Welcome to the Relationship Recovery Podcast, hosted by Jessica Knight, a certified life coach who specializes in narcissistic and emotional abuse. This podcast is intended to help you identify manipulative and abusive behavior, set boundaries with yourself and others, and heal the relationship with your.

So you can learn to love in a healthy way.

Today, I want to dive into narcissistic projection. A core characteristic of a narcissist is that they project their feelings onto you. Projection is sometimes unconscious, usually unconscious way of dealing with the presence of something inside of yourself. And it gets externalized because it's so irritating to us and.

A healthy person with good self-awareness would realize what they're doing, or if they're called out on it, probably have the awareness enough to stop and realize and turn inward, but a narcissist won't see the behavior within themselves, even when you bluntly tell them that it's there. This could be unacceptable or unwanted characteristics or flaws, thoughts, emotions, actions, feelings, and it's important to see projection as a defense mechanism for the narcissist.

It's the way in which they tell on themselves, they reveal who they are and what they're doing. And so I want to unpack this a little more. So through projection, a narcissist will call you what they actually are. They accuse you of doing what they're. Or what they're planning on doing, they throw all the uncomfortable feelings onto you because they don't want to deal with them.

They throw their shame on you so they don't have to deal with it. They make you feel guilty for who they are and what they're doing, because they're unable to feel that guilt within themselves. And just like I said before, anybody can do this. You can project things onto other people and not even realize.

But for a narcissist, this is constant and it becomes a tool. From what we know about narcissists, and I've done quite a few podcasts on what a narcissist does, they're unable to look inside. They're unable to be accountable for their role, for their feelings, and for their shame. This is why it's so important to learn about the characteristics of a narcissist because it will allow you to stop taking things personally, and it will allow you to stop defending yourself unnecessarily.

Here are some examples of how a narcissist might project onto you. The narciss might accuse you of cheating and goes on and on questioning you, what you were doing, who you were with, what's going on. They might keep tabs on your phone or make passive aggressive comments. The narciss might make judgments to just ran about random people in the world, like a waitress or.

A hotel concierge, they might say something like, Where's the plump waitress going? Or where's that really irritable concierge? When the narcissist might have these characteristics within themselves, you might set a boundary within the narcissist, and if you don't give them what they want, they will call you selfish.

So even if you say, No, I'm sorry, I can't do that, that doesn't work for me. I can do this though, instead of working with you or seeing that you have a perspective, they will just tell you that you're wrong, you're selfish. The narciss accuses you of lying because they are actually the liar. And so in these examples, you can see how they're just externalizing.

They throw this onto you or whoever, and they are unable to face it inside themselves. And so I'm going to give you a few tips on how to deal with narcissistic project. The first thing is to don't identify it with it. When you start to become clear on some of these patterns, you'll notice how much it's directed at you, and sometimes it might even be around somebody else in the background, but try not to get upset by it.

Try not to give them that reaction. Try not to get involved in a back and forth around it. Don't internalize the projection if it's aimed at you when you don't take it person. You're able to see what's taking place and it will help you stay out of getting caught in that cycle. This takes a lot of hard work, but when you choose to not take it personally and look at the whole scenario, the big picture, and realize what they're doing, you will focus more on what they're doing and their behavior rather on if you are what they say you are.

This is a hard one, but the second thing you can do is not to project. Good qualities or qualities of a healthy partner onto them. This is what most of us do. We project our empathy, our honesty, and all the qualities that we wanna see in our partner onto them. But those are our qualities. We project our goodness onto them.

We want them to treat us with respect, but this sometimes causes us to hold them to unrealistic standards for what they are actually capable of. It's possible that if those things weren't there, If we weren't projecting onto them, we would actually see them for who they are. It, this one can be really tough because we want to see the best in someone, and in a lot of cases I believe that we do see the best parts of the narcissist as well as the most harmful parts.

And so it's important to keep it in mind that when you project those qualities onto them, you are romanticizing their relationship and also what they can be. The last thing, and this takes a lot of inner work as well. Is that it takes work to separate yourself from the narciss projections. If you know yourself when the narcissist is projecting these things onto you and you don't take it personally, you realize, Nope, that's not me.

It helps you remain in your own power and separate from the reality from the gas lighting. This is really important. And I've done a lot of podcasts on how can you return back to yourself, which, so when I say this, and you might be listening to this, and you might be thinking like, There's no way I even have a sense of who I am right now.

I just wanna invite you to go listen to the podcast on boundaries. If you go listen to that podcast on how to set boundaries that will help you begin to create some space so that you can actually think for yourself and think about what's important. I hope that this was helpful and I hope it shed a light on a topic that can be.

Quite frustrating when you're in the cycle. If you need additional support, you can reach out to me at jessica jessica night coaching.com. You can find me at Emotional Abuse Coach on Instagram and emotional abuse coach.com.