Episode #70 

Projection In Relationship Conflicts

What is Projection?

Is it affecting your relationships?

What can you do about it?

And why is worth the effort to resolve?

Join Dr Julie as she looks at the strong role projection can play in relationship conflicts and how CBT tools can help you identify problem areas and improve your relationships.

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Full Episode Transcript

Hi, and welcome to My CBT Podcast!

My name is Dr. Julie Osborn, I'm a Doctor of Psychology and a licensed clinical social worker specializing in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and I'm here to bring CBT into your life and teach you some tools to make things just a little better each day day.

So thanks for joining me. So I always like to start off with the email that I received from my listeners, which as always I really appreciate.

This from Suzanne. She just says:

“Honestly, you've helped me beyond measure. I listen all the way from the UK and recommend your podcast to everyone and be much Kinder to myself and working on my club. So thanks for that, Suzanne.”

And I appreciate you sharing. The more people I can reach, the better and hopefully can help. So today I was going to talk about relationship conflicts, and it's not just about intimate relationships. I'm going to address that as well. But I want you to think about any relationships that you're in as I talk about this, and I talk about the tools that you can use and how CBT can help.

And it's a little different than some of my other relationship podcasts. So keep an open mind. And I thought it would be a really good one to share. So relationships are seldom as simple as we'd like them to be. First of all right, because they bring out our needs, our anxieties and conflicts with people from our past, which include our parents, our friends and our former partners.

So we sometimes bring baggage into new relationships. And we may think we don't have any, but just being in a relationship will bring up our stuff. But the beauty of that is within the relationship. If it's healthy, you guys can work through it together. So you just want to be mindful of that.

Normally, when we enter a relationship, we expect to be loved for just being who we are. And a relationship should provide a safe zone where your partner values you for expressing your own uniqueness. This seems like it's simple expectation. And indeed, this is the way most relationships do start out. So then we always say, why, then does it seem so hard to maintain this ideal, blissful state of unconditional love over time?

Remember, I have a different view regarding unconditional love, which I only give to parentchild relationships. We do have conditions, and we need to have conditions within our relationship of partnership. We are talking about intimate partnerships, and everybody wants this unconditional love kind of this fantasy, but we need to have conditions, right? So we could have good boundaries. We have safety, those kind of things.

So I just wanted to throw that out there. But our relationship with our partners are definitely colored by our own personal legacies. And I know a lot of times people come in the therapist like, I don't want to talk about my childhood. I'm like, we don't have to, but at some point, some things might come up, and we want some insight on why do I keep repeating this behavior? Why do I keep picking unhealthy partners?

Why do I keep putting up with bad behavior with friends or coworkers? Right. So we're not going to jump into the whole childhood thing, but just to be mindful, there's no way that your life today is not affected by your past because we are affected by everything that we go through and how we process it and work it out is going to affect our day to day and hopefully a lot of the good things, a lot of your values, your morals, what's important to you was probably created also in your past when you were growing up with your taught as a child.

So it's all good stuff, and we just need to acknowledge that. But a lot of times we act to our partners as if they were someone else, and this will likely cause conflict in the relationship.

So when I say someone else like you're reacting to your partner like they're your dad or your mother when they're not and how we perceive our partners is influenced by how we learned to deal with other people in the past. And as I said, this process can go back into early childhood, even to infancy. So our earliest primary attachment is to a caretaker, your mother, your father, or perhaps another adult can have an effect on how we deal with other people for the rest of our lives.

So to give you an example, if your early experiences taught you not to trust in the world, for example, if your earliest experiences taught you to trust in the world, then you'll be more likely to take a trusting attitude toward people throughout your life. Conversely, if you were never shown love during the earliest stages of your life, it may be challenging during adulthood to learn how to experience and express love.

Early experiences in childhood can have a powerful effect later on. And this is another strong argument for treating children well and really being mindful what you say to your children, your nephews and nieces, people that are in your life. Children experience both good and bad in the world, right? That's normal. And plenty of good experiences like love and trust feel comfortable and produce a positive self image in children a positive way of defining themselves.

