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Open Wounds. The NSFW podcast where we explore trauma of every shape and form. Join us as we hear from everyday people about their lives and learn from each other to move from surviving to thriving.
Candice (00:01)
Alright, so let's dive into it. I'm thinking this episode might not be too long. I'm also trying to be cognizant of my cussing.
I know that I like to cuss and it's something I feel very comfortable with, but I know that my sister listens and I know that my niece might be listening in the car sometimes. So it's like, oh, it would be nice if my sister could listen with my niece around and it not be like something she has to turn off. I know I love Amanda Francis, but she cusses a lot and I cannot listen to her in front of my kids because it's like dropping all the cuss words all the time. So I'm going to try to do some more episodes that are a little bit more e for
everyone and see how that goes. If that's something you guys like, feedback is always welcome. So jumping into defense mechanisms. I googled the definition of defense mechanisms, like a projection, because that's one that I was seeing a lot and I'm seeing come up in relationships and situations with people. So I specifically wanted to dive into projection.
But I also realize displacement is similar in a lot of ways and can kind of overlap. So as we talk about this, you may wanna Google it yourself. I'm gonna read the definition off of simplypsychology.org because it has them all listed really nicely. And I'll put that link in the show notes. But.
Their definition is projection. It involves individuals attributing their own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and motives to another person. I don't love that they said unacceptable because I see this with, I see people projecting a lot of times even things that are acceptable and may be more like.
Nurturing or empathy and we'll get into some examples of that So the example they give is you might hate someone but your super ego tells you that Such hatred is unacceptable. You can solve this problem by believing that they hate you So also I'm not crazy about that example, but that's the example they give displacement they said is satisfying an impulse such as aggression with a
object and their example is Someone who is frustrated by his or her boss at work may go home and kick the dog So you can see how these two are similar and the fact that whatever is happening Internally is not being dealt with internally. It's being put out Externally, that's why I find these two to be pretty similar in in how they function in our lives, so
Saw a projection coming up a lot as I started to heal and process my own emotions Especially in my dysfunctional family life. So I was going to therapy as journaling as reading all these books as you could see all these books and I was processing emotions as they were coming up as best I could with you know living life and having family and job and whatnot.
and I would be around family members and they would say, Candace, you're so angry or Candace, you're so this, you're so that. And at first my initial response was like, no, I'm not. But then as I was able to regulate my emotions and stop operating from a place of reactivity to more like balanced,
What's going on here? Like it's really easy to fall into reactivity when you have people in your lives who are, they are dysregulated in themselves. Their emotions are not regulated well. They're not functioning from a place of like processing and doing the internal work, right? So if you're going along.
and you're having interactions with these people because they're not dealing with what's going on inside themselves. They're going and putting it on the people around them. It's almost like I can't tolerate these emotions I'm having within myself. So I need to get them out.
and I'm going to get them out by saying what I'm feeling about the other people, right? And so in that example, the person was like, Candace, you're so angry. And I was like, at first I was like, no, I'm not. But then as this process went on and this person would say things like that to me in the future, like today one came up, they were like, well, you're snotty. And I was like, am I? First of all, I've got to a place now where I don't give a fuck. Okay, I'm snotty. I don't care. I'll be snotty.
I can own it. I can own those parts of myself that other people may shame or try to change about me. So that's a whole different scenario we could talk about, but I was able to get to a place where they'd be like, you're so angry or you're so this and be like, I'm not, that's you.
You think that about yourself and you can't tolerate that in yourself. It's a shadow aspect that you've like suppressed or you know regressed or whatever which those are also defense mechanisms on the list as well. But this is something you cannot tolerate in yourself. You feel shame about it. You feel guilt about it. You feel some kind of way about it. So you're going out and you're putting it on the people around you. So as we work through our
our trauma and as we work through our emotions that come up on a daily basis and memories that may come up and experiences that trigger us. It's very easy for us to like, I don't like how I'm feeling. But if we can sit with it and process it, it's much easier to deal with it long term because the pattern will stop happening. So for example, if I'm really frustrated,
with somebody in my life instead of being like, well, there this and there that, I can sit back and be like, hold on a second. I am frustrated because I'm not holding a boundary or I'm not being true. I'm not being honest in this relationship with how.
this person is, you know, upsetting me or things they're doing I don't want to do anymore or whatever it is, whatever the situation can be, when you're able to get to a place where you take the time to feel your feelings, understand where the feelings are coming from and let them be and be okay with those feelings, I personally see my projection went down a lot.
