Connection Therapy Podcast

September 1, 2023

Hello and thank you for joining the Connection Therapy podcast. This is a podcast about the craft of psychotherapy, and we seek to support those who strive to improve their crafty by sharing research about the science and stories about the art of psychology.  Together we will explore these findings, so you can decide how you want to apply them to benefit your practice.

This is Brenda Murrow and I’m curious if you might be one of those people who watches things and wonders things, and if you’ve ever seen something that is so curious to you… you wonder to yourself what does that mean? This happens to me all the time, and is one of the reasons I became a psychologist.

In this episode, I’ll share one of those experiences which is about the concept of projections.  I’ll describe an overview of what projections are, how you might see them in the world, and I’ll share about how they first became obvious to me.  Then I’ll explain the specific definitions of both positive and negative protections, and why both are important to human development. 

This is the first in a series of episodes, so let me describe how you might want to navigate them.  All are designed for anyone interested in projections, like I said this first one is an introduction to the concept.  In future episodes, I’m going to discuss some additional history and research about projections, both that I conducted and as well as current research.  Then, there will also be further episodes that explain ways therapists might observe projections in their offices, and I’ll offer some possibilities to respond in support of client development.  Our audience members include those curious about psychological phenomena, practicing therapists who would like to add their skills, and students considering a career in psychology, among others.  All are welcome and I’m glad you’re here.

Let’s begin with an overview of projections.  Projections, whether negative or positive, are a normal part of human development, and they can have healthy and unhealthy aspects.  In early development, they are simply a way to manage an increasingly overwhelming world as we mature into the capacity to organize our experiences.   So the idea is that as children, emotions start to rumble up, we don’t know exactly what to do with them, and we project them onto something or someone else.  They are not specifically a concern, as a result, they are part of development, and in limited amounts they are quite normal throughout the lifespan.  Negative projections get a lot of focus because they are typically something that is unsettling, so the behavior of projecting what might feel like a bad quality onto someone else seems pretty straight-forward.  Positive projections are also phenomena that happen all the time.  We are likely to see them in our offices and in the world a lot, and they are much harder to spot because they show up a lot of times in the form of compliments and other socially accepted and even encouraged behaviors. 

It might be helpful if I give an example of one of the first times I started to realize projections.  It was when I lived in Southern California with my two Golden Retrievers.  We were fortunate to live along the Pacific Coast Highway.  You may have heard of the PCH because it has stunning ocean views, runs along the coastline, and attracts many tourists year-round to the restaurants and shops along the way.  We walked a lot and happened to pass by a restaurant that was well-known for brunch and often had long lines of people outside waiting for seating.  And when I started to notice positive projections was almost every morning, as we passed by, someone, very often more than one person, would make a comment about my dogs, usually directed right at them, as if they could respond.  People had all kinds of things to say about and to my dogs. Things like, “You’re so happy!,” “Oh, you look ready for the sunshine this morning,” and “You wish you could stay here and eat some breakfast,” and “You’d like to go home with me.”  All kinds of things were projected onto the dogs each morning, and the weirdest thing was, it wasn’t the same thing.  One of my dogs wore a red collar and she had a square jaw, and so sometimes people mistook her for a male.  So, then there were lots of comments about the dogs being a couple, and curiosity about how they were getting along that morning, and how well they liked each other and again many comments about them staying or wanting to divert their path.

At the time this was happening, I was finishing my doctoral degree in clinical psychology and about to start my dissertation research.   I went looking inside the field for explanations of this behavior.  One of my favorite authors to explain this and most things is Nancy McWilliams.  She is one of my favorites because she has a way of condensing many decades and longer of psychological research and theories into usable formats for clinicians.  She explained that “projection is the process whereby what is inside is misunderstood as coming from outside” (McWilliams, 1994, p. 108).  She says this in her book, Psychoanalytic diagnosis: Understanding personality structure in the clinical process (1st edition 1994, 2nd edition 2020).  She is on her second edition of this brilliant book.  I personally keep both with me because I have so many things underlined in the first edition, I need to resource them both.  If you’d like to learn more about this book, we have information about how to locate it on our website connectiontherapypodcast.com 

