Fellow Relateful facilitators Josefine, Blake, and I playfully coined the term “projective harmonization” — when what you’re feeling in relationship with others is secretly what they’re feeling in relationship with you. There’s a harmony of projection that’s potentially causative. For example, I’m afraid I speak too fast with you (out of pace), and you’re afraid you’re too slow with me (out of pace). I judge myself for being needy, and you judge yourself for being aloof.
Or maybe I find myself teasing you—but wait! I don’t like teasing people, so why am I doing this?—perhaps we’re in a relational dynamic where you think I don’t think much of you, and I’m accidentally reading the lines to the script you’ve handed me. But don’t use this to abstain from responsibility—perhaps it’s all a big ruse for me to disown my inner desire to tease you (by making it your fault for projecting onto me), where the original teasing I’m not willing to feel is a defense mechanism (projection) against an even deeper feeling-I-don’t-want-to-feel of my own self-hatred.
If it’s causative, it seems related to the Pygmalion effect, where people tend to perform better with high expectations and worse with low expectations, with the added emphasis of projection and how it impacts relating (and the interplay of self-fulfilling prophecies and the results): People tend to harmonize with our projections onto them. If I expect a child to be a troublemaker, they tend to meet my expectations. And vice versa, we tend to harmonize with others’ expectations of us.
With projection, we take an unwanted aspect of ourselves and put it on someone else, seeing a double dose of it in them—for example, if we project our anger, they’ve got their own anger, plus ours. The term isn’t so important; what I want to call attention to is how sometimes we fit what others project onto us, like when we revert to old habits at home for the holidays or at high school reunions.
This implies a tough pill to swallow: you can tell what something’s for in a relationship by observing the results you get. Ultimately this means the power’s in our hands, at least for our experience. We can’t necessarily change someone else by changing what we project on them, but we will necessarily change the relationship. And in gaining awareness, we have choice and therefore freedom. And the freedom comes with a deeper surrender to our interconnectedness and how totally interdependent we are with everything and everyone.
Here’s AI Claude’s Concise definition:
Projective harmonization is a psychological phenomenon where individuals unconsciously mirror and reinforce each other’s projections in a relationship, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of behavior and perception.