Why are you left holding their pain? Understanding boundaries and projective identification

In a rare departure from all things schema therapy, I’d like to dip into a classic psychodynamic concept. One so helpful - once you get your head around it – that it can radically change how you might look at certain problematic interactions, toxic relationships and longstanding emotional baggage.  It can help us build a deeper understanding of how we sometimes will use each other in dysfunctional and unhealthy ways.

I’d love the term projective identification to become as widespread and understood as gaslighting because it’s a very close concept indeed. It’s certainly linked with narcissistic abuse and emotional abuse recovery.

As a psychologist and schema therapist, I sometimes see clients who – years after the fact – still carry within them awful things that aren’t theirs to hold. Things like a deep sense of shame or defectiveness that, clinically speaking, seems actually to belong to a school bully or abusive parent. And I’ve experienced being caught in projective identification dynamics myself.

Let me do my best to explain this rather mysterious but incredibly helpful concept.

Ever been the Host to someone else’s negative emotions?

Have you ever walked away from someone feeling weighed down by intense feelings that don't seem to genuinely belong to you? If so, this blog may be for you.

Ever walked into a room feeling perfectly fine, spent time talking to someone – maybe a preoccupied colleague, a critical friend, or an anxious partner – and then left feeling anxious, deflated or completely stirred up? Meanwhile, the other person seems to feel a whole lot better, lighter and walks away looking visibly relieved.

If so, the other person hasn’t just been “a downer”. You might have experienced a fascinating, weird and common psychological phenomenon known as projective identification.

While it sounds like a mouthful of clinical jargon, projective identification is a common experience in relationships. We all do it occasionally. That said, some people rely on projective identification as a dysfunctional way to use other people to regulate their own emotions.

In simple terms, it’s a clumsy, unconscious way we try to communicate and expel feelings that we find too heavy, toxic or difficult to manage ourselves.

We manage this by finding someone else who might become our Host. We cajole and pressurise them over time to accept and hold onto our most upsetting emotions. Then we feel better. They struggle now with these horrible feelings, instead of us.

From healthy infants to toxic adult dynamics

Back the beginnings of our lives, before we had any words, projective identification was the primary way we communicated our feelings and needs to our parents. As tiny babies, we sometimes screamed, howled, cried and raged. Our parents didn’t just hear our cries as noise: they felt our distress deeply within their own bodies. Healthy parents use this embodied information to understand their baby, connect to and soothe it. This is how early empathy and communication works.

And it’s a perfectly healthy a way to communicate and manage big feelings … when we are babies.

But some people continue to rely on projective identification as adults. They keep using it (unconsciously) to:

a)      rid themselves of painful feelings – the “projection”

b)     subtly pressure someone else to absorb and accept these feelings - the “identification”

An unconscious game of “hot potato”

When someone is overwhelmed by a challenging emotion - like intense anxiety, shame, powerlessness or failure – they look for a psychological escape route. They may want to expunge the emotion as quickly as possible because sitting with it feels impossible, intolerable, unbearable.

Instead of processing a painful feeling (through reflection, self-soothing, or open communication), they unconsciously "project" it. Pushing it out of mind isn’t enough. They push the feeling deeply inside someone else.  It’s like treating another person as an emotional dumping ground or warehouse for their own emotional waste. It can feel subtle - or sometimes quite aggressive, or shocking.

Projective identification goes a whole step further than standard projection. In standard projection, someone might simply accuse you of being angry when they are really the one who feels rage. In projective identification, they will behave in a way that actively manoeuvrers you into feeling and acting out the exact emotion they are struggling with.

Think of it like an emotional, unconscious game of hot potato. The potato scalds their hands, so they quickly throw it to you. Then psychological pressure is exerted on you to keep holding onto the potato as if it belongs to you. You are left holding the heat and feeling the burn.

Let me give two examples of how this plays out.

Example 1: the toxic manager

Imagine a narcissistic manager who secretly feels overwhelmed and terrified that she’s incompetent at her job. Because that feeling is too painful and threatening to her self-esteem, her mind unconsciously pushes it away.

But simply denying and pushing away the feeling isn’t enough. Her mind needs a secure container to hold the toxic emotion.

She finds someone amongst her staff to become the Host.

When talking to her staff member, this leader becomes hyper-critical, micro-managing every tiny detail and giving contradictory instructions so the staff member becomes anxious, confused and defeated.