So, what does she mean by that?  “Projection is the process whereby what is inside is misunderstood as coming from outside” (McWilliams, 1994, p. 108).  The idea from a psychoanalytic theory perspective is that as human infants, we are not at first aware of the distinction between ourselves and our environment.  So there is a sort-of resonance between us and those around us, and it is hard to distinguish our unique feelings and thoughts.  Eventually, we identify with some internal states and at first those are overwhelming to realize they are coming from inside ourselves.  So, they need to be projected or expelled quickly.  An example of this might be early feelings of rage that are difficult to control.  When a child starts to fell angry, you can almost see the rage boil up from inside, as their shoulders tense up, little fists and jaw clench, forehead turns red as the eyes squint and eyebrows furrow.  Well-meaning caregivers try to help contain these feelings by using some terms like, ‘don’t be mad, be nice,’ or maybe, ‘bad girl,’ if the child isn’t able to contain the feelings.  Once verbal language is attained, it is common for the child to begin dispelling these feelings by describing others, like peers at school, siblings, maybe family pets as ‘not nice,’ and ‘bad.’  And that’s the general idea, the child has a feeling and they can’t control it; they typically get told maybe they were a ‘bad girl,’ or ‘not nice’ and the next time that feeling comes up or similar feelings are overwhelming, they want want to project that experience out.  This is because it’s uncomfortable to hold all these feelings, not be able to, and then they want to release them or project them.  So, the next time they might call someone else ‘bad,’ or ‘not nice,’ is how the initial projections begin.  Eventually throughout development there will be some skills grown that help contain the feelings and they don’t always need to be projected out.  As I said, it is a common experience throughout the lifespan and it takes some time when we are children to grow into the capacity to hold those uncomfortable and big emotions ourselves.  So it’s normal for them to be projected.  

That is not to say that all projections carry a quality like ‘bad.’  It could be that the feeling is accurately named, ‘you are angry.’  It doesn’t seem to be so much the idea of what is said as much as what is felt that is being projected, so shameful qualities or feeling like a ‘bad girl’ or doing something wrong, having feelings of rage, jealousy, resentment, fear even sometimes, all of these things that are unattractive feelings, if you will, things that most people don’t feel comfortable owning; those tend to have a negative quality to them and they are projected out onto other people.

Likewise, there are positive projections and these tend to be ones that we wish we could have for ourselves and they are projected onto someone else because it’s so hard to hold onto that dream that we have to see them in someone else.  A lot of times this can be a really helpful experience to have a role model and imagine all of the qualities of your role model, and want those for yourself and then work to obtain them.  So you can see that, as therapists, we’re going to likely work with people in both of these circumstances to reduce the judgments that people may have experienced from others or put on themselves about these feelings.  Both negative and positive protections ideally get incorporated back into the whole person, if you will, that maybe is your client and we’re looking to make it OK for all these things to exist, both in other people and ourselves.  We’ll talk more about that in the episodes on interventions and why this is important to development.  And, just a highlight here, it’s important for children to develop these skills to understand all the facets of being human and reduce the pressure for such a limited set of characteristics and be able to incorporate more of these into themselves as they mature.  For adults they are important as well because they tend to be things that disrupt relationships, and so if we can intervene and support people then typically have a little bit easier time interacting with others, because everything becomes more normal, if you will, in the sense that all people have all qualities, and while that might be disappointing, it is actually real life. 

Nancy McWilliams explained that projections are the building blocks of empathy, so let’s discuss more about how that works.  McWilliams explained, “we must use our capacity to project our own experience in order to understand someone else’s subjective world” (1994, p.108)  This supports in developing empathy.  The idea is that we start projecting these big feelings onto others, and then eventually realize that we ourselves identify with them, and we can reclaim the feelings in a way.  This common experience of understanding the difficulty in maintaining large emotions now being shared between us and others starts, the theory goes, to support us in developing empathy for others.

Before we go much further with this example, let’s just make sure we’re all on the same page in terms of the definition of empathy.  From the American heritage dictionary, empathy is defined as the identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives.  If you were following along in the example earlier of a child where the rage is boiling up inside of them, then let’s follow that a little further to understand how projections help us build empathy.  While you were listening to that example, you may have very well been able to identify similar states in your own body, and you would know this because you would have similar sensations of the tension in your body.  This is a very natural course of events and is thought to be how we learn to empathize with others.  The child will likely begin to understand the experience of a friend, sister, or even the family dog better, by projecting their own feelings onto another.  Through this they learn to understand similar states in themselves.  I’m asking you to consider the feelings of how you empathized with this child in this example, to demonstrate how you’ve already learned the skill of empathy by being able to hear an example and imagine those qualities in yourself is a way that empathy is built in us.  Probably, for most people, the track of the development is hard to decipher; how did you actually learn empathy?  Well, this is the theory of how it develops and it is subtle, and then all of the sudden we are able to track other people’s feelings and states and it is a milieu of lots of different feelings.  It takes some skill as we mature to distinguish between other people’s feelings and our own, especially for people who are naturally empathic.

Let’s return to the PCH and try to understand what may have been happening with all of the comments about my dogs.  I started realizing that what these people were seeing in my dogs had very little to do with my actual dogs.  And this made me wonder about what the statements were revealing about the individual who said them.  In other words, I observed so many different and varying interpretations of the dogs’ behaviors, moods, and more that I came to the conclusion that it had to be something internal to the person, and not an objective viewpoint of the dogs.  My dogs loved interacting with people so the statements about them being happy and excited were usually correct, but they also knew our routine that we were headed to the beach so they typically wanted to enjoy a moment or two and then move on, so they could swim.  