So bad experiences, though, create feelings of conflict and frustration. The negative experiences all go into the self definition of who that child eventually sees themselves and how they develop, and they don't feel compatible with the more positive feelings. So according to one theory, the child projects them onto someone else. So projection means finding in someone else the qualities that you don't want to accept within yourself. Like blaming your partner for being controlling when you're the one has the tendency who wants to control.

So let me read the definition again, because we're going to focus a lot on projection, which I was saying, this is kind of a twist to the relationship part that I wanted to share with you guys. So projection means finding and someone else the qualities that you don't want to accept within yourself. So let me talk more about that to get understanding and really take time as you're listening to do some good insight work to see if there's something that I'm doing. And they say if somebody's behavior drives you nuts, there's a good chance that you do the same thing.

And that's why it's driving you nuts.

So it's really hard to I think, to own that and really look at that. But there's a lot of truth in it. So it's not only in your early childhood experience that causes to project our unacceptable feelings onto someone else friends can have the same effect as can partners from a priest relationship. So I'm saying, look at all your relationships as you're listening. This is a process that happens throughout your life.

How many times have you heard someone say, Treat me for who I am. I'm not your former partner or I'm not your mother, not your father, right? The major point to keep in mind is that we project our own problematic feelings onto another person. So an example is if we have an issue with jealousy, which is pretty common, right? We'll project our own jealousy onto someone else, perceiving that person as a jealous one.

This is because we cannot tolerate seeing ourselves having a problem with jealousy because none of us want to be. I'm not jealous person, and it's easier to attribute it to someone else. I think admitting you're jealous feels too vulnerable and weak. And so it's easier just to say all the other person is jealous. So when we feel unable to correct the problem in ourselves, we focus on the issue and the other person.

And this happens with lots of different problems. Anger, dependence, distrust, laziness, and list can just go on the way out of this, of course, is to become aware of our projections and understand how they affect our relationships. And within projections are your thoughts obviously, right? What am I thinking? That my partner is jealous or my partner is lazy or my kids are lazy or I'm angry with my boss?

So what am I thinking about that's allowing me to think this is true and projected on to them. So when couples experience conflict in the relationship, projections are often at the root of the problem. So if you're living with your own conflicts and you're unable to make any headway in understanding them, it's as if we look at the problem and another person. So at a certain level, we may actually seek out partners who have the qualities that we find problematic within ourselves, which I know sounds a little crazy, right?

Why would I do that?

But remember, there's so much unconscious stuff that goes on with us on a daily basis that we're not consciously looking for someone with problematic problems that look like the ones we have. If we have difficulty with our own controlling behavior, we may actually seek out partners who do just that to us. People that dominate us. Our partner may not see him or herself as domineering, but because we need to work out our own problems with the issue of dominance, we search for these qualities in the other person, so we take any cue we can from our partner and we just magnify it.

Then we're able to project our own problem onto the other person, saying it's their fault.

By blaming the other person, we protect ourselves from having to come to terms with their own issues. So we say what blamers don't change because it's not their fault. We can safely continue our controlling pattern and blame the other person for having the problem. But what's the price that you're going to pay for this relationship conflicts? The healthier option is when projections are causing relationship conflicts is to increase your awareness of your own internal conflicts and understand how we project these conflicts onto our partner.

I know this all sounds kind of convoluted, but it's more common than we'd like to think. We can look for examples of our projections and other life situations until you see a pattern. So when you have an awareness of the problem, that's when you can understand the many ways it influences your behavior and this can give you some control over the problem. We have to give good insight into ourselves and be open to want to grow and change and look at our own parts of her playing in the conflict.

We can then try out new ways of dealing with people.

In other examples, when a person experiences frustration time and again from feeling dominated by others, learning some healthy assertiveness techniques can alleviate the problem. I do have a podcast on assertion so you can check that out. It is important to understand that projections are not at the root of every problem. A couple of experiences not what I'm saying. Sometimes one of the partners does not indeed have a real behavioral problem.

In this case, it's not advisable to try to understand it as a projection, but to see it for what it truly is and take appropriate measures to change the situation if you need to. This is a lot of times when you can find a professional therapist that can be a really good strategy for addressing the relationship conflicts and have a third partner kind of dissect and help. You see, is this projection or it's really just a problem that needs to be worked out? Another aspect of the projection is sometimes the other partner colludes without even knowing it.

