It only dawned on me in the more recent years that a lot of my problems in life have come through projecting the better parts of my character out of myself and into others, particularly onto men. This is because I was brought up with the idea of the heroic male, a view which in many ways reflected reality fairly accurately. The men were all in the military and there was a war on, and many of them took great risks.
Somehow, I had essentialised this hazy childhood understanding of the world into the idea that men were necessarily fearless. I also projected out other extreme and false overestimations. I thought that people were generally truth-seeking and trustworthy. So, these were my own projections and they led to me not putting enough trust in my own capacity to be daring and honest, and trustworthy.
Now that I have reclaimed my own qualities back, I feel fully myself, more confident. Gender- polarized society had encouraged the projection of my positive and the introjection of other negative qualities, based originally on a formal division of labor.
I learned that once we combat what has become polarized in our identities, we can reclaim these alienated qualities for ourselves.
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