Lacks Within Us: What We Criticize In Others Tells Us A Lot About Ourselves

When the deficiencies within us prevent us from judging others healthily, what is called the negative projection appears. A series of defense mechanisms that attribute to other people our own defects, and even our own shortcomings. In situations of emotional conflict, we attribute our own feelings or thoughts that are unacceptable to us to other people.

Negative projection maneuvers in situations of internal emotional conflict, attributing to other people our own feelings or thoughts that are unacceptable to us. Feelings or thoughts that are not fully accepted as their own are projected because they generate anguish or anxiety, directing them towards someone and assigning them totally as if they were someone else’s.

Much of the work that goes into personal development consists of getting rid of these projections by establishing a definite boundary between our description of what happens and what actually happens. In this way we avoid the distortion of the facts, overcoming the conflict that really only exists within us.

The defense of the self in personal deficiencies

The external projection of our own personal deficiencies that cause us anxiety or anguish is done to maintain a good personal concept. Self-esteem and defense mechanisms play a fundamental role in defending the self.  The so-called defense mechanisms of the self are strategies that we use without realizing it, whose function is to preserve our self-image and self-concept.

Our brain seems to have developed different ways to protect our body from what seems too painful or unacceptable to us. Defense mechanisms are strategies to stop the discomfort of certain experiences and the feelings associated with them. These mechanisms protect us when we do not want to recognize some aspect of ourselves that displeases us or breaks the self-concept that we had created for ourselves.

The problem comes when these mechanisms are automated by dint of using them over and over again. Thus, it is difficult to abandon the habit, despite the fact that in return they generate imbalance in certain maturational aspects. It is normal to use these mechanisms sometimes, but you have to know how to identify and combat them so as not to distort reality to the extent of your ego.

Otherwise, these defense mechanisms will turn against us, introducing important distortions in our perception, in addition to making them more difficult to identify because they are easily camouflaged among our more realistic perceptions.

What we see in others tells us a lot about ourselves

Others act as a mirror for our mind, in it we see reflected different qualities or aspects of our own being. When we observe something that we do not like about someone, we feel dislike and rejection, this may indicate that in some way we dislike that aspect within us. The psychological projection makes us think that the defect only exists out there , in that other person.

Psychological projection is a mental defense mechanism by which a person attributes to other feelings, thoughts or own impulses that they deny or are unacceptable to themselves.  When our mind understands that there is a threat to mental health, it will attribute the unacceptable qualities to a subject external to ourselves.

In this way our mind apparently manages, by deceiving itself, to put these threatening contents outside of ourselves. These projections are valid both for negative characteristics, hatred, resentment, envy, as well as for positive characteristics, admiration, idealization, affection. Therefore, when we criticize other people excessively, we may be criticizing ourselves.