I will never be a woman, and I’ll never know the experience of living inside a female body or mind. The psycho-somatic gap between men and women is natural, which is why we need to make an active effort to understand what it’s like on the other side…. and this requires an advanced understanding of psychological projection.

Psychological distance is real.

I will never have a true, experiential anchor into the internal reality of being a woman, and a woman will never have a complete anchoring into my experience of being a man.

You can feel the gap.

It’s tangible.

We can’t erase the distance, not fully.

Projection - in the clinical sense of the term - is how we minimise the gap between the known and the unknown as men and women.

In a single sentence: projection is how you close psychological distance between your inner world and the outer world.

Anima and Animus projections get a bad reputation in YouTube pop-psychology, but these inner mechanisms are fundamental tools for male-female socialisation.

Your image of the eternal masculine or eternal feminine remains with you in every relationship you will have for the rest of your life.

Shadow Work (Anima and Animus Integration, in particular) is especially important if you find yourself being swept away by intense infatuations or holding your partners to unrealistic standards - these are tell-tale-signs of romantic projection, and it’s a huge problem.

When you quickly fall in love with someone or rapidly develop a crush that’s an overblown positive projection - we call that pedestalisation, and it’s linked to your Anima or Animus image.

When you suddenly hate somebody or develop a strong disgust response, then we call that demonisation and it’s likewise associated with your negatively-charged Anima or Animus image.

You’re not crazy with your projections, but you’re not fully centred yet either.

If you want to stop romantically projecting, then you need to take the time to understand why you launch projections in the first place.

Studying Jungian concepts, especially through excellent books such as John Sanford’s book ‘Invisible Partners’ which I recommended earlier this week, will help you become conscious of the psychological dynamics beneath the surface of your psyche… read the book, and you will feel empowered to lower the charge of your projections and make more rational decisions.

To go one step further, and after the stage of authentic self discovery, you will eventually appreciate the projective nature of your fantasy mind.

You will learn how to appreciate not only the necessity of projection, but the beauty of them too.

Projection is the magnetism which brings us together.

When you feel the natural fascination to learn more about the other, that urge becomes the desire to get close, have relations, and build your family together. It’s what we’ve been doing for thousands of years, and we have projection to thank.

Ultimately, I believe that the most empowering way to work with the Anima / Animus image is to embrace the fact that you will always project - you’re always going to see things through the filter of the eternal image.

Romantic projection doesn’t mean that you’re flawed - it doesn’t mean that you’re particularly neurotic or unstable - it's just what most people are doing, most of the time, but most people aren't as aware of their inner world as you are or curious to learn more about why things happen in the shadow undercurrents.

The romantic projection problem is hurting you because you’re aware of the romantic projection problem, which is ironically healing the problem too.

I find this liberating, and I hope you do too.

Jordan

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