So an interesting phenomenon that happens when a partner is the recipient of a projection, the one being projected upon because this person is trying to smooth out the conflicts, he or she may identify with the projection.

So then the couple now begins to define the problem in this way, and the person receiving the projection starts to say, yes, I have a problem with being too dominant and I need to work on it. So in fact, this person may start to behave in a way that confirms the projection, even if it really isn't them. And it may never have occurred to this person. The dominance was a personal issue in the past, but because it's brought up frequently through the partner's projections, the second person may create a self definition that conforms with the projection.

Sometimes there's more of a passive person, maybe in the relationship that takes blame for a lot of things instead of standing up for themselves and can end up feeling really bad about themselves if they're getting all these negative projections on them.

So the recipient of the projection can either take it in believing it, that it's true and behaving accordingly or, in the more mature case, is what we want can modify it, insisting that the projection is not really true of their behavior, and in this case, the recipient can actually help the partner come to terms with his own issues and restore some health relationship by saying, maybe give me some evidence, right. That's a CBT tool Where's the evidence that I am controlling and being able to talk through the different behaviors and the examples that can really bring to light that it may be really is the other person and that this is projecting because the person doing the projecting may define the whole of the other partners having the problem, and then the recipient may do the same.

So to define the problem not just as part of the self but the whole self. And in any relationship, it takes two to Tango, right? People are interacting with each other.

So if you're just blaming your partner for a problem, you really need to look at your part as well, because when this happens, the couple may forget about the positive parts of each other and just concentrate instead only on the problems. And the mistake here is this when we work on our relationship conflicts, we need to draw on the positive parts of the relationship rather than focus entirely on the problems. I'm going to just repeat that when we work on our relationship conflicts, personal, professional friendships, we need to draw on positive parts of the relationship rather than focusing entirely on the problems.

And that's where a lot of conflicts come. As people just focus on the problems, they forget what happens when a couple first gets together.

They focus on their similarities, not their differences, and the parts of them that are compatible, and that's when they start to fall in love and feel close. This is when the intimacy and trust relationship are formed. It isn't until the relationship is matured and then the negative projections begin to take shape this helps explain why some couples who are so perfect for each other in the beginning start to have conflicts as time goes by, and when the negative projections begin, the partner doing the projecting tends to withdraw from the intimacy of the relationship and to focus more on seeking some independence.

And the second partner may then withdraw as well. And this is when the couple may start to experience serious relationship difficulties.

So one thing I wanted to just add here is that I have a little belief that it really takes 18 months to get to know if this is the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, because when you first get together and as I said, you focus on your similarities and everything is blissful and wonderful. You're in that honeymoon stage, and it takes after about a year, we start seeing, how do you guys work out conflicts? What are your values around money, maybe around children?

What are your goals for the future? And when I tell couples or someone who I see that just started dating, they're like, 18 months.

It sounds like forever. But I'm like, what's, 18 months? If you're going to spend the rest of your life with someone and over and over and over again, I have people say about the year. Mark, I see what you're talking about. Not that it's all bad, but that honeymoon stage is over, and now we're dealing with life and we're seeing things for as they are.

And now we need to start working on these conflicts. And that's why I don't want to just be projecting on to each other and not being able to resolve anything. It always takes two right? As I said earlier, so the process of projection and relationship is not always one sided. Things can get really complicated when both partners are mutually engaged in this process, and this is more common than we like it to be.

It becomes difficult for partners to see where the problem lies when that happens. So I'm going to share an example with you, and I'm just going to call them Chris and Patches to keep it simple. So Chris grew up in a household where the parents were emotionally withholding affection was seldom expressed towards Chris and other siblings, although material needs were always provided. So Chris always searched for nurturing, love and support the things that were never provided for him in his household. And he harbored some anger that the kids were never given these things.

So of course, this anger was never expressed because it wasn't allowed because there was fear that it would lead toward even more emotional deprivation. Pat, on the other hand, had two very controlling parents, and it was hard to experience independence during childhood, adolescence, and even early adulthood. And this led to hidden resentment that could never be expressed. So now we have Pat and Chris are getting together. They both felt liberated, as if all of their dreams in hopes for relationship could be met in the other person.

