Today, I want to talk about projection, one of the most important concepts in Bowen Family Systems Theory as it relates to the mental health and proper development of an individual in their lifetime.
Projection is the process by which one generation transmits their unresolved emotional issues onto the next generation.
Parents see children as an extension of themselves instead of as a separate and unique individual that has their own thoughts, feelings, aspirations, insecurities, strengths, and limitations. As a results, parents end up having all sorts of anxious expectations of their child.
I see projection happen in three main ways…
1. Parents live vicariously through their child.
Often, parents become overinvolved in raising their children and lose sight of their own identity outside of their role as a parent. They stop pursuing their own goals and dreams, investing in their own learning and development, strengthening their own talents and skills, and nurturing their sense of self.
Parents see their child’s talents, skills, successes, and achievements as their own. As a result, they end up living vicariously through their children’s development, vitality, and achievements. They project the talents and skills they wish they had in themselves or the dreams they wish they could fulfill onto their children.
Most of the time, parents don’t realize they’re doing this. It’s often unintentional and implicit, but children experience the subliminal emotional messages nonetheless. Parents often believe they mean well and want the best for their children.
However, what they want is based on their own view of reality and the context of their own life, not on the actual child’s reality given the generational and environmental context of that child’s life.
A parent who always wanted something for themselves but didn’t have the opportunity to achieve it or develop it in themselves — a career, a social life, a perfect marriage, an economic status, a hobby or passion, a skillset or unique talent, and so on — might push their children to achieve that thing so that they can live vicariously through them.
“I want my children to become everything I never got to be.”
Oftentimes, this is masked under the guise of making huge sacrifices for their children so that their children can achieve these things. They might even throw this in the child’s face when they’re upset or not getting what they want from the child.
This makes the relationship with the children transactional and puts a lot of pressure on the children to become something that might not feel natural for them to be. This might suppress the child’s authentic talents, inclinations, wishes, and potentials.
For Example
An immigrant parent who never got the chance to go to college and had to work a blue collar job their whole lives might push their child to go to college, get an MBA, get a corporate job, and climb the corporate ladder.
Meanwhile, the child is uniquely skilled for blockchain coding, grows up in the information age with ample access to free or low-cost learning resources on the internet (thank you, Reddit and YouTube), teaches themselves how to code at a young age, and wants to be an indie freelance developer in the gig economy.
This makes perfect sense in the context of the child’s generation, and the child might go on to be very successful by his own definition. However, there will be an emotional and mental disconnect with the parent if the parent is projecting their reality onto their child’s life.
The parent will never be able to see or accept how truly successful their child has become. They would need to temporarily suspend their understanding of reality based on the context of their life in order to step into their child’s perspective and accept who their child wants to authentically become.
If the child has enough courage, they will push back enough on their parent’s projection and pursue their own individuality, but this will create tension in their relationship and leave both feeling misunderstood and emotionally distant.
However, if the child is really sensitive to the parent’s disapproval, they will sacrifice their true desires to live out the parent’s vision for them.
This could be things like:
Playing certain sports or having certain hobbies.
Having a certain appearance and dressing a certain way.
Displaying certain personality characteristics, like extroversion or intelligence.
Choosing a certain type of romantic partner or certain friends.
Choosing a certain career path and a certain definition of success.
Participating in a certain religion and having certain beliefs.
Having certain values and general lifestyle choices that align with what the parents want.
Children will live to make their parents proud and to fulfill the dreams their parents had for them. They’ll also live in fear of upsetting the parents if they don’t live up to those expectations.
Parents project their unlived life and their development onto their children and then live vicariously through their children even if their children don’t actually want those things for themselves. This leaves children in a tough spot because they feel pressured to perform for their parents versus living out their own individual choices.
They allow their parents to be the authority on their life course, versus learning to think and decide for themselves, and picking up the metaphorical pen and authoring their own lives. It might even feel threatening to go against what parents want because this could mean disappointing them, rejection by them, emotional reactions from them, or even worse consequences.
