Love is a beautiful and powerful force. But sometimes, without even realizing it, our love becomes tangled with fear. The desire to protect, to guide, to ensure happiness for the people we care about can quietly shift into something else entirely: it can become control, expectations or unconscious projection. We begin to place our own unhealed wounds, unmet needs and hidden fears onto the people we love most. The trouble is, when we do that, we do not just risk pushing them away. We also keep ourselves stuck in cycles of pain. But there is a different way. When we learn to heal our fears and truly listen to the hearts of our loved ones, love becomes free again. And so do they.
This week, my client Carmen (not her real name) was struggling with more anxiety and fear than usual. She was incredibly angry with her daughter, who had decided that she did not want to get married or have children. (There are, of course, reasons why Carmen’s daughter doesn’t want to be in a relationship, but we are dealing only with Carmen’s side of the issue.)
When I asked Carmen, “Why does it bother you so much?” she replied, “Because I don’t want her to be alone.”
“I understand that, ” I said, “but why else?”
Carmen hesitated for a minute and then said, “She is depriving me of loving my grandchildren. I need someone to love.”
Ahh . . . there it was. Carmen was trying to project the love she herself needed onto her imaginary, unborn grandchildren. Her own childhood had been filled more with abuse and neglect than with love. Carmen thought that showering love on another person would make her feel more loved.
Unfortunately, that isn’t the case.
I suggested to Carmen that we find ways to make the little girl inside of her feel loved, accepted, and adored. Carmen needed to show herself love, not someone else.
There were two things taking place with Carmen:
- She was projecting her emotional and physical needs onto an imaginary person… trying to give to others what she herself was so desperately needing.
- She was trying to control her daughter’s life because being in control made Carmen feel safe, something that she had not experienced as a child. By focusing on her daughter’s life, Carmen was avoiding her own pain.
As we know but often don’t want to acknowledge, the only things we can truly control are our own thoughts and actions. Everything else is a facade, things we tell ourselves to feel safe.
In Carmen’s case, she was creating anxiety and fear for herself because she could no longer control her adult daughter. She also upset her daughter by resisting her daughter’s choice to walk her own path and live her own life.
Sometimes, as humans, we project onto others the very thing that we never received and have always wanted. Unconsciously, of course… we don’t realize that we are doing it.
Parents sometimes push onto us things they themselves wanted to do as children but were never allowed to do. Or perhaps we reverse the way our parents treated us.
For instance, a different client told me, “I was pushed to make my own money and get a summer job while in high school — I am never going to do that to my child.”
When I turned 21 (over 30 years ago), I had been married to my then-husband for only 13 days. But he never acknowledged my birthday. My birthday is the 4th of July. How do you forget that day?
A few years later when my younger brother turned 21, I threw a birthday party for him. He didn’t ask for it, and truthfully, I’m not even sure he was into it… I didn’t realize it at the time, but I eventually learned that I had thrown my brother’s party more for myself than for him. I wanted to ensure that my brother was acknowledged in a way that I hadn’t been by my husband at the time.
Besides projecting our unfulfilled needs onto the people currently in our lives, we can also transfer our feelings onto other generations. Instead of listening to what our child wants or supporting their dreams, we project our fears onto them.
For example, a parent may have had a fear of moving away from their hometown, of leaving behind what they knew all their lives. So, when it comes time for their child to leave home to attend school, the parent may transfer their own fears onto the child by telling them, “You can’t leave home. You need to continue living at home and driving to school because it’s not safe out there. You could be hurt or kidnapped.”
Or perhaps the parent doesn’t want the child to leave home because the parent will then be alone. If the parent has issues she has never dealt with or has no other significant relationships, fear may compel her to say something like, “You don’t have to go to school. You can get a job here and keep living at home.”
Here are a couple of suggestions how to avoid projecting onto others:
- Check yourself. Are you projecting your wants, desires, and needs onto your loved one? Go within and ask: Why am I doing this? What is my motivation? Am I trying to make someone else happy? Is it what they truly want? Or is it what I want? Have I asked them how they feel about the issue? Am I truly doing what is in their best interest?
- If you’re planning a special event for your loved one, take a back seat and let the loved one drive the car. How many times have we seen the mother of the bride take over her daughter’s wedding without consulting her daughter and the prospective son-in-law? Let your loved one share their thoughts with you. And when you ask questions, listen with your head and your heart when your loved one answers them.
Remember: the event is not about you!
This needs repeating: the event is not about you.
It’s about the loved one and what they want.
Ultimately, we must acknowledge when our fears are influencing our decisions. We have to face and deal with our pain as well as the reasons why we project our issues onto others. We need to ensure that what we are doing or saying to our loved ones is truly about them and not about us.
This is why it’s crucial, particularly for those of us who grew up in dysfunctional homes, to have the courage to work through our issues, painful though they are, and to seek healing and peace. Otherwise, we run the risk of inflicting our pain on our loved ones and, rather than keeping them close to us, driving them away.
Can you see yourself in this story? And if so, would you like some help in learning how to change it? Connect with me here.
Love and Be Loved,
Mary Carol
