Projection And Your Relationships
What is "projection"?
Projection is very basic and it's something we do all the time. It's taking something we feel about ourselves that's lousy and pushing it, projecting it, onto someone else. You might say 'that person's an idiot' when your feeling dumb; you might say 'you know that person doesn't know how to relate to people', when you're feeling insecure and so on.
How can projection affect my romantic relationships?
Often, we project things onto our partners, and then we come to believe those things about our partners, even though they're really self-reflection; they're really things we think about ourselves. We can make ourselves miserable with the things we ascribe to our partners, things that they really don't deserve.
What is "projective identification"?
Projective identification is a lot more involved than projection, because you're making someone feel something by projection it onto them. It's like if you tell your spouse often enough, "you have no idea what you're doing," and they come to believe they are incompetent, you have projectively identified. If you do that often enough, you can keep terrible feelings about yourself at bay by projecting them into someone else so that they feel them and you can keep looking at them and saying "see, they're the one with the problem." The reality is, however, that you've created a problem for them, and you haven't dealt with it in yourself.
How can projective identification affect my choice of a romantic partner?
Projective identification comes into play when we're looking for partners, even though it's unconscious. You don't go out saying," I want to find someone who I can make feel lousy on some level." You go out looking for someone who you think is going to meet your conscious needs, but unconsciously you'll recognize some fault or insecurity that you can kind of exploit within them.
