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'Why are you projecting yourself on me?' - Trinidad and Tobago Newsday

Kanisa George

EVERY difficult or traumatising experience we face has the potential to alter our existence in ways we scarcely stop to consider.

Even inconveniences of minute relevance can set in motion a series of emotional hurdles that subconsciously disrupt our stability. When emotional discord is left unchallenged, a floodgate of negative emotions may consequently rise to the surface, rendering us helpless to its voracity.

Try as we might, if we fail to keep things in check, our propensity to manifest negative attitudes can easily flourish and become evident in how we treat ourselves and how we interact with and treat others.

It is virtually impossible to extricate our emotional state from our opinions or viewpoints as our internal compass, which dictates our external direction, is firmly linked to our emotions.

Beyond that, being swept up by a torrent of complex or challenging-to-navigate emotions creates room for us to place those negative, often unwanted emotions onto others.

When we trigger our unconscious defence mechanisms by use of psychological projection, we involuntarily disown an unacceptable part of ourselves and attribute it to someone else.

'Projection is a psychological defence mechanism that distorts our perception of reality. It involves displacing our feelings, thoughts, tendencies, fears, and insecurities onto others to protect ourselves.'

Author and licensed clinical social worker Karen R Koenig likens projecting to a self-denial exercise. She notes that projecting something you don't like about yourself onto someone else protects you from having to acknowledge those parts of yourself.

It's a way to manage discomfort by focusing attention on others and shifting energy away from the parts of yourself you either refuse to confront or aren't courageous enough to evaluate.

It can also protect against the fear of the unknown, creating a sense of stasis that can stall development and growth. Psychologists Carl Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz observed that people project archetypal ideas onto things they don't understand as a natural response to the desire for a more predictable and clearly patterned world.

A lot of the internal conflict we experience but are unable to face doesn't just sit within us waiting to be released. Thus, we unconsciously use self-imposed isolation and projection to decrease our internal stress and protect internal conflicts from manifesting.

Incidentally, many of us don't realise that projection is learnt behaviour. Most of us, especially in our infancy stages, were on the receiving end of our parent's fears, insecurities and pain. To shield us from perceived harm or disappointment fuelled by their misgivings, parents or the adults in our lives tapped into projection without realising its impact.

As we move into adulthood, many of us develop our own fears and insecurities that we are often ill-equipped to manage, so we usually do what we know best.

Projection is one of many defence mechanisms that all healthy people will e

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