What people project onto others

Personal relationships are always a bi-directional process: we do not limit ourselves to interacting with other people starting from a situation of neutrality in which we emit information and we adopt an attitude depending on the one they send us back, but our ways of thinking and the previous learning that we have done influence us from the first moment.

That is why when we socialize, in addition to establishing communication, we also it is very common for us to project our insecurities onto others. Even if the person in front of us has not given us reasons for it, we can start from prejudices or beliefs until certain arbitrary points that lead us to think that, rather than interacting with someone, we are interacting with something that we carry within. Perhaps even that "something" has been inside us for many years. What is this phenomenon due to?

• Related article: "Self-concept: what is it and how is it formed?"

The importance of cognitive dissonance

People have a tendency to seek internal coherence between our beliefs, thoughts, attitudes and the behaviors that we carry out in our day to day; that is the most common way of functioning on a day-to-day basis and of relating to our environment.

At the moment in which there is an incoherence or contradiction between our beliefs or between the ways of thinking to which we usually cling, a state of discomfort is generated in us, a kind of tension psychological. This is partly because these “clashes” of ideas have implications in how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive what is around us, and therefore we feel obliged to resolve that conflict.

Sometimes, to solve this problem, we can fool ourselves or look for mechanisms to solve this internal incoherence by manipulating the premises from which we started, the meanings of the words, etc.

How does cognitive dissonance affect self-esteem?

The inconsistency between different cognitive processes or between what one thinks and what one ends up doing is a phenomenon associated with cognitive dissonance. And it is that this can also be defined as the tension that a person experiences when his actions do not coincide with her thoughts, attitudes or beliefs; or when it perceives that it harbors in its mind two simultaneous thoughts or cognitions that are mutually exclusive, so that they cannot serve as a guide to know what to do until we manage to position ourselves properly in that "conflict".

It is a highly studied phenomenon in the field of psychology since the 1950s, when the psychologist Leon Festinger first coined the term "cognitive dissonance". In his case, he described it in such striking cases as that of a sect that was forced to generate explanations of why the apocalypse had not occurred on the dates on which it was anticipated Leader; However, cognitive dissonance also occurs in much more everyday situations, such as what we do when we compare ourselves with others.

Cognitive dissonance can greatly influence our self-esteem, especially when contradictory cognitions or thoughts we we can have are related to our self-concept, that is, the set of beliefs and ideas that orbit around our concept of the "I".

For example, this is noted in the way many people develop a tendency to constantly compare themselves to influencers and celebrities. These are public figures whose reason for being is precisely to offer their best face, to make it very easy to idealize them, by carefully filtering the image they convey to their followers. This is a reality that, from an intellectual point of view, is known to most people.

However, from an emotional point of view, it is very common not to be able to avoid comparing oneself with these celebrities, which which can even facilitate the appearance of psychopathologies such as depression, body dysmorphic disorder, anorexia, etc.

People whose self-esteem suffers from these unrealistic comparisons often admit that the people they admire hide many imperfections, but at the same time do not understand. They can remove from their heads that their ideal, what they want to become, is made up of those images and impressions associated with people who do not really exist beyond the marketing. And in such a situation, cognitive dissonance is resolved (at least in appearance), generating the illusion that to feel better about ourselves we have to emulate the behavior of those famous people, even if we are not famous people, to end up frustrating ourselves by failing to reach self-acceptance.

• You may be interested in: "Cognitive dissonance: the theory that explains self-deception"

Projecting our insecurities onto others

As we have seen, the path to self-acceptance can put us on the path of projects that actually lead us to self-sabotage. That is, when what we believe to be personal development and self-improvement is actually the tendency to project our insecurities onto others, everything we do plays into our against.

That is why the occasions in which, without realizing it, we use other people are not rare like battlefields in which fights are fought between parts of our minds that have long been in conflict. That hurts these people, yes, but it also hurts us, keeping us anchored to problems and insecurities that we cannot overcome, because we let our interactions with others perpetuate them, making that struggle between competing beliefs or desires become increasingly fierce.

An example of this we have in the love-hate relationships of people who generate envy. Those who suffer from self-esteem problems easily develop envy, and this leads them to adopt a hostile attitude towards those they admire. This, in turn, is not an effective source of motivation to overcome, because the need to leave the other in a bad place (even if only in our mind) outweighs than to reconcile ourselves with our "I".

In cases like this, cognitive dissonance is managed by making our low self-esteem an excuse to belittling that person, giving us relief that in the medium and long term is unsatisfactory and forces us to return to start.

To do?

Psychotherapy is the most effective way to achieve balanced self-esteem and to incorporate good ways of socializing and communicating with others into our lives. If you are interested in having professional help in this regard, please contact me.

Bibliographic references:

• Festinger, L. (1962). Cognitive Dissonance. Scientific American. 207 (4): pp. 93 - 106.
• Jordan, C.H.; Spencer, S.J.; Zanna, M.P.; Hoshino-Browne, E.; Correll, J. (2003). Secure and defensive high self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85 (5): pp. 969 - 978.