And when people were projecting on me, I was able to get to a place of like that neutral observer that where I could step outside. It was almost like I could see like my boss and me and I could be over here going, wow, this isn't about like this was an example when I worked the last job I had. I was like, I'm a little late. I'm a minute or two late for the shift pretty regularly.
And so she got so upset and she was like shaking and getting all over me like you're always late and you're never on time and I looked at her and she and you're never on time. You need to be here early. And so I was like, okay, fine. If you guys want to pay me to be here early, I'll start getting here early. But I realized later on when she was talking about her sister and her dynamic with her sister.
Her sister was always late. Her sister was unreliable. This created a trauma within her and her bond with her sister where she couldn't trust her sister. She couldn't have faith that her sister was gonna be there for her. Her sister had let her down and damaged the relationship. So that was a projection. She was seeing the similarities between me and her sister and.
putting us in the same pile and her emotional response was like, I can't handle this. This person's bringing up all these things. So instead of her standing within herself and saying, this employee is not my sister. This is a different person. She does always show up and she is one or two minutes late. She said she lumped us together and her emotions put us in the same place. So she was projecting all that stuff and history from her relationship with her sister.
onto me and I was able to sit there as this was happening and kind of step outside of myself and be like, this isn't even really about me being one or two minutes late for a shift. Like when the store isn't even open for another 30 minutes, I'm already here with a plenty of cushion before we're interacting with the clients or the customers. But
I had to get to a place where I wasn't reactive. I wasn't constantly feeling like I'm under attack. Like I had to be in a really good place mentally in order to step outside of that dynamic with her and with other people and say, this isn't really about me. This is about them. They can't tolerate the situation for whatever reason it is. Luckily, in that scenario, I knew the reason. But a lot of times we may not know why this person is projecting on us.
Frequently, it's whatever that person is saying to you is really about them. Like if you were to put a mirror over your face and reflect it back to that person, it's really they're talking to themselves. The other example I see in this, I'm very guilty of this and I've been working on this, is projecting our own wounding and our own...
childhood shit onto our children because we see ourselves in them. We see ourselves in that vulnerable state. We see ourselves like their innocence, their naivety or whatever their vulnerabilities. We are seeing our own childhood selves in them, right? So
I'll give the example of my son. My son, my nine-year-old is very like strong-willed and determined and he thinks he knows it all and he likes to, you know, do his own thing. And so I was projecting that I couldn't be too hard on him because I thought I would like break his spirit. I thought I would like create a bunch of shadow in him. Now granted, I'm not saying like,
He's not gonna have to go to therapy when he's an adult because I feel like we probably all will end up needing therapy at some points in our lives just because the human existence is hard. But I was projecting a vulnerability onto him that he doesn't really have. I was also projecting a fragility and a almost like, what's the word I'm looking for? Like with my relationship.
as child with my parents, I very easily felt rejected, alienated, unloved, unsupported, right? So I'm assuming I have to behave in a way as a mother for him so that he doesn't feel these things, even though he's not feeling these things. Like really, if you sit him down and ask him like how he's feeling, he feels very confident. He feels very.
Assertive he feels like he can say what he wants and that nothing's going to have like almost a little bit too much that he can say what he wants and nothing's gonna happen like we have to work on that a little bit so that's kind of where I realized shit I am projecting onto my son my own childhood wounds and It was actually getting to a place where it's it wasn't really healthy for him because I was being a little bit too
kid gloves with him. was treating him a little bit too fragilely when he had way more resilience and way more, I forget, I don't know what the word I'm looking for is, but he's pretty solid and he doesn't need that type of treatment for him to feel safe and secure and loved. And so I think this is a funny experiment. If you will go onto Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, whatever.
and watch videos of animals. You can you scroll down to the comments, you will see so much projection. You will see so much and also displacement too. But you will see and this happens with videos of parents with kids. Like I watched a video the other day that was literally my brother sent it to me. It's very traumatizing of a child being verbally and psychologically abused.
