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hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here today on this channel we are talking about projecting so we are doing Shadow week on this channel which is all about getting in touch with the
Heidi Priebe explains how to recognize projecting your insecurities onto others, and how the meaning we attach to traits, not the traits themselves, is what we project.
Key Takeaways
- Projection happens when we attribute unspoken judgments to others, usually reflecting our own repressed insecurities.
- The meaning we assign to a trait is usually the thing we project, not the trait itself.
- Journaling about objective facts and the meanings attached to them can reveal projections.
- Vulnerable, honest communication reduces projection and fosters genuine connection.
What the video covers
- Projection is attributing your own thoughts or judgments to others when they have not explicitly expressed them.
- Projection often arises when we repress parts of ourselves, such as the gap between our current self and our idealized self.
- Signs of projecting include strong beliefs about others' judgments without explicit feedback, hiding parts of yourself out of fear of judgment, and resentment toward imagined thoughts.
- Feedback that is explicit and direct is not a projection; the key distinction is whether the judgment was actually stated.
- The truth usually lies between what we think others think and what they actually think, with overlap increasing as we know someone better.
- What we often project is not the objective fact but the meaning we attach to it, such as 'I'm ugly, therefore I'll never find love.'
- Different people can derive entirely different meanings from the same trait, such as rough-around-the-edges looks being seen as authentic.
- A journaling exercise: write an objective belief, complete 'and that means...', and list the meanings you attach to it to uncover projections.
- Projections often mask deeper insecurities, and examining them reveals internal blocks worth working on.
- Honest, vulnerable communication about where we are and where we want to go lets others respond to the real person rather than our projections.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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parts of ourselves that we have repressed from our conscious awareness and when we repress something from our conscious awareness we usually encounter it in other ways so rather than thinking about ourselves in a certain light we might start obsessively thinking that
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somebody else is thinking of us that way and that's kind of the working definition of a projection that we're going to be using today now we project things all the time onto other people this is just part of Being Human but
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today what I want to work specifically with is the experience of projecting our insecurities onto other people insecurities kind of represent the gap between where we are in life and where we would like to be or in other language
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the gap between who we are and the kind of idealized version of ourselves that we might have inside our own heads and sometimes it can be really difficult for us to reckon with what's inside of that Gap so the ways in which we're
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disappointing ourselves or letting ourselves down or not living up to what we believe to be our true potential and when we find that stuff really difficult to accept or to face what we often do is surround ourselves with people who we
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believe are making those negative judgments about us and then start to grow resentful of them for the judgments that we have decided they're making about us now I also want to be clear that a projection ceases to be a
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projection if someone has given us very objective explicit and direct feedback on that thing and now that's why we believe that they're thinking what they're thinking so if someone comes up to me and says hey I think you're ugly
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and stupid I'm not projecting onto them if I think that they think I'm ugly and stupid but if I decide this person thinks I'm ugly and stupid despite them not ever saying that to me then what I'm doing is projecting So today we're going
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to be talking about how to recognize when you're projecting as well as how to break our projections down to really understand what's going on with them so we'll just start out with a quick rundown of signs that you might be
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projecting on to somebody so pretty much anytime you have a very strong strong belief that someone thinks a certain thing about you or holds a certain judgment about you that they have not explicitly stated to you there's projection going on another sign you
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might notice that's a bit more subtle in your own behavior that might indicate you're projecting onto somebody is you notice yourself starting to hide or obscure certain parts of yourself when you're around someone because you're afraid that if they see certain parts of
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you they're going to judge those parts so you might start becoming really avoidant or defensive around certain topics when they come up even if the other person is not expressing explicit judgment towards you around those topics and a third sign that we're likely doing
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some projecting is anytime we start noticing ourselves feeling highly resentful towards someone based on something we are imagining them to be thinking about us which is once again different from having resentment around something someone actually said to us
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it's definitely production if we're angry at them for a thought that we assume them to be having without us having confirmed that they actually have that thought so when we break down projections there is one kind of immediate impulse that I think comes up
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for pretty much everybody which is am I projecting or am I right right it can be hard to know am I accurately picking up on what I think someone is judging me for or am I projecting my own beliefs
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outward onto that person when really they don't have that judgment about me at all and if we're being really honest with ourselves I think that the truth is usually somewhere in the middle so there's kind of a Venn diagram between
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what we think someone is thinking of us and what they're actually thinking of us and the better we know someone the more likely those diagrams are to overlap neatly but the less we know someone the more we're probably getting wrong but
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there's a third factor that I think is really important to take into account which is what I want to spend the rest of this video honing in on which is that often what we're projecting on to people is not an objective piece of information
