Posted: 2026-02-12

Projection Is Completely Fucking Impossible

Someone said to me, when my nonprofit was just starting to take off: "you can't take everyone with you." They were right, but the way in which they were right was surprising. Apparently that's normal.

When you start achieving things, some people will get weird about it, and the version of weird that they get about it is particularly problematic.

The only person who can stop a projection is the projector. The "completely impossible" part is the experience of the target: they're not interacting with you, they're interacting with an artificially constructed version of you in their head which represents a symbol that makes them feel better about themselves.

You cannot, in short, logic or evidence someone out of a belief they didn't logic or evidence themselves into.

This can be undone through hard and challenging work in therapy, but the target has nothing to do with this work.

When someone sees you doing something they wish they were doing (or were deeply conditioned to believe they "should" be doing) they basically have three options:

• Grow — which is hard, slow, and destabilising
• Feel inadequate — which is painful and non-productive; or
• Reframe you — which is quick, easy, and provides instant relief

You cannot have a relationship with someone who needs to reframe you to feel whole.

Including — especially — an intimate relationship.

The cases I've personally experienced weren't complicated messy human things, but really clear-cut situations where one person did nothing wrong and the other person felt a deep need to defend themselves from said nothing. Messy human situations exist, but my experiences were not those, and we can learn from them.

"I've known you deeply for 15 years, but as soon as it became emotionally convenient to swap you out for a caricature, I took the path of least resistance." Someone who says or does that has not earned your friendship.

Business

Startups, even very modestly successful ones to the tune of "we have seed funding for rice and beans" tend to create projections of wealth, power and success. A friend of mine who started one said everyone immediately became weird about the idea of careers and money when talking to them, even though their actual income had gone down significantly since they started.

Nonprofits seem to do the same thing on the ethical axis. Instead of projections around wealth and power, they tend to create projections around goodness — the idea that you're morally superior to others.

So suddenly some people who are deeply caring and generous suddenly start accusing you of "looking down on their career choices" even when you haven't spoken in years. Some people start needing to believe "you think you're better than them" or "you're judging them" in a complete absence of any interactions at all. The last people you would have expected in a million years will suddenly invert their personality towards you because they feel threatened that you are "beating them” at Their Thing.

Ironically, the more kindness and compassion you show them, the more threatening it is.

It took me a while to make any sense of this. None of this is because you actually did anything — right or wrong. It's because your ambient successes — even ones they joined you in celebrating — have created a symbolic version of you in their head that threatens their self-image, and the only way they can buffer themselves against it is to straight up invent facts. Someone who is kind and caring is often more vulnerable to this, because their self-image already carries moral weight.

Projecting Narcissism

The absolutely prototypical version of this is for the person to see someone being successful, achieving things they care about, and displaying qualities they value, then calling them a "narcissist" — a charge of character that requires no actual evidence or logic to land — as a counterweight.

Someone suddenly projecting narcissism onto someone they’ve known for a long time is a near-infallible indicator that their sentiment towards that person has soured (and you can reliably measure someone’s sentiment towards you through responses to questions evoking it).

NPD is a developmental disorder requiring specific conditions in childhood; you don’t suddenly become a narcissist one day. What’s happened is that the person has cultivated a dislike for the target of the projection, and making the character judgement is an easy and nearly universal rationalisation which shields them from the knowledge that the only thing that’s actually changed is how they feel about the person.

"I suddenly dislike you without a reason" threatens the person’s sense of consistency. "You changed and became narcissistic", despite flouting how the disorder works, does not, and it doesn’t require the accuser to examine why the sentiment shifted. It will usually externally begin in the form of softened versions like "you should be humble" or "the smartest people acknowledge they’re wrong sometimes." I have seen those lines applied in comically backwards situations where the person was actually apologising for their own existence.

Comparisons

The internal calculus of "this person is publicly and successfully making a material difference at scale in domains I care deeply about, and I am not" can be softened on the other person’s end with "they’re so full of themselves", "they’ve become judgemental about everyone else", and "they look down on us". It is precisely the fact that the domain matters to them which powers this.

I can't underscore enough that if you are living with someone who does this, there is a very real possibility that their behaviour will escalate into actual abuse and even violence.