and fearing that they were going to be physically abused in the video, half the comments were, this kid deserves the whooping, this kid deserves to be beat, he's manipulative, he's lying, whatever. The other half of the comments were, my God, this poor baby, what are you doing to him? But if you look at animal videos, it's even more exaggerated. People are projecting so much of their own internal
vulnerability, their own internal woundings, their own internal abandonment, or feeling neglected, feeling rejected, feeling abused. And these people in the comments probably very validly have had stuff happen to them that they need to work through. But instead of going to therapy and working through it, they're scrolling on the internet and going, my God, that puppy is crying in that way because it's been abused.
We don't know if that puppy's been abused. Maybe that puppy is crying because it has been abused and this is a reaction to that abuse. Or maybe that puppy is crying because that puppy wants its way and it doesn't want to be in its cage anymore. Or maybe the puppy is crying because it can't find its toy. I don't know, right? Like there could be a million reasons, but it's really funny. It's a real like interesting experiment in psychology and mental health to get online.
and look at animal videos and see the comments. Because you will see so many people attributing emotions to an animal that they literally have never interacted with in their life and they know nothing about. Like there was a, I'll give this one example of a bird video. This bird, he was a parrot so he knew how to talk. And so he had memorized the words, I'm not gonna hurt you. And he would say like,
Come here, baby. There was a couple other things that he would say like, but he was biting the owner while he was saying, I'm not gonna hurt you. And so the people in the comments were like, my God, the person who had him before, assuming the person who's recording this video hasn't been his owner the entire life. So that's a lot of assumptions happening there. But they're like, this poor bird has been abused. That's why he's saying, I'm not gonna hurt you. We don't know that.
We have no idea if that bird's been abused or not. All we know is that the bird learned those phrases, that those phrases were said to him over and over again, and he memorized them and can repeat them back. But the comments in that video were so many of people believing so strongly that that bird had been traumatized and been abused and that that bird needed rescuing or needed love and acceptance. But really,
The people are just putting their own emotions out onto this bird. This bird has become a placeholder for their difficult emotions that they can't process and that they need to work through. The displacement one, I'll talk about that a little bit. I think mostly what happens with displacement is the person who's having the emotion and if it is anger, anger isn't usually
societally acceptable to express, right? So if you're having an episode where somebody's making you mad and you can't yell at them, like in this example, they gave the boss, you can go home and yell at your dog because your dog can't talk back to you unless you have a partner or somebody who's gonna be like, don't yell at the dog or whatever. You can go online and troll people.
Right? Like you can create a weird burner account on some social media platform and take all your pent-up aggression about life out on other people. So that's displacement is where whatever emotion is coming up within us, we're not addressing within ourselves and in our own container. We're spreading it out like manure onto everything around us. Right? So,
Displacement is you know something to again both of these are going back to the fact that we have an emotion within ourselves that we are not appropriately like processing or Monitoring or dealing with and I'm not saying like process projection and displacement are like so bad We should never do them because that's probably impossible. I don't think that anyone's gonna get through this without having done these multiple times all the time, but we're working on
getting to a place where we don't need these defense mechanisms because we don't need to defend, right? Like it's a defense mechanism inherently means you are feeling that you need to defend yourself versus being able to feel safe within ourselves, being able to feel like we have a place where we can go to work through this stuff and we're not gonna be judged, we're not gonna be criticized, we're not gonna be alienated or rejected, right?
a lot of these emotions that people are projecting out onto others or displacing onto others is because they don't feel safe enough within themselves or within whoever their support system is to process them, right? So creating that sense of safety, if that means you don't have a safe person that you can talk to, like a therapist using a journal or, you know, going...
out into the forest and screaming into the trees or whatever. You're throwing rocks into a body of water if there's no one around. There's ways we can process the emotions in a safe space if we don't have humans to help us. Obviously, it is easier, I think, if you do have a therapist or a friend or a neighbor or whoever, somebody that is a willing, listening ear that's non-judgmental, which is another thing.
because you don't want to be going and being like, you know what, my boss said that I was late all the time and I just can't believe her. What a bitch, da da. And you don't want that person to be like, well, you are late all the time. You should get your shit together because now you feel even worse that you told them, right? Now, yes, it was true. I was late. I was a few minutes late over and over again. So I corrected the behavior. But if I went and vented to somebody and they made me feel even worse for it,
That's not a good person. That's not a person that you wanna be utilizing in your support system, right? You may wanna go to them when you want the truth and you want honesty and you're really trying to check yourself on your personal growth. But if you just need to get your emotions out and kind of like process what's happened, finding a good listening ear that's non-judgmental can be super helpful.
