Your Projections Are Lying to You
I’d like to say some words on the psychological concept of projection.
It must be realized that people’s unthinking projections are what drive the siloing, acrimony, and dehumanization that grow to rend our world apart.
Think of watching a movie through a projector—how film was originally shown since its inception. The movie is an overlay the projection machine posits upon the screen it’s facing.
Human beings are likewise projection machines. And strangers we encounter or figures we see in media but never interact with are like blank, smooth surfaces on which we project the movie that our unconscious mind has produced about them.
These self-envisioned movies we produce are never fully true, and overwhelmingly are little but gross misrepresentations. Yet we believe they are accurate understandings of the person we project them onto.
As we grow to know someone truly, textures and colors of authentic nature appear as grooves of distinction on the once blank surface. These markers limit the extent to which our psyche’s movie can be projected onto the other and make any kind of sense. Imagine trying to watch a film projected onto a graffiti-strewn brick wall.
One of our primary psychological tasks as internetworked human beings is to withdraw the projections our shadow-selves force onto others. In this way we invite each person to populate the garden of their own authenticity with the rare and exquisite flowers of their sovereign being, rather than fill that sacred psychological space with our own misattributions and misgivings.
Only through reflection can we face the reality that the person we’ve presumed to see is only a being of straw we’ve manufactured from our own lack of thoroughgoing investigation. When in actuality what we encounter is a human being with an incalculably rich and varied inner landscape that informs their past and ongoing experience in ways we can’t imagine.
As each of us takes up our own work in this domain, we will grow to see the human world as an ecosystem vibrant with invaluable organisms rather than a series of flat screens on which to offload our discontent.
Keith Gilmore is a writer, speaker, and coach. He is co-founder of Texture Life Coaching, a life coaching platform serving clients in Portland, OR and throughout the country, and The Integrated Man, a program for reconnecting men with their purpose.