There are ways you can tell if someone, therapist or not, is trying to be helpful but really just bringing you their baggage. This kind of projection can obviously happen in any kind of situation, for instance you decide to keep some distance from a destructive family member and other people pipe in with “but they’re family,” as if that should be enough to change your mind. In that case they’re almost certainly thinking of their own family and not yours.

However, it seems the most common examples of projection are with issues of sexual assault — partially because a lot of people want to be helpful in the healing process, and often because they relate to the injury. I won’t bury the lead, it’s either (1) assuming things that don’t have direct evidence, or (2) hyper-focusing on only one particular aspect of the story. Now the second part is a bit harder because sometimes a person’s attention will focus on one particular detail based on intuition from past experience, and if it’s a therapist that may legitimately be derived from a broad number of similar experiences. Still, any particular situation could be entirely unique, and one way you can notice the absence of baggage is if your audience is open to that possibility with a willingness to check if their assumptions are correct, reassesses the importance of different goals when the story changes, and adapt their thoughts to match new information.

I want to do more than just explain, so let me offer two different examples here, both to help you build your own intuition as well as make another point about how this often becomes a problem. Certainly all humans, therapists included, can have baggage about all kinds of subjects, but often recognizing whether someone is trying to be helpful, or judgemental, is offering wisdom or just personal bias can be a skill all by itself.

I supervised therapists in some capacity for over 15 years, and I doubt I’ve seen anything as clear-cut as this first example. A therapist I was working with had a teen client who had serious problems with constant and compulsive lying. This was absolutely a serious problem and led to his getting beaten up by peers on more than one occasion “for his mouth,” and the therapist had obviously focused a lot of her attention on that.

There were certainly issues of guilt and blame involved (which is a topic for another blog that I’ll link here once I write it), but even though his lies were obviously not a smart decision and were occasionally provocative, the full moral responsibility for his being assaulted is still only on the people that assaulted him. Often the difference between practical consequences and moral responsibility gets confusing and is hard to keep clearly separate. In discussion with the therapist I noticed she had moved from the therapeutically appropriate “this behavior doesn’t get you to the outcome you want” to some more subtle version of “if you keep doing this, the consequences are your fault.” That was my first flag. No, he has a right to make up stupid stories about how good he is at something he doesn’t know anything about; this doesn’t mean he deserves to get beaten up.

In further conversation about the case, I asked about other things she was addressing in his life. Turns out in the months of seeing him, there was very little else they talked about, and conversations were mostly about the obvious lies he was telling in session. This was flag number two, which to me suggests we’re missing context and motive for the behavior.

To go back to the original questions about projection, she (1) made the assumption he was primarily motivated by a desire to “get attention,” and didn’t seem to have questioned this assumption or explored other options. (2) While this was a major feature of his life, there didn’t seem to be other ways in which he was attempting to “get attention.” I asked questions about her feelings toward the client. It’s a bit of an understatement to say the third red flag was obvious when she said, “I guess I really hate it when men lie to me.” (I mean, he was either 14 or 15, but okay, “man.”) She was quickly able to connect this response to her experience with her ex-husband and to her credit very appropriately took responsibility, “which I guess is my issue. I need to focus on other things.” Good insight and absolutely the perfect reaction. Everyone is human.

To make a long and complicated story short, she was actually unable to find other things to focus on and couldn’t change her approach. I spoke with the mother and after we moved the client to another therapist, where we found out what was really going wrong. I don’t blame the first therapist for missing this, some clients and therapist are just a poor match, that will be true for everyone (even me). It doesn’t mean she actually did anything wrong. However, because of her baggage, she wasn’t able to recognize the actual problem and fell into the same trap as his peers did. Her sessions with him had nothing else to talk about other than the lying, because that was his (unconscious) goal. It’s a problem if all you have to talk about are things you’ve make up, isn’t it? He tried to hide behind these stories so no one noticed how insecure and hollow he felt. That’s a problem. The next therapist quickly recognized his neglect of his real self and focused her attention on helping him develop authentic interests and skills, not merely stories about things that other people might like. When he developed enough security to discover his actual interests, unsurprisingly he had real things to talk about, and the lies slowly disappeared.

