I was recently listening to a What’s Your Grief podcast on defense mechanisms after grief and I learned something really interesting. This something hit me pretty hard. This is a defense mechanism I didn’t even notice I was doing.

Whenever we feel bad about ourselves, we do this thing where we try to blame other people. It’s called projecting. Sigman Freud considered that “in projection, thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings that cannot be accepted as one’s own is dealt with by being placed in the outside world and attributed to someone else.”

An example of this could be you’ve been really annoyed and upset at a friend and you try and confront that friend. But instead of being constructive, you blame them. You say to your friend “you’ve been acting weird lately, are you mad at me?” When in reality, you’re the one that’s upset.

This happens in grief. I have often been thinking “everyone just expects me to get over Ben’s death and move on,” but the truth is, no one has actually said that to me. I’ve only actually read that in some grief blogs about other people’s experiences. And the only other place I’ve heard it is inside my own head. I feel like I should be over it. I am the one telling myself these things.

Well, you know what, fuck that. This is me accepting my own faults. I am not going to get over it. No one wants me to get over it. No one expects me to get over it. I will never get over it.

Projecting is something we all do. It is a natural defense mechanism. We do not control these parts of ourselves, they just naturally happen. But what we can control is knowing when to reflect on such things and correct ourselves.