Your projections aren’t fake. You projected onto them for a reason. You felt their hooks. It was an energetic match, and so you launched your projection. It’s not bad or wrong, this is a psychological process which you need to understand.

I want you to feel clear and confident about what’s happening in your unconscious mind, so please keep reading. Got a book for you at the end.

First things first: stop trying to stop your projections.

You can’t stop projections from happening, not in the first instance, and you shouldn’t set an intention for zero-projection because this would be the same as setting an intention to never daydream or visualise the future.

You’re an imaginative creature, hence you project.

Projections are a normal, automatic psychological process which closes the distance between self and object: they’re the way that we fill in the gaps between our inner world and outer world, they close psychic distance and allow us to form new relationships.

You must project into a new space (or onto a person) to be able to move through the space (or closer to the person).

The problem is that our first impressions are often wrong, but there’s always a hint of truth in even your most knee-jerk assumptions.

Every book has a cover worthy of judgement.

The hook must exist for the projection to catch.

But are you seeing it all correctly?

No, certainly not.

You need to practice discernment with your projections: ask yourself why you threw out certain projections and not others, and likewise pause to think what part of your shadow you flung out with it.

Going deeper, it’s critical to become an expert at differentiating true projections from false perceptions, especially if you want to experience honest and meaningful relationships.

The more painful your childhood wounds, the more likely you are to inflate projective hooks completely out of their true proportion.

You don’t feel safe, you’re playing defence.

It’s true that your ‘gut feeling’ might be right, it might be a truthful projection, but it might also be a mostly untrue instinctual attack.

Pinpointing the confusion between projection and perception is harder than it sounds - this is why shadow work is so important.

One shadow work strategy is to invert your focus.

What do people project onto you?

What hooks do you have for those projections?

Reverse your attention inwards, write down the projections which are commonly thrown at you, and identify the hooks which they land on.

When we receive criticism or people poking fun at us, it’s never entirely untrue and it’s a good opportunity to embrace the fact that there must be some form of shadow hook that caught their shadow projection.

It might be a reasonable criticism, or it might be the smallest hook - you don’t need to be controlled by these things, but you should know what they are.

Seize the opportunity for self-reflection and self-integration.

This week, in both my community post and library livestream, I showed you my copy of Jung’s Map Of The Soul by Murray Stein, and I encourage you to read the entirety of this book while addressing the projections you launch and likewise feel offended by.

Jungian Psychology will help you to uncover what your unconscious hooks might be, which consequently grants you an opportunity to change things for the better.

As a final reminder before you get back to your reading, don’t forget that shadow projection works at both ends of the self-other relationship: your psyche is playing tug-of-war, all you can do is take responsibility for your side of the calloused internal tension.

Clutch your hooks,

Jordan