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it's the meaning that we think they are making out of the information and that meaning that we believe someone is making out of a piece of information is always coming directly from us so to illustrate what I mean by that I will
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give you a couple of examples let's say you have some physical feature that you have decided is unattractive and maybe you have found a way to justify this by going online and reading all of the studies about what human beings find
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attractive and you've decided nope I am right this physical feature is unattractive and everybody's going to think so now I believe that's probably not true I don't think there are any physical features that every single member of the human race would find
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unattractive but let's say that were true let's say you were actually right and you do have a certain physical feature that every single person who ever met you is going to find unattractive the thing you're projecting might not be the feeling of I'm ugly it
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might be all of the meaning that you make around that statement so you might decide I'm ugly air go I will never find love I'm ugly Ergo everybody is pitying me I'm ugly air go everybody is disgusted by me when in reality even if
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you were right about the fact that you are the one person on Earth who is ugly to everybody you would not be right about the meaning that other people are making out of that characteristic there are a lot of people who kind of like
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people who look a little rough around the edges they might find a conventionally less attractive appearance to be the thing that makes someone interesting maybe you're sitting across from someone on a first date who thinks the fact that you look a little
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rough around the edges is a great signifier that you're not particularly Vain and maybe vanity is the number one thing they don't want in a partner people can make all sorts of different meanings out of the same thing so what
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we want to look at here is the meaning that we're making out of what we're projecting and a quick kind of journaling exercise that can help you get to the root of this is just writing down the thing that you believe to be
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objectively true so that can be something like I am under qualified applied for the job that I'm applying to or I'm in x amount of debt or I have X physical characteristic that I think is unattractive and then complete the
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sentence with and that means dot dot dot and then write as many things as you can immediately think of that come up when you try to make meaning out of what that thing you're insecure about is so maybe
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I'm applying for a job and I am truly underqualified I literally do not meet the qualifications for the job and somebody else who I know is applying is overqualified for the position or perfectly qualified for it I might make
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that mean that I'm not going to get the job when in reality I don't know exactly what this company's decision making criteria is when it comes to hiring so I might sit down and write I am under qualified and that means dot dot dot I'm
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not going to get the job I'm not going to get any job I shouldn't even bother applying if they offer me an interview I shouldn't go I'm not just noticing the objective criteria of my qualifications I'm making a ton of meaning around it
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and that meaning is likely what I'm going to be projecting onto the person interviewing me if let's say I get an interview maybe what that person is looking for is someone who is a little bit under qualified because they want
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someone who's coachable and adaptable and can be flexible in their position maybe they found that in the past when they hire candidates who are overqualified there tends to be higher turnover maybe there are things like attitude or company culture fit that are
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much more important to the person doing the hiring than your technical qualifications so the meaning that you are making out of you being under qualified might not at all be accurate to the meaning the other person makes out of the same objective information
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which is you being under qualified so even if you're totally aligned on what you believe is an objective fact like I'm in x amount of debt or I haven't achieved X Y or Z things in my career or
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I have a certain body part that looks a certain way you might be really misaligned on the and that means part of things you might make a whole bunch bunch of meaning out of these things while other people are making totally
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different meaning out of it and that's the part that gets interesting is looking not just at what we think people have objectively noticed about us but what we think they are making that mean often that's a very direct Gateway into
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what we are making that thing mean so remember there is one point in my life where I developed really strong limerence around this person who was in my social group and I remember telling myself the story that they would never
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want to date me because I'd seen them go through a couple of relationships and all of the women they had dated in the past had a very specific body type and it was not similar to my body type so I
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made this whole story in my head that despite myself and this other person getting along super well there was never a world in which they would want to date me and I had all of these criticisms very alive in my brain of what they were
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probably thinking about someone who looked more like me and then I remember going out with them one day and running into someone who it turned out was their ex and this woman was absolutely gorgeous wonderful person and she had my
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exact body type and I remember walking away from that interaction and going well maybe they broke up because he didn't really like the way she looked so I asked a little bit about the relationship and he was like yeah I was
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always way more into her than she was into me I really wish that that had worked out but it ended because she ghosted me and I remember this feeling of almost annoyance coming online like I didn't want him to be attracted to that