Chris Sam Pat, a person who was appreciated freedom and was genuine affectionate and willing to give love and emotional support. Similarly, pets on Chris, someone who valued love, trust and respect for personal integrity. So their first year or two together were very happy. But over time, Chris resentment Harbor since his childhood and never resolved it became attached to Pat. And rather than seeing all the positive qualities in path that form the basis of their initial attraction, Chris focused negatively on Pat's need for independence and not being home enough.

Pat is accused of always being out with friends and finding a job more important than the relationship. And remember, Chris is wanting to find that love and attention and nurturing that he didn't get as a kid. Pat, on the other hand, sees Chris demands to be at home more often as control the same thing that caused his revenue his childhood. Rather than focus on Chris's more positive qualities of love and trust, Pat accuses Chris of acting like a parent who would not allow independence. So now the couple is at an impasse, and Chris accuses Pat of emotional withdrawal.

Pat lanes Chris for being controlling. They're unable to see their way out of their dilemma until they start to work with therapist who's able to clarify their patterns. And for this couple with some exploration, courage, and insight, there's definitely hope. So. This is just a good example.

I hope it made it kind of clear where what each of them needed felt great at the beginning. And then as time went on and they became a little more individuated in the relationship, each of them saw those aspects in a negative way and weren't able to process it on their own and just started to build resentments and projecting on each other. So there's so many relationships, friendships, intimate relationships, even things that go on a work that can be resolved if people are willing to step back and be honest and share what they're thinking and feeling in the conflicts and look at yourself and say, what part of this is me and what can I change?

Not just wanting the other person to change so that I'm going to feel better. Of course, that would be the easy way, right?

But it's not really the healthy way and we're not going to grow and we want to keep growing. So I'm going to give you some questions for you to ask yourself to assess your relationship and whatever situation it's in. So first, understanding the source of the conflict in your relationship is one step towards resolving the differences between you and whoever you're dealing with, right? So we can get to the problems out in the open and talk about them objectively. We can often find the solutions.

So again, I'm going to share some starting points for you to shed some light on your relationship conflicts which might be hidden at the moment, but with some thought can become known and talk about constructively. So all the tools you've learned so far with using the Thaw record would be a good place to start. First of all, write down the situation how you're feeling, what are your thoughts and then identify which are hot. The thoughts are 100% true, and then you want to challenge them. Come up with new thoughts and then you can always share this with whoever you're having the conflict because remember, sharing your thoughts is less people feel less defensive versus then you make me feel this way if you're like, this is what I'm thinking.

I'm not important. You don't care about me. You don't want to spend time with me. It's very different than I'm sad and hurt, and you need to fix that. So using the full record is a really good place to start.

You also want to look for themes in your relationship conflict, so props to keep reappearing time and time again. Focus on identifying the underlying theme and most of your arguments. Arguments usually focus on the surface aspects of the underlying conflict. So your goal here is to find the underlying conflict, which would you can do with the fall record that's going to get you the underlying conflict. You want to have these themes ask yourself if they've appeared in other relationships with other people, friends, perhaps, or with other partners in the past.

Also, can you identify your part in contributing to these themes? This is super important. Every relationship takes two people and both contributes to the difficulties. What's your part? This is really hard.

I know to answer for yourself, since we tend to see the problems lying within our partner than within ourselves because we don't want to see that we have issues and we don't want to maybe have to even work on them. And if it's our partners and we blame them, so then it's not our fault. It's a little easier, right? But it still doesn't feel good. Why doesn't it feel good?

Because my thought is that, well, I don't have any control over this. I'm just hoping they're going to change to fix it. That doesn't feel good. I want to look at my part as well. And when two people can work on issues together, that's where there's going to be growth.

You also want to start focusing on the positive qualities in your relationship that you may have forgotten about as time goes by. And can you begin to define your partner in those terms? Again, this is definitely with friendships too. We all have conflicts with friendships, and things come up and may miss misinterpret somebody's behavior. There's just a million examples, right?

