Compounding the Lying: When the One You Love Won’t Own Their Mistakes
When you are projected onto by someone you love, it is heartbreaking—and it’s time for you to choose yourself.
If I Can Make You Wrong, Then I Can Be Right
Have you ever been projected onto? Do you know the experience firsthand? It’s when someone blames you for what they have done. They are disowning their behavior and projecting it onto you as though you did what they had actually done. They might make you feel ashamed of yourself or they might lash out at you and abuse you physically, emotionally, or verbally for doing the thing that you are accusing them of doing. When we are naturally empathic, we might take this on as our fault and become confused thinking that maybe we actually did do the thing they did. We start to think about it and, in state of confusion—cognitive dissonance, we run through the possibilities in our minds: Maybe it appeared to our partner that we did the deed. Maybe we don’t really know ourselves very well and perhaps we, too, sometimes do these really insensitive things our person is accusing us of doing (that they are actually doing, remember).
Projecting is a big part of narcissistic and emotional abuse. It’s a form of gaslighting. And, to be honest, maybe at times you have done the thing that you are being accused of. However, in this particular instance, you were not the one doing the bad deed. The reason for them accusing you of doing the same thing is to level the playing field so that they are not the “bad” one in the situation. This way, they don’t have to own what they have done fully and now both of you are “in this together” and equally as “bad” as each other. A true soul mate connection! Not. Your partner does not want to feel the shame that will erupt from within when they have to admit that they messed up. Even the very smallest of “bad” things they do cannot be admitted to. The shame is just too all-encompassing and intense to face. To be seen as “wrong” in any way means that they are not “right” and being “not right” can incite much shame and bullying from their inner critic parts that incessantly micromanage the heck out of your partner. So, instead of admitting wrong-doing and promising to try harder next time to self-correct, they avoid the uncomfortable feeling of shame and the belief that they are “bad for being wrong” all together by simply not admitting to what they have done and making it your fault instead. Easy peasey! That works out well for the one at fault, but it won’t for you—at least not long-term.
When You Catch Me In a Lie, I Will Have to Punish You More
There are other times when you might catch someone in a lie and when you confront them about it, they make endless excuses for why they lied or try to make you feel bad about their poor, sad life and for why they couldn’t meet your needs or follow through in some way. Watching a grown adult make very poor excuses for bad behavior is a little comical because of the absurdity of it all, but it’s also extremely infuriating to see them making excuses for why they could not be honest or why they cannot be a decent person or friend. To me, it is very sad. It shows me exactly how traumatized they must have been from very early on to feel the need to lie and then cover it up with even more lies, lame and lazy excuses, or lashing out behaviors. It’s a protective position and it helps them avoid shame (as always, that shame really is a biggie). However, when you are in the midst of this kind of baffling behavior from your partner, it is no picnic.
The craziest part is when you catch them in a lie and they decide to either vindictively and passive-aggressively “get you back” for “catching” them (as though it’s your fault for them doing the bad thing) or they just start adding insult to injury by compounding the lies with other lies. This serves to punish you for calling them out and for being upset with their poor choices. Watching an adult operate from their very wounded inner child is really hard on a person who loves them because they are out to punish you as though you are their abusive parent trying to control their behavior when really you are probably just really confused and hurt by what they did and wonder why they did what they did. You might also be angry and disappointed by what they tell you, which is probably warranted. Adding more lies to the equation is particularly heartbreaking because their intention is to make you feel WORSE than you already feel about whatever they lied about. They will just start piling on top of what they did with more, worse things they are going to do or have already done and it increases your fear and confusion. It might even feel like you are being stabbed in the back or the heart. It is a betrayal and it’s very harmful. It’s like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Now everything they ever did comes out or they just lie more to make you feel worse. This can make you feel like they hate you or that they want nothing to do with you even though they were the one who lied or kept something a secret. This is also a form of gaslighting and can cause cognitive dissonance because you feel very confused about why you are being punished with more lies or threats when you didn’t do anything wrong. You desperately want to believe that your person loves you, but instead this behavior feels like they want nothing to do with you. It is a very terrifying form of abuse as well because you feel like you are also being rejected and abandoned when your person fails to really acknowledge their lie or, when they do, they then dig an even bigger hole in which to bury you (alive most likely). The shame they experience when they are caught with their hand in the cookie jar is so intense that they react like a wounded child and make matters a lot worse.
