Are We Projecting Our Negative Self-Beliefs Onto Others?

I recently had someone tell me he has a hard time asking for help. He said “Every time I want to ask someone for help, I think to myself ‘they probably don’t even really like me anyway, so why would they want to help me?”

When he finished his sentence, I pointed out to him “It’s not that they don’t like you; it’s that you don’t like you. And you’re projecting your own dislike of yourself onto other people, assuming that they see you the same way you see yourself.” He looked stunned for a moment, but then said “You’re right.”

If we see ourselves as basically unlikeable and treat ourselves like we aren’t worthy of love, or friendship or help, we end up projecting our poor self-worth onto everyone in our lives. We reach a point where we believe that everyone sees us in the same negative light that we see ourselves. This is a primary reason why it is often so hard to ask others for help, or to believe that other people really care about us.

In her book Conquering Shame and Codependency, Darlene Lancer uses an example of someone who has paid for her friend’s lunch “so she would like me.” Lancer underscores the fact that this person’s belief is “She wouldn’t like me if I were (just) myself, because I’m not enough to be liked and loved.”

Negative self-beliefs are one of the many killers of relationships. First, any negative self-belief that we choose to own ruins our relationship with ourselves. In effect, we abandon ourselves by having negative self-beliefs. We then project these negative self-beliefs onto everyone else in our lives. These beliefs put distance between ourselves and others by making true intimacy impossible. How can we be intimate with someone else when we believe we are unlovable? We can’t. How can we trust that someone else really loves us when we are projecting our own self-loathing onto the other person? We can’t. As long as we see the other person seeing us as we see ourselves, we will never believe they love us.

Instead, we will fear the day they choose to abandon us, and our own continued self-loathing will most likely drive them away and assure that that very day becomes a reality.

Next time we catch ourselves thinking that “someone probably doesn’t really like me anyway,” or feeling like we have to pay for or earn someone else’s love or friendship, we need to turn the mirror on ourselves. Most likely we our projecting our own negative self-beliefs onto others. We need to stop, re-evaluate our self-beliefs and begin to change them into positive self-beliefs.