Parents often also getting a sense of energy and aliveness from their children. Children have a natural impulse toward exploration and engagement with the world around them. They are playful, risk-taking, curious, and full of energy.
As adults, we often lose this impulse if we are not intentional about nurturing it in our own lives, and end up living through our children’s vitality. We outsource our sense of aliveness into their developmental process. Ask yourself, how often do you find yourself engaging in play in your life if not with your children or from watching them engage in it?
2. Parents fear their child’s failure and pain.
Just as parent see their child’s successes and achievements as their own, they experience their child’s failures, struggles, and pain as their own. This can lead to the parent being very sensitive to any sign that something might be wrong with the child and anxiously worrying about the child.
Because of the lack of clear separation between self and other, they take on their child’s emotional discomfort. Protecting their child from emotional discomfort is actually a way of protecting themselves from their own emotional discomfort from seeing their child struggle.
Even if the best thing for the child long-term is to experience that discomfort because it will strengthen them and help them learn and grow, the parents will jump in and stop that process.
They might try so hard to protect the child from making mistakes or becoming a failure that they end up inhibiting the child from taking risks and making the mistakes that are necessary for learning and development. Children have to make mistakes, they have to learn from trial and error, they have to feel things on their own skin so that their knowledge and wisdom are experiential and embodied.
If children can’t take their own risks, think through their own decisions, and work through the consequences of those decisions, they will have a hard time developing the autonomy and resilience necessary for adult life.
In fact, childhood is meant to be experimental. It’s like a dress rehearsal for life out in the wild. A simulation of sorts where they get to test out their skills. The more they can try and fall within the context of the family environment, the more their brain and nervous system become complex and prepared to adapt to life out in the wild. Failure, adversity, and non-traumatic psychological discomfort is actually really good for a child’s development into a robust and resilient adult individual.
Of course, some degree of this protect and caretaking is perfectly healthy and adaptive. Children do need parents to be attuned and protect them from trauma or serious injury. As a social species, we evolved for this kind of emotional sensitivity because it helps parents care for and protect their children, who are normally vulnerable in their developmental years. However, like too much of anything good, too much of this can impair the well-being and long-term development of the child.
Ways This Shows Up
They constantly try to protect their child from failure which makes the child anxious about making mistakes and taking the risks which are necessary for learning and normal in the development process.
They constantly try to save the child from their pain which makes the child highly reliant on parental soothing and validation and impairs the child from learning to self-soothe
They’re constantly perceiving certain problems in the child or overreact to the child’s limitations and might be highly critical, pathologizing, or anxiously try to change and fix the child.
Oftentimes, whenever a parent comes in and tells me their child is lazy or underfunctioning at home or outside the home, my first curiosity is: “In what ways might the parents be projecting their anxiety onto this child in way that makes this child feel hesitant or unmotivated to move forward in life for fear of failure, criticism, or disappointing the parents? How might the parents be overfunctioning for the child which then manifests as underfunctioning in the child?”
What often looks like lethargy and laziness on the outside is actually paralysis from an anxious family system on the inside. Children who are “babied” are actually anxiously projected on by the parents and end up manifesting the very things their parents fear, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
3. Parents compensate for their insecurities.
Parents work our their insecurities through their children. They compensate for the parts of themselves that they feel “less than” for by concentrating on those parts in their children. This is largely an unintentional process in which they unconsciously try to “heal” these insecurities and increase their self-esteem by filling their perceived lack with their child’s qualities.
As a result, children might go on to develop those qualities in themselves to the exclusion of others. They might become overly focused on getting their sense of worth from those qualities that the parents focus on. And, in the end, this method doesn’t actually help the parents resolve the insecurities in the long-term.
Parents might seek attention and validation from others for those qualities in their children. They might overly display those qualities in their children to others in their life. They are essentially trying to receive the validation they’ve always wanted for those qualities through their children.
For Example
A mother who was heavily criticized for her weight and looks might come to be heavily critical of her own daughter’s looks and push her daughter to focus on her appearance:
She might push her child to model and post modeling pictures of her all over social media.
