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Welcome to Episode 120 of the Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. Today, we are going to look at the process of projection. Last week when I focused on the four automatic responses to system anxiety, one of the automatic responses was projection. Because I could not go into it in depth. I felt like this would be an important emotional process to revisit this week. I'm going to use one of Friedman's fables to do that. So without further ado, here is Friedman's Fable, "Projection."

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Please obtain a copy of Friedman's Fables and read "Projection."

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And the moral of the story is, "What we see outside of us is always connected to what is happening inside of us."

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The moral of this story is related to the idea that nobody gets the problem they can handle. It is our own anxiety and how we manage it that has as much an impact as anything on the way we process the world around us.

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In the case of Billy's parents, whatever anxiety they had before his "symptoms" started, it became worse when they processed what they saw by projecting their greatest fears on the situation. In general, anxious, reactive responses have less to do with the stimulus and more to do with the patterns that have been programed in us. These typically result from unresolved issues in our own family of origin. Edwin Friedman, in Generation to Generation, has an entire chapter on child focused families.

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As I mentioned last week, projection as an automatic response to anxiety most likely happens with an intense focus on a particular child.

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As Murray Bowen developed family systems theory, he studied family after family and he noticed three emotional coordinates that are present in child-focused families (where there is an intense focus on a particular child and that child becomes symptomatic).

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The first component or emotional coordinate in child-focused families is reciprocity between mother and child. Reciprocity was noted as one of the four automatic responses to system anxiety. In a child-focused family, this almost always occurs between mother and child.

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This often does have to do with overfunctioning and under functioning, but it also has to do with healthy, functioning and anxiety. Paradoxically, when the child with whom the mother has intense involvement starts to function better, mother will get more anxious. This is what happened with mother. When Billy was nonchalant and non-anxious about her fears his functioning was fine, and that sent her through the roof.

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The converse i also true. When mother starts to function in self-differentiated ways, the child will experience this as emotional withdrawal and will start to act up. In these cases, Friedman recommends that mother be coached to maintain a non-anxious presence through the child's unwilling sabotage until the child can get to a place of better functioning.

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To some extent, this dynamic is true in nearly every family as teenagers and young adults try to function on their own. This has the effect of increasing the anxiety of the parents. Likewise, when parents start to develop a life of their own outside of their children's, it increases the children's anxiety. This is reciprocity.

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The second component or emotional coordinate, present in child-focused families in the projection process is the emotional absence of the father. Remember that somebody can be physically present but emotionally absent.

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The typical result of father's emotional absence would be for mother to look for intimacy somewhere else, and her focus would then be on one of the children. This is how a child focus develops between mother and child. This is a classic triangle. Mother and father have discomfort between them because of father's emotional absence and mother focuses intensely on a child.

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In families with multiple children, it will be one child who likely ends up with the intense focus. This is why when you look at families with multiple children, one of the children typically has a harder time functioning. This would be the clue that there has been intense focus on this child. And as I mentioned last week, anxiety is not distributed fairly. So those children who have not been the object of intense focus typically are able to function in more healthy ways.

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The reasons for father's emotional absence in these situations can vary, but it usually goes back to his own family of origin and unresolved issues there. In child-focused families, father's reactivity is almost always to mothers anxiety, not to the child's behavior. There was some reactivity to Billy's behavior in this fable, but father was more reactive to mother and to her fear.

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The third component or emotional coordinate that occurs in child-focused families where there is projection is mother's uncomfortable relationship with her own mother. This would be an unresolved issue in her own family of origin, which, in response to fother's emotional absence, would result in her own intense focus on one of her children. When mother can be coached to work through her relationship with her own mother, where she can ultimately become a non-anxious presence and take non-anxious emotional stands with her mother, then it is likely that she will reduce her intense focus on her child.

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These three emotional coordinates highlight the difference between the cause of anxiety and the focus of anxiety. We don't know the exact causes of mother's and father's anxiety here in this fable, but we do know that their focus was on Billy. During this brief period that was documented in the fable, Billy remains a non-anxious presence, which increases his parents' anxiety. It is likely that had their projection increased and their intense involvement gone even deeper, that Billy would have ended up acting out in some way.

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While the projection process can most often occur in a child-focused family, it can also occur in other systems. And this is where it's helpful to understand if we are trying to lead through self-differentiation.

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Projection can also occur in congregational and organizational systems. It is a form of pain displacement because, as I mentioned, it's actually based on an unresolved issue and one's family of origin. The leader of a congregation or organization can become the intense focus of one of the member's projection when there is an unresolved issue in their own family of origin and they focus either their adoration or their criticism on the leader.

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When this happens in somebody who is normally functioning in healthy ways, I always ask the question, "What is going on in their own family of origin?" It is likely that the homeostasis has gone out of whack and they are having a hard time coping with it, so they displace their pain and anxiety on the leader. This rarely results in adoration and almost always results in criticism of the leader.

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When somebody continually adores or criticizes the leader, this is a chronic situation and the question that is asked is, "What is the chronic, unresolved issue in this person's family of origin?"

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In either case, it's important to remember that our first instinct is to withdraw from people who criticize us and make things worse, or we might get too close to people who adore us and end up adapting to their own anxious functioning. In either case, self-differentiation is the key. Not taking the bait of criticism enables us to remain a non-anxious presence and ultimately help them come to terms with their own anxiety. This is done by avoiding a conflict of wills and connecting emotionally in a healthy way. This comes from being present and being able to listen, not from defending ourselves or getting into a conflict of wills and trying to prove the other wrong.

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The emotional process of projection is a clue to us that someone is having a difficult time dealing with their own anxiety.

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If this happens in us, if we are projecting onto somebody else, then we need to ask what's going on inside, and instead of looking at the person upon whom we're projecting, actually looking into our own family of origin.

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If it's somebody else who is projecting on us, then the key is to maintain a non-anxious presence and connect with them in healthy ways. What I have found is in these cases, we ultimately get to a point where I am connecting with them and helping them to walk through what they are struggling with. So they transfer the object of their pain from me back to where it belongs and then are able to work through what is going on with them. When we are able to help somebody do that, not by telling them what to do, but just by being present with them, they actually will end up closer to us in a healthy way.

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Understanding the projection process will not only help you recognize this when it's happening in the system that you lead, but it will also help you to handle it as a non-anxious leader.