And the last thing I want to say about projection is like, yes, you know, it happens to us and we are also doing it to others. So when you first start kind of feeling it out, it's really easier to see when it's happening to you, right? We are on the receiving end of the projection. We can be like, wait, what are they saying about that about me? I'm not that, am I that?
And then you can kind of be like, no, I'm not that. They are that. Or they're pretending they're not that. Or they have shame around that. But I'm not that. That's their thing. It is really revolutionary when you can get a hold of this and see it happening in real time with your relationships. When you can say, wait a minute, I'm not that at all. This person is just projecting their shit onto me. It's a relief.
because when you've lived a life with a parent or a caregiver or somebody who's in a position of authority over you telling you you're this, you're that, you behave this way, you behave that way your whole life, that is a lot of fucking undoing. Like you really have to like be like, okay, no, I've worked on this. I know for a fact right now in this moment, I am not what you're saying I am.
So where is this coming from? that's a you thing. That's a you problem, right? So that's the first step I would say is like, once you realize that other people are just going around spreading their stuff that they can't process onto others, and then you can step away from it and be like, that is not my problem. That's your problem. You don't have to say it to them because they're definitely not ready to hear it. But you can be like, you know what? This isn't a me thing. This is a you thing.
and you can feel however you wanna feel about me, but I know that I am not X, Y, and Z, whatever you're saying that I am. And then the next level is to start checking yourself and making sure you're not projecting your stuff onto other people, right? So making sure that when you're like in a dysregulated state, now what I've started to say to my family members is like,
You probably don't want to be around me right now. I really do need some alone time because my emotions are in a place where they're going to start becoming displaced and projected onto other people, right? Like for me, when I'm in that place of like dysregulation, overwhelm, stress, I need some peace. I need some alone time.
I need some solitude to get through them, right? Especially because I, you you can't just have your therapist on speed dial. If you do, that's cool because I've never met one who would let me do that. yeah, figuring out a way when you're in a place like, I'm not in a good place right now. And I probably, if I'm interacting with people, I'm gonna project and displace and obviously,
If we're at work, there's nothing we can do. We gotta stay there until the clock runs out, right? We can go to the bathroom, we can take a 15 minute break and try to regulate our nervous system so that we're not projecting and displacing our emotions on others. And then once we get a moment where we do have that safety and that time to kind of go through and be like, you know what? I'm upset about this and this and this.
It has nothing to do with this person. It has nothing to do with that person. It has nothing to do with my dog or my parrot or this kitten I saw online. It's me, right? And so I just thought that was an interesting thing that I see happening a lot with people. see it happening, especially when they view the person that is being projected or displaced upon as weak.
or vulnerable, that's why it happens so much with animals, think is because people see them inherently as more vulnerable, as a weaker species, as something that is defenseless and helpless, right? So when we can check ourselves and be like, is that kitten really abused or am I feeling some kind of feeling watching this video that reminds me of my own childhood, reminds me of what I witnessed in my adolescence, right?
or in my past relationships with people as an adult where I felt that I was being taken advantage of or her or whatever, right? So when you see that like before you go to type those comments away on your Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or TikTok, my God, this poor animal, like you should check yourself before you post it. Is this really about this animal or do I feel some kind of way that I need to process, right?
So I hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. I'm gonna try to get back into posting them more. I'm not making any promises, because life is what life is, and I haven't had the motivation to do them as much lately. I've asked a lot of people to come on as guests, and I've got a lot of nos, and I much prefer this scenario with people to talk to about these things, so.
If you have guest recommendations or you would like to be a guest, you can email us at openwoundspodcast.gmail.com and we'll see you soon. Thanks.