She might be really sensitive to the way other’s talk about her daughter’s appearance.
She might bask in any compliments her daughter receives related to her appearance.
The projection process here is simply a result of the parent externalizing this unresolved part of themselves onto another person versus doing their own inner work on it.
4. Parents transfer their unresolved emotional attachments.
The other manifestation of unresolved pain is a result of the parents own emotional attachment with their own parents. Whatever they didn’t get from their own parents they will unconsciously repeat and try to work out through their attachment with their children. This often leads to a cyclical pattern across the generations because children then go on to do the same to their own children, unless they become aware and interrupt the pattern.
These parents can’t relate in a securely attached way to their children if they are anxiously projected their unresolved emotional attachments with their own parents or with their spouse. The children of these parents will then go on to try to resolve whatever lack was in their attachment with their parents through their relationship with their own children.
For Example
A mother who was abandoned by her own mother might promise to never abandon her children, so she’s going to do the exact opposite as a way to try to heal the abandonment wound. She instead is intensely emotionally involved with her child and becomes overbearing as an overcompensation for the emotional void she experienced in her own parental attachment.
But this is done as an emotional reaction to her past, not as a conscious reflection and mature intention to approach her attachment with her children. She’s not tuning into her actual child’s needs, who might need something different than what she’s giving. She’s giving the child version of herself — from the past — what she believes she would have wanted from her own mother.
She is unconsciously trying to heal her wound, not actually attend to what her children actually need from her and relating to her child’s authentic self. It becomes about her own emotions, versus what her child uniquely needs from her, which might actually be more space and autonomy.
So she ends up being suffocating for the child. And, ironically, she also ends up being neglectful, despite her intention to not be. She ends up being neglectful because she’s not actually attuning and attending to the child’s needs.
As a result, she repeats the very thing she was working so hard to avoid — being neglectful. She also unconsciously manifests her own abandonment. Because, in feeling suffocated, the child pulls away and emotionally distances from her to try to protect himself from her engulfment.
This leaves her feeling empty, rejected, and unloved. And it leaves both of them from being authentically connected to each other. Maybe she puts a million and one pictures up on Facebook and creating a shrine for her children. But the children actually prefer privacy and try to set boundaries around social media use.
What the child wishes is that the mother would understand their need for privacy and respect their boundaries. But the mother reacts and feels rejected because she’s just giving her love. But she’s doing what she thinks she would have wanted from her own mother. She’s not attuning to her own child’s needs. She’s serving her own emotional needs unconsciously and unintentionally, but it has an effect on the child.
Final Thoughts
As a result of projection, a child’s sense of self and development might be impaired, which cal lead to all sort of emotional, psychological, and relational problems in adult life:
The child might feel constantly responsible for their parent’s upset.
The child might feel like they’re always doing something wrong.
The child might feel constantly anxious to fulfill their parent’s expectations.
The child might take on anxiety from their parents.
The child might end up with an unclear sense of self and poor self-image.
Parent and child never experience true intimacy and authentic connection.
In short, projection stops a child from feeling free to explore who they uniquely are. They have no breathing room to learn to “hear” themselves and experiment with who they want to become:
What they think, feel, believe, and understand about the world.
What they love to do, what they’re good at, what they don’t like to do, what they’re not good at.
Who they want to have romantic and platonic relationships with.
What their biggest hopes and dreams are.
How they want to live their day-to-day lives.
Instead, the parent’s projections drive what self they should become. Then, they will go on to do the same with their children, unless they become aware and choose to explore and embrace their more authentic longings and ideals.
This is all a result of parents seeing children as an extension of themselves. This impairs children from growing into themselves and into their own separate individual in the world, also known as the process of self-differentiation.
Self-differentiation does not mean that children disconnect from the parents and become isolated, which is often a misinterpretation of this approach. Quite the opposite actually. Authentic connection deepens the more children are freed from the parent’s projections and are seen and embraced for who they authentically are becoming in life.