These defenses are incredibly flimsy and need to be carefully and actively maintained to avoid falling apart, but maintaining these beliefs gives them some counterweight to maintain the integrity of their self-concept. Same as before, said person being considerate and down-to-earth just makes it more threatening, because the only comfortable stories are the ones where you’re some kind of ogre.

Polyamory

This has been wild too. A lot of people seem to imagine polyamory as something that only extraordinarily attractive partners can achieve. This is, of course, preposterous — it simply means slicing relationships vertically with many people and mixing and matching. But that imaginary scenario tickles a lot of peoples' insecurities.

The version of this which I saw involved the projector twisting everything I said to prove that I was madly in love with her when I hadn't made any advance at all, elevating her on the hierarchy above all my actual partners as the one I couldn't have. This is, again, preposterous, and my actual partners had a thing or two to say about this, and the phrase "extremely gross" came up repeatedly.

There are also a lot of simmering resentments around the topic, similar to how homosexuals or transgender people used to (and sometimes still do) get a lot of hatred from some closeted people when coming out — you can't just do whatever you want. Repression backlash is a well-understood phenomenon, and the psychological mechanics here are very close.

The societal ignorance around polyamory is extreme, but that's a story for another time.

Hierarchies

There are a range of situations in which people will tend towards hierarchical thinking (where people are internally "ranked"), and while we could nerd out about the psychometrics of Social Dominance Orientation, Authoritarian cognitive styles and Dark Factor traits, I can just give you an example:

In one common scenario, the other person has internally created a ranking of people based on some factor they value (let’s say intelligence, which is a common one), and felt like you were placed far above them, so they needed to correct this by saying the gap is actually not that small.

All of this happens inside the other person's head. This is how we end up with situations where they will straight up walk up to you and drop, out of the blue, "I'm smarter than you think I am" — yielding utter confusion from you who had never internally or externally questioned the other person's intelligence.

Correcting them by telling them that "I never thought you were unintelligent" paradoxically inflames the situation — rationally, they knew that perfectly well, but you’re destabilising their flimsy shield by saying it. Their only available response is to shore up the belief that is actually protecting their self-concept: that you are looking down on them. That is what they want to believe to feel safe.

You, as the target of the projections, cannot in fact help these people reorient their thinking. All you can do is step back and give them space to either figure themselves out or not. When you haven't actually changed, it's up to them to reconcile differences in self-image.

It's in my nature to try and reconcile differences, to try to help people reconnect and settle whatever tension there is. People who are projecting will suddenly start finding this actively threatening when it is contradictory with a story they need to preserve their self image. Resolving issues would mean collapsing the blind spot that is protecting them from their feelings, and they will fight ferociously to defend it.

The doublethink of editing this out is actually central to the mechanism of projection — even acknowledging themselves that it existed would cause the mechanism to collapse and a tidal wave of inadequacy to take its place.

Responding to "you've changed" with "how would you know, we haven't spoken properly in years" is just taken as proof of the story.

Sunk Costs

Projection basically creates a "sunk cost" situation: where backing down and facing what they’ve done not only means taking on the original shame that was unthinkable to feel, but the additional shame of admitting their attacks were projection all along. This is how we end up with people doubling down, selectively remembering, reinterpreting past or neutral events. The person becomes deeply invested in their fiction out of emotional survival.

If your life is (increasingly) made of asking the difficult questions, you shouldn't expect to get on with people who run and hide from them. It’s sad, but you can’t change it.

Blind Spot

Projection, by definition, is predicated on the creation of a blind spot. People who engage in it will almost certainly read the above through the lens of everyone else’s projections (particularly everyone else they don’t like, likely meaning the people they’re projecting onto). Collapsing the blind spot is exactly equal to the projection shield shattering, with the associated shame costs.

This is a classic point for the person to table-turn and say that you are the worst projector of all and probably also call you a narcissist again in an attempt to avoid paying those shame costs. As long as the person keeps hiding behind their projections, the range of available responses they can make to this content is narrow and entirely consists of efforts to short-circuit critical thinking (eg ad-hominem attacks).

Once those have been addressed, all that remains are avoidance behaviours.

Lived Experience

Bystander

~ Anonymous

Bridges

~ Anonymous

Awareness

~ Anonymous

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Version: 1

Written: iunno to 2026-02-12

Written on: 7.5mg olanzapine since 2025-11-11

Mental health was: very poor - estimate 15% brain