A Personal Threshold: How It All Began
Many years ago, I met a girl who changed something very deep inside me.
At that time, I was in a confused and difficult phase of life. I did not have much confidence. I carried a lot of self-doubt and a quiet sense that something was wrong with me, even though I did not fully understand why. I was young, uncertain, unsupported and trying to find my place in the world.
The girl was kind, simple, and sincere. But more than anything else, she did one small thing that changed everything for me: she showed faith in me. She believed I was capable. And somehow, that belief reached me at a time when I could not yet believe in myself.
When I found out that she liked me, it felt like a breath of fresh air. For the first time in a long time, I felt seen. I felt chosen. I felt that maybe I was not as broken as I had quietly assumed.
My feelings for her were not very ordinary. They were more like admiration, devotion, and a strange sense of purity. In my inner world, she slowly became something more than just a person. I began to see her as almost divine — as someone who carried goodness, clarity, and a kind of light that I myself did not yet know how to hold.
Looking back, I can see that I did not really know her very deeply. She was a good human being, yes — but the image I carried of her was much bigger than the real person. I had placed something ideal, almost otherworldly, onto her.
But that image did something powerful in me.
Because of her, I started wanting to become better — not just in a practical way, but as a human being. I wanted to be more sincere, more capable, more worthy. In difficult moments, thinking of her gave me strength. In a strange way, that inner image became a shield that protected me from a lot of negativity around me.
For many years, this stayed with me.
Only much later in life did I begin to notice something quietly important: the difference between the real human being and the image I had carried for so long. And that difference slowly opened a much deeper question in me — not only about her, but about the way we sometimes relate to others, and what we are really seeing when we fall in love in this way.
This reflection begins there.
Projection : How It Works and Why Direction Matters
When people hear the word projection, it often sounds like a psychological term. But in real life, it rarely arrives that way. It arrives as attraction, admiration, devotion, resentment, blame, or the feeling that someone else carries something important for us.
In simple terms, projection happens when something that lives inside us is experienced as if it belongs outside us.
It might be our hope, our ideals, our sense of goodness and meaning. Or it might be our anger, our shame, our fear, or our sense of failure. Instead of meeting these things as our own inner realities, we see them in others.
But projection is not just one thing. It moves in different directions. And those directions matter.
Sometimes, we project upward.
We place our longing, our ideals, our sense of beauty, goodness, or meaning onto another person. We see in them what we cannot yet fully see or hold in ourselves. This kind of projection is often born from vulnerability and a genuine hunger for something better. It can inspire growth. It can protect the heart. It can keep something alive inside us when life feels harsh or empty.
This kind of projection seeks completion.
But there is another kind of projection.
Sometimes, people project downward.
Instead of placing their light outside, they place their darkness there — their anger, their shame, their cruelty, their envy, their sense of inadequacy. They do this not because they are necessarily evil, but because they cannot yet bear to face these things in themselves. So they look for someone else to carry them.
This kind of projection seeks evacuation.
Very often, this happens in narcissistic families, groups, and systems where some emotions or truths are not allowed to exist. The most sensitive or vulnerable person in the system becomes the container for what the system cannot face about itself.
Both forms of projection are ways of surviving inner difficulty. But they do not have the same consequences.
One can protect and guide a person toward growth.
The other can quietly wound and distort a person’s sense of self.
This is why projection is not something that can be judged in a simple way. It always tells the truth about the inner condition of the one who is projecting — but not necessarily about the person it is projected onto.
When Projection Saves Us
There are moments in life when a person is not strong enough, not supported enough, whole enough, or safe enough inside to stand on their own. This is not a failure. It is simply part of being human.
In such moments, projection can become a kind of psychological bridge.
Instead of collapsing into despair, numbness, or self-hatred, the psyche finds something outside that carries hope, goodness, or meaning. A person, an idea, a teacher, a lover, or even a dream can become the place where our own unrealized strength and dignity temporarily live.
This is not weakness. It is adaptation.
Many people survive very difficult inner or outer conditions because they are able to hold onto such an image. It gives them a reason to keep going. It gives them a direction. It gives them a sense that something better is possible, even if they cannot yet feel that possibility inside themselves.
In this form, projection is not escapism. It is protection.
It can:
- protect a person from fully believing the worst things they have been told about themselves
- preserve a sense of goodness in hostile or invalidating environments
- keep aspiration, self-respect, and hope alive
- quietly guide someone toward becoming more than their circumstances
Very often, the person we idealize in this way is not important because of who they are in every detail, but because of what they awaken in us. They become a mirror for a better version of ourselves that is still forming.
Later in life, when we look back, we may realize that what we were really in love with was not just another human being, but a possibility — a way of being, a way of feeling, a way of existing that had not yet become our own.
In this sense, projection can be one of the first ways the soul says:
“There is more to you than you have been allowed to live.”
And sometimes, that is exactly the message a person needs in order to survive, grow, and keep moving forward.
