Sevilla King, LICSW

After visiting a relative who I realized had spent every day of their lives for 10 years quietly working  to renovate their house. The care to detail that a daily engagement of this sort was obvious in the beauty and coherence of the spaces. I then made my own commitment to bring my own house up to snuff, after all, I now knew what it took, right? So you would think that the first thing I did was to write a plan and commit to so many hours a day to the project. Instead I found my mind drifting to people I know whose houses were less than model, feeling disdain, and then feeling superior that I had taken the vow to fix my own place.

One thing that saps the soul yet seems next to impossible to stop is judging others. We know judgement can be a vice, and as Jesus said, “Judge not lest ye be judged”. Whether you’re Christian or not, and I suspect many reading this post are not, there is deep wisdom in this proclamation.

There’s a term bandied about as much as “trauma”, and that is “projection”. But unlike the ambiguous and subjective nature of trauma, projection is more concrete. One of the original defenses outlined by Sigmund and Anna Freud, projection is a clever way your ego protects itself, but projecting something dislikable ono another person, and you being hyper aware of its presence in them (not in you, of course).

Have you also experienced this? That when you make a commitment to change something about yourself that you don’t like, you will notice that trait all the more in others, and find yourself negatively viewing that person, judging them? Or even if you haven’t made that commitment, think about the people you have a low opinion of. Now think deeply about that trait that you judge and be honest with yourself. What of that trait do you possess? Or are is this trait something you guard against with an overzealous amount of energy?

My own laziness was projected onto others as I denied it through my resolve to fix my own house. I then identified with that future self rather than accept my present self (who still hasn’t done the work, btw) and then found that present remiss self easily in others.

While projection has a downside, in terms of creating malevolent/lazy/clueless individuals in your mind that may or may not exist, it is nonetheless a call to go deeper into yourself and find that which you so disdain in another. There is not really a way to know someone is bad by not knowing that part of you. So, projection then opens up an opportunity to follow that bad trait and explore what’s behind it.

In the quest to become our true selves, as fully familiar with ourselves as possible, then those dark areas we have disowned and split off and thrown onto others must now be traversed. Carl Jung calls this the Shadow, and said that if you split off your darkness, it’s opposite light is also gone. So when you’ve disavowed what you think is badness, the goodness that’s its flip side becomes obscured as well. A bullied boy whose parents neglected his physical education, abhors violence, and thus grows into a man who has stifled his aggression so it is not available to him when it comes time to advocate for a raise.

So use this projection as a prompt. Next time you find yourself judging someone – take a breather and explore what you are judging in yourself. This action of owning versus judgement can open up a part of you of which you’ve lost touch and in that reunification, a whole new ability becomes available. By acknowledging my laziness, not only did I identify the barrier to my renovation project, but I was also able to identify that laziness was a sort of hesitancy due to lack of knowledge and skill and the act of reaching out for information and help is giving me a revivified interest in home improvement – because the more you know about something, the more interesting it becomes, and the more you want to pursue it!

And you are one step closer to unveiling your true self.