They begin to fumble, lose confidence, and internalise the belief: "I am completely incompetent at my job" (their identification with the projection).

Presto. The leader has successfully passed the hot potato. Her own hidden sense of inadequacy has been successfully implanted into her colleague. They are now the Host. The leader walks away feeling relieved and capable. The staff member is stuck holding a heavy emotional weight that isn’t theirs.

The "tell": A clue that this is happening can be the intensity of the implanted emotion: an out-of-character emotional spike. Or you may feel unlike like your usual self, emotionally hijacked, used like a puppet, muddled, confused or foggy, because your personal boundaries have been breached and a difficult part of someone else has got in. Because this process is unconscious, your body might register the impact before your mind does. You might feel a sudden headache, a knot in your stomach or tension in your shoulders. You might feel preoccupied trying to make sense of this or have an urge to get away from the person or situation.

If you start to feel incompetence, shame, fear or other emotions that don’t match how you generally feel, you may be holding someone else's projected material. You might be vaguely aware that the feeling doesn’t quite belong with you and is something to do with the relationship with a particular person.

Example 2: The roots of childhood trauma and schemas

To understand how deeply projective identification can impact us, we can also look at childhood. This is where our earliest negative life patterns - or schemas – are created.

Imagine a parent who carries a deep sense of defectiveness and worthlessness. Perhaps they were unloved or harshly criticised by their own parents. For some individuals, sitting with the feeling of "I am fundamentally flawed" is much too painful. They unconsciously look for another place to deposit it. Some choose their own child as the Host / container.

To pass on this "hot potato" of defectiveness, the parent might constantly tell the child they are clumsy, ungrateful, stupid, or a disappointment. They might constantly scold the child or treat them like an unwanted burden. And it goes beyond words; the parent also exerts a persistent emotional pressure, rolling their eyes, sighing, or treating the child as a nuisance.  The child, lacking the psychological boundaries to firmly reject this, completely identifies with the projection. They internalise the parent's discarded shame, thinking, "It’s my fault. I am bad." 

Years later, that child enters adulthood with a deeply entrenched Defectiveness/Shame Schema, carrying emotional scars that can take time to unpick.

How do we fall for this?

As human beings, we’re naturally wired for empathy and connection. If someone pushes a powerful emotion towards us, our instinct is often to try to understand it, which can sometimes open the door to absorbing it.

This may be especially true if you struggle with specific schemas, such as:

-          Emotional Deprivation (feeling that your own emotional needs won't be met)

-          Defectiveness / Shame (feeling of being flawed)

-          Subjugation or Self-Sacrifice (prioritising others' needs to avoid conflict or guilt)

-          Enmeshment (struggling to find where you end and another person begins)

In other words, if you:

-          are used to putting other people's needs before your own

-          are highly empathic

-          struggle with boundaries or assertiveness

-          grew up feeling that your own emotional tank was empty

you might be particularly vulnerable to absorbing other people's emotional waste. It feels familiar to you, and it keeps the peace.

You might be carrying projective identifications that are years, or even decades, old.

How to drop the toxic baggage off – permanently

Once you understand how this dynamic works, you can start to build stronger psychological boundaries. The next time you find yourself feeling out of sorts during or after an interaction, take a breath and ask yourself:

• Is this feeling really mine? Does it make sense and feel congruent? Or does it feel a bit off, foreign, alien, confusing, not quite right?

• Am I being coerced to feel a certain way: is pressure being exerted on me?

• Was I feeling this way before I interacted with this person?

Simply noticing and reflecting creates some breathing space. You can be in a relationship with someone without becoming the warehouse for their unexpressed pain or toxicity.

You can gently, inwardly say to yourself: “I am willing to listen, but I am leaving this feeling here with them. It belongs to them, not me.”

How therapy can help

Sometimes projective identification has been so powerfully lodged within us – especially through experiences of childhood trauma, emotional neglect, or bullying - that it becomes difficult to sort out what belongs to us and what belongs to others.

As a schema therapist and psychologist, I can work alongside you to sift through these heavy emotions, helping you let go of toxicity and baggage that was deposited inside you by individuals who could not manage their own pain. None of us deserve to spend our lives acting as containers for someone else's unresolved misery.

If you would like to explore how therapy can help you establish clearer boundaries and heal long-standing schemas, please feel free to reach out.

Schedule a free 20 minute consultation