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girl because that meant there was the capacity for him to be attracted to me and now I had to deal with the fact that there was something else in the way of me wanting to be with this person and
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wanting to pursue them romantically like I had to go home and grapple with the fact that I'm deeply afraid of intimacy which is my least favorite thing to have to Grapple with because it's so real it is so much easier for me to just project
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superficial reasons onto other people around why they wouldn't want to be with me than it was for me at that time to actually be in my emotional myself and pursue what I wanted in a vulnerable way so sometimes when we reclaim our
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projections we find out that they're actually a front for something deeper and harder for us to Grapple with other times we find out that there are just ways in which we're not happy with ourselves that we actually don't want
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other people to accept us for either so another example of this is there was someone I got close to a long time ago who I remember I found particularly interesting because they had such an interesting job in my eyes so I made the
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subjective value judgment that they had this really cool career they'd work themselves into a really interesting position and there was so much that I felt like I could learn from that person but every time I brought up this
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person's career to them when we were hanging out socially I felt like I was bumping up against a kind of defensive energy and they would immediately start talking about the different career that they were working towards and the
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different objectives that they had and they would start kind of putting down the position that they were in in their current job and after this happened a number of times I was like okay I'm gonna try addressing this so I just went
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hey I think that your work is really interesting but I'm getting the sense that you don't really want to talk about it am I right about that or am I wrong about that and I will never forget this
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they looked at me and said I don't want you to think that I'm a loser and I was genuinely floored by that statement because that was one of those rare scenarios where that Venn diagram of things that I was thinking about them
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and things that they were thinking I was thinking about them was just two circles I thought they were super cool and their career was really interesting but they had made this value judgment about their career that it was uninteresting and
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they were uncool for working the job that they were working so we shared the same objective piece of information which is that we both knew what their job was but they had made it mean something completely different than I
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had made it mean and the more I got to know this person and the more I spoke to them I started to get a bigger picture of what kind of work they wanted to be doing and what kind of impact they
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wanted to be making on the world world and I realized that by their own standards this person was considering themselves to be a loser because they weren't doing the work that they thought they should be doing in the world but
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instead of owning that as their self-judgment they would go around projecting it onto other people and assuming that everybody was looking at them and thinking what a big loser when in reality I didn't know anyone who thought that of this person but I
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thought that that experience served as a really good example of what happens when we feel we are not fulfilling our potential the act of Love of getting really close to someone whether that is in a platonic relationship a romantic
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relationship a family relationship whatever it is it the act of being seen for who we are and accepted for who we are but if we don't want to accept who we are or where we're at and we make
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some sort of meaning that's highly negative about where we're at might be really difficult to welcome in genuine love if we need people to always see us as the idealized vision of ourselves that we have in the future we're always
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going to experience a sense of disconnection from people because people cannot mirror back to us that which we are not they can of course mirror back to us our fantasies but that's not going to be a healthy or reality-based
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relationship but the flip side of this is not just somebody mirroring all of the things we hate about ourselves back to us if we can integrate and come to terms with the fact that there are things we don't like about ourselves
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things maybe we judge ourselves for because we have not yet actualized on something that we believe it would be truly fulfilling for us to actualize on that's part of what we can share with someone instead of getting defensive
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anytime they notice that that's not our current state we can talk to people both about where we're at and about where we'd like to get to and about the parts of ourselves that we're not super happy with right now and that's the kind of
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thing that Fosters true deep Intimacy in connections sharing things like our insecurities with other people and giving them the chance in real life to reject us for them if they are going to that's a very vulnerable act and that
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vulnerability is the kind of stuff that real deep connections can get built on if the other person is ready to meet us there but in order to Foster those types of intimate connections what we need to get comfortable doing is putting down
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the meaning that we make around all of those things if I decide I need x amount of money in order for someone to want to date me I'm never giving myself the opportunity to go on a date with someone
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figure out if that's something that matters to them and then find out if we could be a match or not but let's say I absorb and integrate my own insecurity around not having a certain amount of money then I can go on a date and say
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hey here's what I do here's what I earn and here's the direction I'm really interested in moving in here's what excites me about earning more money or here's this side hustle that I'm really curious about or I would like to earn