When Projection Becomes a Burden
What once protected us and gave us strength can, at another stage of life, quietly begin to hold us back.
Projection, too, has its season.
At first, it can give direction, strength, and hope. But if it remains unchanged while we ourselves are changing, it slowly begins to weigh on both the person who projects and the one who is being projected upon.
The moment projection turns into a burden is usually very quiet.
It happens when the other person is no longer allowed to be fully human. When they are unconsciously asked to remain a symbol, an ideal, or a source of meaning. When the relationship is no longer a meeting between two changing people, but an attempt to preserve an inner image.
In such a space, something essential begins to disappear.
Spontaneity fades. Playfulness becomes careful. Desire feels restrained, as though it might disturb something fragile. Truth becomes harder to speak, not because it is dangerous, but because it might crack the image.
Slowly, the relationship loses its vitality.
Often, these relationships do not end through conflict or drama. They end through a kind of quiet thinning. A loss of aliveness that leaves both people confused about what went wrong.
The tragedy here is not that projection ever existed. The tragedy is that it was never allowed to evolve.
What once served as a bridge was never taken back home.
The Moment Projection Cracks (And Why That’s Sacred)
For many people, projection does not end with a fight, a betrayal, or a dramatic collapse. It often ends in a much quieter way.
One day, something small happens.
You notice a detail. You hear an opinion. You see a choice. And suddenly, the person you have been carrying as an image appears, very simply, as a human being — limited, partial, shaped by their own history and their own blind spots.
Nothing terrible has happened.
And yet, something changes.
This moment can feel like disappointment, but it does not have to be. It can also feel like clarity.
It is the moment when the psyche begins to realize that what it was relating to was not only the other person, but also an inner figure, an inner image, an inner story. And when that realization comes, a deeper question quietly appears:
If this person is not the source of what I loved, then where did it come from?
This is a sacred question.
Because it turns the direction of attention inward.
What was once seen as belonging to someone else — goodness, strength, dignity, beauty, meaning, faith — begins to be recognized as something that has been living inside us all along, waiting to be claimed.
This does not erase the gratitude we may feel toward the person who once carried that image for us. In fact, it often deepens it. We can finally thank them not for being perfect, but for being the mirror through which we first saw something true about ourselves.
In this way, the cracking of projection is not a loss. It is a return.
A return of our own qualities.
A return of our own authority.
A return of our own inner life.
And with that return comes something quiet and rare: peace.
Why No One Can Tell Another When to Let Go
One of the quiet misunderstandings about inner life is the idea that there are correct timelines.
That one should let go at a certain age.
That one should “heal” within a certain number of years.
That one should stop projecting as soon as one understands what projection is.
But inner life does not work that way.
Projection is not a habit that can simply be dropped. It is a process. And like all deep processes, it unfolds according to the needs and readiness of the individual soul.
For some people, projection is still what keeps them standing. It may be the only place where hope, meaning, or goodness is still alive. To take it away too early would not be wisdom. It would be cruelty.
For others, projection has already begun to feel heavy, constricting, or false. In them, something is already preparing to change.
No one on the outside can truly know which moment someone else is living in.
This is why it is a mistake to turn spiritual and psychological insight into instruction. Understanding a process does not give us the right to manage someone else’s inner timing.
What looks like illusion from one angle may still be medicine from another.
And what looks like clinging may still be survival.
Each psyche knows, in its own way and in its own time, when a certain inner structure has finished its work.
Our task, when we are witnessing another human being, is not to push them forward or pull them away, but to respect the mystery of their unfolding.
Sometimes the most honest thing we can say is simply:
“I do not know what this is for you. But I trust that your life does.”
Closing: Projection as a Sacred Detour, Not a Mistake
Looking back, it becomes clear that projection is not simply something that happens to us. It is something that happens for us — at least for a time.
It is one of the ways the human soul learns to recognize its own depth before it knows how to carry it.
Sometimes, we meet our best qualities first in another person. Sometimes, we meet our hidden wounds there too. In both cases, what we are really meeting is our own unfinished inner life, seen from the outside because we are not yet able to hold it within.
When projection is honored for what it is — a bridge, a mirror, a temporary shelter — it does not need to be hated or denied. It only needs to be completed.
Completion does not mean erasing the past. It means retrieving what truly belongs to us.
It means being able to say, quietly and without drama:
“What I saw there was real. But it was also mine.”
And when that happens, something very gentle becomes possible.
We can feel gratitude without attachment.
We can remember without being bound.
We can honor the people who once carried our inner images without asking them to keep carrying them.
Life does not move in straight lines. It moves through symbols, detours, misunderstandings, and half-light. Projection is one of those detours. Sometimes it saves us. Sometimes it teaches us. Sometimes it asks to be released.
None of that is a failure.
It is simply how a human being slowly learns to come home to themselves.
Musings of a Warrior Buddha 
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