As promised in Part One, I'd like to expound a bit on how understanding the concept of psychological projection can help you manage and even avoid burnout.
Projection, as the name implies, is essentially the process by which we cast our own internal issues onto those around us, allowing them to reflect back to us something about ourselves that it would benefit us to learn. You may have heard the common example that when someone is making us angry it is likely that they are revealing something to us about ourselves that we don't want to look at. You may or may not have found this to be true for yourself. But what does this have to do with burnout?
Over the past 25 years, in my work as a psychotherapist and now as a coach, I've had many opportunities to observe the factors which lead people to exhaust their emotional resources and burn out in their careers as well as in their personal relationships.
Common causes for this exhaustion include:
I will address a number of these issues from this (non-exhaustive!) list in future columns. For now, I'll focus on the last point, where projection plays a considerable role: confusion over whose issues are whose.
At its most simple level, you can recognize projection whenever you fall into the "best defense is a good offense" strategy of managing relationships. For example: I feel upset. I convince myself it is because my husband is mad at me. I think I know why. I make my case against him. He walks in the door, and BAM! He gets an earful.
If I was taught that it isn't okay for me to express anger and that my feelings don't matter, I need to project them on to someone else (as in this example of my husband) in order to justify what may be very real, natural and expected feelings of anger for something he did. Projection gives us the permission to feel things that we have decided, for whatever reason, are not okay for us to take direct ownership of.
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