Over the years, I’ve tried to make sense of the experiences I had along the PCH in the context of what psychoanalytic theory has to say about protections.  I feel like it’s relevant that the people we met were typically on vacation, or at least at a tourist spot for the day.  The projections about being happy, and wanting to stay there, and eat a lot, and eat good food were likely the way the people felt themselves. 

Notice I haven’t  introduced my dogs to you by name yet, and I feel like that’s because in the interactions with the people along the highway that’s how I noticed these were projections is that the dogs didn’t really feature in the interaction. They were the recipient of these ideas and thoughts and feelings from these people, in other words they were recipients of their projections.  Their names were Gage and Maddie.  Gage was the older one that wore the red collar; Maddie, younger, by about three years.  They lived up to their breed’s expectations and yet were each unique individuals in their own right.  They loved to play, they loved to retrieve anything, and they really liked being around people.  Maddie liked interacted with people a little bit more than Gage.  Gage was smart and always trying to figure things out, Maddie was more receptive and perceptive.  They enjoyed these mornings and had a great time; feeding off the excitement of the people watching them approach, they could sense that, and then they were ready to move and go swimming.

The reason I waited until now to introduce Gage and Maddie to you was to illustrate the experiences along the PCH and how I learned that these were projections.  We would get home from our walks and I would reflect on the exchanges and realize that if only to verify an assumption was I asked any questions about them or what they really were like.  There were just all these assumptions and things spoken to, and yelled at us some mornings, jeers and comments as we passed by, mostly good-natured and well-meaning.  But, it never felt like the people wanted to get to know them as beings in and of themselves.  That is one reason I like working with animals in therapy is the animal cannot return the comments, compliments, and the statements, and you can really observe the interaction between somebody and in my case, I’ve with horses and dogs.  What you start to see is when it’s really one-sided (and that seems to be where it gets its name) is something about the person speaking is being projected onto the other being, in this case Gage and Maddie.  That’s why it came to my awareness that I was observing projections, they were friendly-enough interactions and a normal thing at a tourist trap area like that, but it wasn’t a mutual interaction in the sense that there was mutual interest.  I don’t really expect people to want to get to know the dogs, and I may have been alarmed if they did.  To me that made this stand-out as a projection in that Gage and Maddie were receiving the ideas and images and thoughts of these passers-by. 

I am not for sure what all the people may have had going through their mind, but I do know that when people are excited, like when they’re on vacation for example, the excitement gets overwhelming and they want to be social and learn about the locals and other things.  That is how I’ve made sense of these behaviors over time and they really helped me understand this phenomena and how we experience it a lot in the world.

In future episodes, I’m going to discuss more about the research I conducted and even some current research about this phenomena.  I’ll share additional episodes about ways I intervene to support clients because these are important skills in building empathy so when we see them in our therapy offices we want to be able to spot them and also intervene to support client’s development.  So, I’ll have some episodes about that as well.  

A lot of terms and concepts were introduced in this episode, so I’d like to provide a summary before it closes, here we go.  In general, projections involve the idea that there is an internal reaction, like a thought or a feeling, that is unknown and potentially overwhelming so it is protected onto someone or something else.  Negative projections get a lot of focus because they are typically something that is unsettling and so the behavior of projecting what might feel like a bad quality onto someone else seems straight-forward.  However, positive projections are also a phenomena we are likely to see and they are harder to spot because they show up a lot of times in the form of compliments or other positive statements that are hard to recognize.  Projections, whether negative or positive, are a normal part of human development and they can have healthy and unhealthy aspects.  In early development, they are simply a way to manage an increasingly overwhelming world as we mature into the capacity to organize our experiences.  Projections here or there are not specifically a concern and in limited amounts are quite normal throughout the lifespan.  Projections are the building blocks for how we develop empathy.  As humans we project our feelings onto others, then we recognize them in ourselves, and eventually we can empathize easier with other people, because we have gained the capacity to understand why we take similar actions, or experience similar feelings, and now we can extend that understanding to others. 

Lastly, I would like to highlight something you may have noticed, which is that I was speaking about Gage and Maddie in the past tense and that is because they have both passed on now.  Losing good friends is always hard, and they are greatly missed.  Their memories resonate long after they’re gone, in part because of all the things I learned by being around them for many years.  You’ll hear more about Maddie in some episodes because she was the therapy dog in the research which I mentioned I conducted.  

I hope you’ll join us again for future explorations in the field of psychology.  If you would like to learn more about the authors and the studies listed in this episode, you’ll find more information about them on our website, connectiontherapypodcast.com .   And, if you’d like to take a step further, we offer additional ways you can collaborate with us.  Maybe you would like to confidentially discuss a case, or do some additional consulting?  We’d be happy to speak with you.  We also have study groups where you have the opportunity to join and gain more knowledge in a supportive environment.  These are small groups where we share and explore the podcast topics and more, in detail.  And, in some states, your time spent in the group may be able to qualify toward your continuing education requirements for many licensure types.  You will find more information on our website, connectiontherapypodcast.com 

Thanks!  

Until Next Time…