All Their Projections
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
They do not experience themselves
as a whole psyche.
There is no cohesive interior.
No tolerable arena
in which contradiction can coexist
without threatening collapse.
So the unacceptable is evacuated.
Projection is not incidental to them—
it is structural.
A primary defence mechanism
that allows the narcissistic personality
to maintain grandiosity
while engaging in moral transgression
without psychic consequence.
What cannot be integrated
must be assigned.
Envy becomes your malice.
Aggression becomes your hostility.
Deceit becomes your manipulation.
This is not confusion.
It is defensive externalization
executed with alarming consistency.
They accuse reflexively
because the material is endogenous.
The charge feels true
because it originated there.
In narcissistic functioning,
the ego ideal is sacred.
Shame is intolerable.
And responsibility—
true responsibility—
is experienced as ego death.
So the psyche reroutes.
Blame migrates outward.
Guilt is dissociated.
Reality is reorganized
to preserve the self-image
at any cost.
This is why confrontation escalates pathology.
Insight is registered as attack.
Boundaries as abandonment.
Accountability as persecution.
They do not reflect—
they retaliate.
Projection metastasizes into narrative.
Narrative hardens into conviction.
Conviction recruits others.
DARVO becomes reflexive.
Gaslighting becomes epistemic.
Reversal becomes moral doctrine.
The injured party is recast as dangerous.
The witness is reframed as unstable.
The truth-teller is pathologized
for refusing complicity.
This is not merely psychological distortion.
It is moral inversion.
They do not ask
What have I done?
They ask
Who is threatening my supremacy?
And so they conscript.
They require others
to hold their disavowed self—
to carry the aggression,
the cruelty,
the absence of empathy—
so they can remain internally unblemished.
To be projected upon
is to be used
as a psychic landfill.
To be blamed
for the very harm
that necessitated the defence
is the final obscenity.
But projection is not dominance.
It is disclosure.
A flare fired from the unconscious
marking precisely
where the rot is contained.
Because what they cannot stop accusing you of
is what they cannot survive acknowledging
in themselves.
And eventually—
because defences are not infinite—
the projections lose traction.
They always do.
Reality outlasts narcissistic architecture.
Memory resists erasure.
Truth does not consent to exile.
And when no one remains
willing to be the container,
when mirrors stop complying,
when the world refuses to agree—
they are left with the one encounter
they engineered their entire psyche
to avoid:
contact
with the self
they spent a lifetime
disowning.
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