Perhaps the most common lie we fool ourselves into believing is that all the love, joy, and happiness that we need and desire is actually located outside of ourselves, usually in another person, and sometimes a thing. We believe a certain person or thing is required for us to feel safe, accepted, desirable or loved. We believe we need them in our life for us to be happy.

Once we have identified what we are looking for, and in what shape the person (or object) must take to provide the things we want, we then go about looking for some poor soul, who has similar delusions, on which to project our dreams and desires. We get a picture in our head of how it all should look and we dedicate ourselves to the search. Enormous amounts of our time and energy are committed to this search, as evidenced, for example, by the huge numbers of people who regularly trawl online dating sites.

Many of us do not ever really progress from the scared child who need their security blanket or beloved stuffed toy to sleep peacefully at night and cope with new and scary situations. As we grow older, we quickly learn we cannot continue drag around our security blanket or our favorite fluffy bunny without becoming a social outcast, but instead of dealing with our fears and inadequacies in order to get to a point where we no longer need such emotional crutches, we merely find socially acceptable substitutes.

The man who needs a model on his arm to impress his mates and colleagues; the woman who needs a rich and powerful man to feel she has status and credibility in society; the mother who needs her child to feel fulfilled and purposeful; the father who needs his family to project a certain image of acceptability and conventionality. These are somewhat extreme examples, but we all project onto others in varying degrees. Just finding someone to be with to avoid seeming friendless and lonely is a common version of this sort of lie we tell ourselves.

Once we find the object of our dreams and desire, we then commit ourselves to preserving and perpetuating our view of who and what they are, and what they can and should do for us, and even when presented with clear evidence to the contrary, we are slow to abandon the rosy picture of the other that we have created in our own minds. We become so vested in our projected view that it is difficult to integrate truth, even when it is staring us in the face.

I lived with a man for 20 years who I thought was the love of my life. Our connection was so effortlessly deep and rewarding that I interpreted this as love. He was funny and intensely smart, and handsome to boot, and I dedicated myself to him, and his happiness, for two decades. From our first meetings I decided he was the most honest, caring and sensitive person I knew and I filtered everything I ever learned about him through that lens.

Now, when I look back, I can see that he actually revealed his true self to me, but he quickly learned what was acceptable to reveal and what was not. Whenever I did not react favorably to one aspect of his personality, he learned to conceal that part of himself forever after. But of course, there were situations where he could not help himself, such as when he was under stress.

In these cases, when information was presented to me that was contradictory to my projected view of him, I either dismissed the information as invalid, or I put it in the too hard basket and pushed it out of my mind. Most of us never let truth or facts get in the way of a good projection.

It was not until I was confronted with irrefutable physical proof that he was not what he seemed, that he was not who he would have me believe him to be, or who I thought he was. It was an incredibly painful process but slowly I had to accept that the man I loved was actually an unreal projection of my own need and desire. The real man was somewhat less, of course, because none of us can ever live up to the unreal projections of others.

Like the rest of us, Gabrielle Bernstein always assumed that she needed to someone else’s love to be happy. As she writes in her memoir, “Spirit Junkie: A Radical Road to Self-Love and Miracles,” it was only when she realized that the love she was looking for was within her, that she was able to accept a relationship grounded in truth, not projection, and it was only then that her relationships became more functional and more enjoyable. She writes:

“This was a love I’d never known before. I’d become full with inner peace. Since I was no longer searching for love and fulfillment in a romantic partner, I was able to let men off the hook…I could now enjoy my relationships for exactly what they were at any given time. I was able to release my major expectations and allow people to be the best they could.”

I projected my fantasy onto my husband, the father of my children. Others project on their parents, siblings, bosses, priests, politicians and Presidents, and even their cat or dog. We believe we need others to save us from ourselves, to love us when we cannot love ourselves, and to choose us because we never choose ourselves. It is only once we understand that everything we need is sourced within us that we have any hope of achieving true and lasting love, joy and peace. When our love of self is greater than our dedication to our projections and fantasies, our relationship experiences are transformed, and true freedom becomes possible.

Eileen McBride
Eileen McBride is the author of Love Equals Power 2, a spiritual seeker and teacher. This article was published on December 12, 2014.