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more money but I haven't really figured out how to do it yet and right now what's more important to me is balancing my mental health or my family life or whatever it is but now we're giving someone the opportunity to actually
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connect with us because we've owned our insecurities instead of deciding that they're thinking those things about us and we're actually offering someone the chance to connect with us on those insecurities instead of just distancing ourselves from both our insecurities and
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other people by virtue of us projecting those insecurities onto them when I think back to that friend I had who was so insecure about their job I remember thinking about it after we had that initial conversation and going well it's
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not really just their job that I was interested in when it came to getting to know them and wanting to get to know them better it was also the type of person who would find themselves in that field of work I was curious about what
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drove them what motivated them what interested them in the work that they had done and I remember thinking that the type of person who had done the work that they had done was likely just the kind of person who I would be curious
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about period it didn't matter to me if they completely abandoned their line of work and chose a new one what was interesting to me was the person behind the actions and what kind of qualities and substance made that person up and at
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the end of the day that's usually what we're looking for when it comes to human connection we're looking to figure out who is the person behind all of this and all of those inner tensions and the gaps between where we are and where we're
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trying to get to are what's interesting about a person a person with no tension in their life or in their inner world is like a TV show with no plot nothing's moving in any direction so a lot of the
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time the things that were the most afraid people are going to perceive in us are actually the things that make us the most human Ergo the most interesting but if we pre-decide we're going to be rejected for something what we're often
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doing is coming into the situation with really weird energy if I think I'm unattractive and I go on a date with someone who I've decided in my head thinks that I'm unattractive I'm probably not going to be approaching
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them with a lot of warmth because I'm already mad at them inside my own mind for what I think they're thinking about me despite the fact that they might think I'm very attractive or the physical qualities I'm judging myself
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for might mean almost nothing to them maybe they're attracted to me for completely different reasons but then if I go in and give off this weird defensive energy I'm probably going to kill any chance of some sort of
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meaningful Vibe developing between us same goes for going into a job interview and deciding that they're not going to give you the job because of some criteria that you think makes you disqualifiable for it maybe what they're looking for is just confidence and
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flexibility and those are the two things you're definitely not going to bring with you into the interview if you've already decided in your head that you're going to get rejected so at the end of the day I really like the principle of
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just letting external rejections happen externally if they're gonna happen think about how different your life would be if you decided I'm not going to pre-reject myself for things I'm going to go ahead and let other people reject me that is often how people get things
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that everybody else is baffled by right they decide that if this is a no for somebody else I'm going to let them actually say no to me but I'm going to try for the job the relationship whatever it is that I want and if it's a
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yes for the other person then great we both win but living in this way is scary because a lot of us get something out of externalizing our projection it's hard for us to accept what we don't like about ourselves the things we're judging
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ourselves for and or the deeper wounds that we're bearing underneath our self-judgments but the more we open ourselves up to the process of getting really clear on what meaning we're making out of these things that we believe other people are already or will
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reject us for the more clear we get on where we have those internal blocks and then we can use what we find to figure out is this either an area that I want to do Growth work in or is this an area
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that I would like to accept myself for or is this insecurity hiding a deeper insecurity maybe it feels easier for me to believe that I'm going to be rejected based on my looks than it is to believe that someone could get to know me and
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just go yeah I don't like you that much I don't like your personality so a lot of the time the hard part is not ceasing to project onto other people it's being willing to accept that the things and
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the judgment events that we project onto others are actually judgments we have internally that we need to spend some genuine time with unpacking but the more we can do that the more we learn about ourselves and the more we're working
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with honest information because we're getting at the core of what's really happening for us all right that's all I have to say for today on the topic of projecting our insecurities onto other people and I want to be clear
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insecurities are not the only thing that we project outwards so not everything that we're projecting is an insecurity not every insecurity is something we project but this does tend to be a really common one for a lot of people so
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it felt worthwhile to address it during Shadow week as always let me know what you guys are thinking feeling experiencing as you go through this video I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other
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and I will see you back here again really soon thank you [Music]
Topics:projectioninsecurityself-awarenessshadow workpsychologyself-improvementrelationshipsHeidi Priebemental healthjournaling