The reason for the lying can be many, but sometimes when people lie, it’s because they don’t want to hurt you by telling you the truth. To their mind, the truth might hurt you. It might seem a little sweet, but really it’s for self-preservation as they don’t want the inevitable emotional confrontation that comes with telling the truth and they don’t want to risk you walking away from them or rejecting them if you are not okay with their truth—no matter that the lie will hurt you far worse once it’s found out. Of course, when a child is six years old and he lies to avoid Mommy’s wrath, it is coming from a place of survival to his child mind. His less developed brain does not know if Mommy might actually kill him for doing something “bad” and the primitive brain is very concerned with keeping him alive. He fears that when Mommy finds out what he did, she will call him names, hit him, or punish him in some other way. That is very, very scary for a child and it makes a lot of sense that he’d lie to her in order to avoid that kind of lashing out. Then, when she inevitably finds out that he lied, he is usually in even more trouble than if he would have told her the truth. But he couldn’t think that far ahead because parts of his brain had not developed and connected yet in order for him to think it through logically.
However, when he is 45 years old and doing it to avoid his spouse’s wrath, that is another thing all together. To be fair, this 45-year-old may or may not be able to think it through logically either and this is because once a trigger starts, those younger, wounded parts that were afraid of Mommy’s wrath (even a long time ago) come up hard and fast. These activated parts live in the more emotional part of the brain and the logical part of the brain goes to sleep until the trigger has passed. The more that emotional part of the brain is triggered over time, however, the harder it is for the more logical part of the brain to wake up and get back on-line to come up with adult-like solutions and to be able to sort out the truth about his spouse’s reaction to his lies. The hair-triggering that occurs over and over again can make the brain become pretty faulty or even damaged. My suggestion to this fella is to get help with healing his childhood trauma and stop projecting an evil and cruel mother onto his spouse, who might be (understandably) mad as all get out that he lied or let her down, but is probably not going to abuse him like his mother did. If he heals his trauma and starts to love himself more deeply as a result of the recovery work and then realizes that he did in fact marry Mommy Dearest, well then hopefully by then he will feel strong enough to leave his abusive spouse.
What Does This Do to The One Being Projected Onto?
The very real pain that being projected onto causes is extremely harmful to your entire being. The stress from the confusion, lies, passive-aggressive punishment, and lashing out is toxic and negatively impacts your mental, emotional, and physical health. I imagine you can see why. The issue is that when you are in the middle of this type of confusion, you very often cannot see which end is up. You can’t tell if you are the one who actually caused the problem or if your partner did. You want to get to the bottom of it and resolve it, but you are met with finger pointing instead. You love your person and want to believe that they love you and have your best interest at heart, but because of their trauma, they create more problems than they solve. I know it would be easy to continue to feel sorry for your person because of his painful childhood. I know that you are compassionate and you love your person, but your person is not acting from their highest self while their nervous system is continuously activated into fight, flight, or freeze mode.
No matter how healthy you become and how much you love yourself, if your person has not healed, they will continue to disown their shame and project it onto you. And this becomes more and more obvious and tremendously uncomfortable the more you heal. So, as always, I recommend that you heal your own trauma and even your wounded empathic nature. This wounded empathy is due to trauma and times when you loved your parent so much that you made things that happened to them or the things they did to you your fault—much in the same way as you are doing with your projecting partner. Once you have healed your trauma, you can have loads of empathy for someone without fully taking ownership of their issues. It’s more akin to true compassion when you are more healed. Compassion allows you to hold space for someone’s pain without being swallowed up in it or taking it on as your own. This is also how you stop taking others’ behaviors and moods personally. You start to have energetic boundaries and see that their feelings and actions are all about their internal struggles and not you. This helps you hold space instead of go into the ditch with them where you will both get stuck.
When you are ready to heal your trauma and choose yourself and self-love, you will find that you can more clearly see when someone is projecting onto you, and you can decide whether to stay or to go. It’s when we love ourselves that we make ourselves the priority and can more easily decide what is best for us. If you or your partner need help with trauma recovery, please reach out. It would be my true pleasure to help your partner with his or her shame and other inner critic bullying so that they, too, can love themselves and move past their past wounding.