And again, things will work. So I know this tends to go to relationships, but please be open to look at any conflicts you're having in your life. You also want to look at what are the negative qualities in your partner that cause conflicts between you guys? And does your partner or relationship that you're dealing with agree with these qualities? If they are true, that's a place to start as your partner changed over time, gradually starting to agree with the negative qualities may be true.

Or Conversely, does your partner insist that these negative qualities are not true? So there's always shades of Gray, right? Not black and white. And if we can look for those shades of Gray, I think you can start preparing the relationship you want to ask yourself, do you focus mostly on the negative qualities when you think about your partner that's just going to feel your fire? Is there anything from your past, from your childhood on through adulthood which reminds you of the conflicts between you and your partner?

This might be a clue regarding your unresolved conflicts, which are the source of projections, which, in other words, would be your core beliefs. You can listen to the podcast and core beliefs where I really share my story and how I developed my core belief, how it affected my relationships until I fixed it. So one thing to also look at is, does my relationship mirror my parents relationship? And a lot of times when I ask couples about if their parents argued the way they did or if their behavior is the same a lot of times, it's a yes, because all we know growing up is what our parents model for us, and we assume that's what relationships are like, and even if we don't like it, sometimes we end up repeating the behavior until we get some personal help for our own growth.

And the last one is, does your partner project unresolved conflicts onto you?

These are probably easier to see than your own onto your partner, but that would be at least a place to start saying, I feel like you're projecting this on me like that. If you think I'm controlling when you do A, B and C, I find that controlling, like, where is this coming from? So if you can keep the positive qualities about your partner or your friendship in mind, it's going to make you much more empathetic and loving when you have these conversations to say, I love you, you're important to me, but this is something that I'm struggling with, what I see as your behavior.

Maybe it's coming from me as well. Both of us.

Can we talk about this? Maybe we need to go get some professional help so somebody can help walk us through it. There's lots of times I've worked with couples. I worked with parents and children that just being a third party in the room and giving them a different perspective on how to look at something or even hear each other because they're not emotionally connected to me like they are with each other. That can be really helpful.

And remember, going for professional help doesn't mean you failed doesn't mean it's over. It means that you have enough strength and fortitude to say, you know what? We can't figure everything out. Let's go get some help. Because this friendship, this relationship, this is important enough.

Sometimes at workplaces, if they have a good HR company, they can have someone come in and mediate as well. So that's what you're really saying. This is important enough to me that I'm willing to do what I need to do and to look at my part. And I don't want to just project all my stuff onto somebody else. To say to your partner on to you and just be vulnerable is really going to help you grow.

So I hope this was helpful. I hope this kind of got you to think a little differently. We're always talking about thinking differently, right? And that if you've been accused of projecting or you tend to just blame, right? Which is another way of projecting your stuff onto someone else.

Take the time to write down what am I thinking when this is going on? Am I feeling hurt? Am I feeling scared? Am I feeling angry? Why is that?

And what are my thoughts and using number with the mind over mood doing the saw record? There's really excellent questions that are asked in the book that are going to help you get to those underlying thoughts and start seeing that they're probably a lot of hot thoughts and you're making yourself feel even worse than you need to and to be able to balance them and then come up with some behavioral changes which might be just starting to communicate better and repairing relationships and maybe even a relationship that's been severed.

If it's important enough and you want to go back and repair it, this might be a start. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to have healthy relationships in your life and some things can't be fixed.

I know not every relationship should be fixed, not everybody should be together. Some friendships you need to move on. Sometimes you need to leave a work environment. That's all true. So I'm not here saying everything can be fixed by no means at all.

But at least if you do have to walk away and move on, you want to know I own my part and I did everything I could to resolve this, and sometimes we just need to move on. And that is the best decision for us. But it's always a good place to start at our own issues. And again, looking within. So as always, make decisions based on what's best for you, not how you feel.

I appreciate you spending time with me today.

Please send out any feedback emails at MyCBTPodcast@gmail.com.

You can follow me on Instagram. I'm on Facebook and my website is MyCognitiveBehavioralTherapy.com - a lot of good information on there.

So be safe and take care of yourself. Have a good week.

Bye!