We all yearn for love. What differs from person to person is how they express it and their understanding of its meaning.
In childhood, we love sincerely and without hesitation. As our experiences accumulate, we begin to form preconceived notions about how relationships are built. When dealing with a narcissist, love means sacrificing oneself on the altar of an inflated, false self. For those raised in abusive environments, love means losing reason and control. An emotionally unavailable person makes us believe that love is a struggle over scraps. Over time, these perceptions become ingrained and affect every relationship that develops in our lives. Sigmund Freud referred to this phenomenon as “projection.”
Projection is a recurring life drama in which we project the roles of key figures from our past onto people in our present. Anyone who resembles someone from our past in appearance, behavior, or voice may trigger projection in us. We are drawn to someone through their appearance, facial expressions, tone of voice, or even the shape of their eyes. We may be drawn to the way they treat us, and even the way they look at us. Their behavior, or their emotional detachment, may resonate with us. As a result, your relationship with a close friend might resemble your relationship with a brother or cousin. You might find yourself seeking the approval of your yoga instructor as if they were a father figure. And your girlfriend or spouse might scold you as if they were your mother.
Projection fuels binary (black-and-white) thinking. Someone in our present reminds us of our past, and we find ourselves either strongly attracted to them or strongly repelled by them. Projections are usually accompanied by feelings, needs, expectations, triggers, fears, or fantasies. If you find yourself giving someone more importance in your life than they deserve, your relationship with them may be a prolonged replay of the past.
What you may not realize is that the root of all this drama is complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Humans respond to trauma in strange ways. First, trauma freezes a person in time, preventing them from moving on from what happened. For example, veterans often revisit battle memories, only to find themselves suddenly transported back to the moment of their trauma. Secondly, to overcome a traumatic event, a person feels the need to relive it. But this time, instead of feeling helpless and out of control, they need to feel empowered and in control. In other words, they need to re-examine their relationship to the trauma from a broader perspective.
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For those with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychological transfer is an attempt to relive the relationships that caused their complex trauma. However, relationship trauma isn’t based on a single event, but rather on a long web of interactions, including abandonment, neglect, abuse, humiliation, deception, and betrayal. To relive years of relationship trauma, you’ll need to create a realistic “play,” assigning the necessary roles to the characters. Mother, father, brother, sister, cousin, uncle, ex-boyfriend, ex-lover, ex-girlfriend—anyone who might be associated with the original trauma, and anyone you meet, is a potential candidate for one of these roles.
Furthermore, to achieve this seemingly impossible feat, you’ll need to mold the people in your life to behave like the original person. That is, the dynamics between you and the new person must mirror the original relationship.
If you experienced deception, betrayal, abuse, or emotional neglect with the original person, you’ll generally gravitate toward people who treat you in the same way. If someone doesn’t behave the way you hoped, you will subconsciously make them behave that way. This is what Freud called “repetitive obsession,” a pattern resulting from projection. If you were abused as a child, you will attract and tolerate abuse in adulthood because: a) it feels familiar, b) you believe it’s the only way to relate, and, most importantly, c) you believe you can achieve a different outcome this time.
Projection is why some people repeatedly fall into relationships with narcissists and other toxic, emotionally unavailable individuals. They crave a healthier relationship but are drawn only to a certain type of person. In reality, they have an unresolved past.
Trauma can control and destabilize our lives beyond imagination. However, trying to resolve it through others is counterproductive and destructive. Allowing the past to affect us without addressing it only deceives us—not just others, but ourselves as well.