Thankfully my second example isn’t from a therapist, but I picked it because I hope it’s just far enough over the line that you’ll understand that it’s a bad idea but see why it might have looked like a good thing. A college student* told me how, unrelated to the topic of discussion, or even the subject of the class, her professor went off on an angry tangent about how she hates the phrase “sexual assault.” She claimed the term is just a pretty mask people use because they’re scared to say the word “rape.” (Please see my previous blog about metaconversation and negotiating word choice.) She went on to proclaim the value of the word and talked about how good it was that there was a female “performance artist” who would make herself look bloody and run naked into the street to “raise awareness” of the reality of rape.  Um .. wut? 

I’ve heard people complain about unnecessary trigger warnings in current classroom settings, but if ever there was a situation where it would be justified, this discussion certainly needed one. Not everyone who has been sexually assaulted feels comfortable with the word rape, and that can be a very normal and appropriate reaction for them. But in this case the professor is just adding unnecessary guilt to a survivor’s experience as if they aren’t responding to their assault “correctly.” 

This whole thing seriously destabilized my client, which I think is an entirely predictable, and understandable reaction. I’m going to take this whole thing at face value, because I think that’s most likely what actually happened — an over zealous professor with good intentions was (1) assuming all situations are the same as (probably) hers, and (2) overly focusing on the word rape, a detail which excludes other important parts of survivor’s lived experience with sexual assault. Now I do want to express some skepticism as well, particularly at this description of the “performance artist,” which my intuition doesn’t think sounds real. Obviously I could be wrong, and again I think the face value interpretation is probably true, but the odds of some other motivation being at play here are high enough for me to want to mention them. First, if there is such a performance artist, I have to wonder if this person is merely enacting an exhibitionism fetish. If this isn’t the case I certainly think she’s more caught up in on her own process to the point of ignoring the collateral damage her performance may cause. Second, and again I do think this is a pretty low probably, but given that the effect of this discussion is predictably destabilizing to survivors, it is worth considering that perhaps the professor is taking advantage of her position to engage in some kind of emotional sadism on her class. Vicarious revenge for her feeling that society was not paying attention to her experience perhaps? If I was more personally involved in the situation, that would be the first thing I would want to rule out; is she actually trying to be helpful or not? Either way, for the rest of the discussion lets assume both the performance artist and professor have good motives to their actions. What’s going on here?

Give me a moment to bring in one of my favorite metaphors for human growth, The Monomyth. In brief, the story reflected in almost all mythological and religious literature is essentially the same, because it’s a broad outline of human psychological growth. Let me summarize in a way that will apply here: The hero’s normal life is threatened and so they were called to adventure into a dark cave, deep forest, empty desert, or underworld. In the process they are injured, find a wise guide that directs them to the weapons or tools they will need to defeat some monster, dragon, evil god or demon and take the treasure that spirit guards back to save the normal world. In this case a rape may be both the injury and the thing that threatens normal life, one tries to maintain the fiction that normal life can continue until the injury becomes too great to ignore any longer.

In this example, the professor probably relates to the performance artist so strongly because they have both done the same thing. They have had the courage to go into the darkness, and perhaps they found a guide, but they certainly found a weapon — probably their righteous anger. So they want to use this weapon, and provide it to others.

Often a person’s first reaction to sexual assault is to try to deny it happened, to try to avoid the darkness and pretend normal life can continue while their village is burning down. This professor and performance artist correctly recognize they are farther along in the journey than a person living in denial, and perhaps being given the weapon of that anger will give the person courage to confront the challenge. It really does make sense, it’s just not always true. They have mistaken the tool needed to overcome the dragon for the treasure the dragon guards. Only seeing things in this one way means they take on the role of a retired hero who has now become the wise guide that will direct future heroes to the treasure. I have no doubt that some future heroes will find this helpful, and that some of them will use this tool to reach the treasure, but certainly not all. Not everyone needs a weapon, and anger is not necessarily a tool for everyone. There are certainly some future heroes who will find this tool, and the path they’re trying to lead them down, hurts the hero more than their dragon.

The professor is right that whatever she has discovered IS growth, for her. And it IS important, for her. If she was imprisoned and fought herself free with her anger as a weapon, I’m legitimately glad for her. But merely being farther along in her journey doesn’t mean she’s ready for the role of the wise guide for future heroes. At this point, we can see how the rigid application of one solution to all varieties of sexual assault is like wielding the weapon indiscriminately, and it results in others getting caught in the crossfire. Different heroes may be on entirely different kinds of quests.

And let me add … confronting this particular dragon does make you a hero. It’s a courageous act that is unique for everyone and requires as much clear-headed creativity as a person can muster.

*Client story used with permission.