What Your Judgements of Other People Are Really About

There is a particular quality of irritation that goes beyond ordinary dislike. The colleague whose self-promotion makes your skin crawl. The person who is effortlessly what you are quietly straining to be. The quality in someone that produces a reaction far larger than the situation seems to warrant.

This disproportionate reaction is information. Not about them, primarily. About you.

What projection is

Projection is the process of attributing to others what belongs to you — your own unacknowledged feelings, desires, or qualities — and then responding to them as though they originate in the other person.

It runs in both directions. You can project qualities you don't want to acknowledge in yourself onto others — their selfishness, their neediness, their arrogance — when the same quality exists in you, unacknowledged. You can also project qualities you have suppressed or disowned — and respond to them with a specific kind of longing, envy, or resentment.

The clearest signal of projection is disproportionality. The reaction is larger than the situation warrants. That excess is pointing somewhere.

The most common forms

Irritation at a quality you're suppressing in yourself

The person who cannot stand others' anger is often someone with significant suppressed anger. The person who finds others' neediness intolerable often has needs they cannot allow themselves to have. The quality in the other person has been permitted in them. The same quality in you has not.

Envy dressed as contempt

The dismissal of someone's success as unearned, their confidence as arrogance, their ease as superficiality — when what is actually present is the wish that the thing were yours. Envy is one of the most uncomfortable emotions. It is one of the most reliably converted into criticism of the envied person.

Idealisation

The positive version of projection — attributing to another person qualities that are disowned in yourself. The teacher, the partner, the mentor onto whom your own wisdom or capability is projected. The intensity of the idealisation corresponds to the intensity of the disavowal.

How to use it

When a reaction feels disproportionate, the more useful question is not 'what is wrong with them?' but 'what is this pointing at in me?'

• What quality am I responding to, precisely?
• Is this quality entirely absent in me — or is there a version of it I haven't been willing to acknowledge?
• If I'm responding with envy, what is the want underneath it?
• If I'm responding with contempt, what is the discomfort underneath it?

These are not comfortable questions. They are clarifying ones. And the clarity they produce is usually more useful than the certainty that the other person is simply the problem.

What this is not

Projection as a lens is not an instruction to excuse everyone's behaviour or to treat every strong reaction as purely self-referential. Some people are genuinely difficult. Some behaviour is genuinely harmful. Some irritation is accurate signal. The distinction is in the proportionality. Accurate signal is proportionate. Projection tends not to be.

What you cannot stand in others is usually pointing at something unfinished in yourself.