts or something similar from the bulk bin dispensers over the floor.  He was obviously embarrassed but he started angrily lecturing me as I walked by saying ‘ everyone makes mistakes, you make mistakes, she makes mistakes…”.

He projected onto me some thought or attitude.  He thought I was thinking he was incompetent or a fool or stupid or something.  In reality I was quite oblivious and couldn’t care and had only compassion and understanding for what had happened.

Once you see that these projections actually originate from within your psyche just notice that it does.  You don’t need to do anything else.

You see the ego cannot play out it’s strategies with the light of your watching on it.  Awareness is transformational.  Bring consciousness to everything you do and everything you feel and everything you think is true about others.  Your ego’s tendency for using psychological projection will drop away leaving you present and calm and loving.