Are You Projecting?

Sandra Wabwire • May 26, 2025

I’ve heard it said, “you don’t see people as they are, you see people as you are”, and there’s so much truth to that. If you’ve ever had someone accuse you of something, seemingly out of the blue, with no knowledge of where the accusation came from, you know the impact of not being seen as you are. You hadn’t even considered doing what they said you’ve done, and yet it doesn’t seem to matter. They’ve determined you’re guilty simply because they said so. This is a classic example of projection, and most of us do it. Projection is the imposition of one’s own perspective – thoughts, feelings, & behaviors – onto others, and it’s most easily identified when the perspective tows the line of the unacceptable, like tendencies toward cheating, stealing, etc.


Projection, however, can be equally as damaging, possibly even more damaging, when we, without evidence, assume others share our positive perspectives. Many people everyday find themselves in abusive or dangerous situations with others because they assume that others are inherently good, simply because they themselves endeavor to be good to others. Women overlook bad behavior in men, parents excuse a lack of discipline in their children, and strangers let down their guard, all because of a commitment to seeing the best in people.


The reality is, people lie, cheat, steal, and kill every day, and though it is my hope that none of those circumstances happen to you, it is your responsibility to protect yourself. In fact, I was recently touched by the story of Lyntell Washington, a pregnant Baton Rouge woman who was murdered in front of her 3-year-old daughter by her then boyfriend. She believed he was better than all the men she dated before him, and she was mistaken, he was much worse. She confronted him about lying, and threatened to disclose their affair to his wife, and he killed her. If that weren’t bad enough, he attempted to use another girlfriend to get away with it.  I imagine Lyntell had questions prior to discovering his lies, and I imagine she used projection to excuse those questions so she would not be seen as difficult or combative, and because she likely believed the best, in the face of the worst, she lost her life. Questions are protection; and in order to ask effective questions, you must maintain an awareness of the truth. Ducks quack, liars lie, and thieves steal; and when you excuse and overlook that behavior, you set yourself up to be harmed. Often it seems easier to just trust people, to not maintain boundaries, or to be nice; the truth is the people who approach interpersonal interactions this way are more likely to be harmed. Most people will not be like Lyntell Washington; however, the damage of emotional abuse alone can take years to recover from. Please understand, you can’t afford to see the best in people, you must see the truth, even when the truth makes absolutely no sense to you; and at times, it won’t.


I regularly listen to women share stories of the harm being done to them by men they once loved, and it pains me because I know that at some point, they projected positive thoughts and feelings onto these men to settle for less than they ever deserved. It pains me much more to hear about the harm being done by their family and friends, during the aftermath of the breakup, who can’t understand how low these men will go to destroy their former mates, and that there are systems that support them.


The truth is, it is useful for children in challenging environments to escape reality in this way, it is harmful when we continue to do it into adulthood, to ourselves and potentially to others. It's time to call a spade a spade. We uphold problematic systems, positions, and relationships when we fail to simply accept the truth that the humanity can be anything from graceful and kind to devious and diabolical, even when the person before us once played the role of graceful and kind. There’s nothing more that’s required from us but that we simply pay attention and open ourselves to the facts of what people do, and ultimately who they are, and the only thing required to do so is time.

By Kerrie Hudson February 8, 2026
The new year typically comes with a desire to be successful in an area where winning has been challenging. As such, we spend time thinking about what we want for the year ahead and commit to doing things that will help us achieve our goals. The challenge many of us run into is that we quit on our goals before we can clear the first few months of the year; so, while January is still with us, I want to share with you some information about what I believe to be the number killer of success, anxiety, and how to overcome it so you can have a greater chance at winning this year. Regardless of your goals, anxiety has a way of stepping in and stealing your motivation before you can gain much momentum. It’s the quiet voice lurking in the background telling you that you can’t have what you really want because it’s too hard, or you’re not good enough, or if you do attain it, something terrible will come along and take it away. Essentially, anxiety is at the heart of why you settle; you’ve listened to that little fearful voice that’s informed only by your limited experience and/or imagination, and convinced yourself you can’t have the thing you deeply desire; so your only option is to go without the tightened body, or the love you deserve, or the business that would positively impact the lives of others, which ultimately leaves you dissatisfied and even regretful. You’ve given up on your goals and dreams because of something that might happen, but probably won’t. If you’re going to disrupt this cycle the key is to challenge your ego. Many people believe the issue with the ego is cockiness and arrogance that leads one to see themselves as above others, and while that’s true, what most people fail to understand is the arrogance in perceiving fear as fact versus seeing it as just one of many possibilities. When you see your fears as fact you treat them as certainty and you make decisions that align with them, ultimately shortchanging yourself of the life you deserve. In reality, the ego can work for or against you, and combined with anxiety, an unhealthy ego will kill your ability to enjoy your life and achieve your goals. So, if you you’re going to succeed in anything and have a good time doing it, you must check your ego and anxiety so they don’t keep you in a constant state of settling in fear. If left unchecked, the ego will convince you not to invest too much or not to try too hard because “this probably won’t even work”, or “nothing good ever happens for me”. It will see losses as catastrophic events and overinflate the importance of a few outside opinions. Its goal is to keep you safe, when in reality, the things that pose a threat to you are likely not threatening at all. The key is balancing the ego by removing certainty from your beliefs, because anything that hasn’t yet happened isn’t certain, it’s a possibility. When you begin to see your fears as possibilities you can move from a place of guardedness to a place of curiosity; this helps you to open yourself to more possibilities than the one rooted in your fears, and when you see more possibilities, you can free yourself to take risks (which is necessary to succeed). With this shift, you can begin to see losses as lessons so you can use your setbacks as a setup to do better, to refine your approach, to put the proper supports in place; and as your gain more experience, you’ll begin to see realistic likelihoods of what can happen over possibilities and certainties, reducing the size of your fears. You begin to think “if I take these steps, it is possible that I won’t achieve my goal, but it is likely that I’ll be closer to it than if I settle here”, and when you take on this perspective beautiful things happen.
By Kerrie Hudson December 21, 2025
Most of us are trying to improve our lives, and as such, we can cling to ideas and concepts that we believe will help us to get there. A lot of times these ideas and concepts lose their true meaning and become a crutch that we lean on to resist change, instead of a skill we develop to become a better us. Boundaries is one of those concepts that’s often used, rarely understood, and often weaponized in ways that keeps us stuck in the same old patterns; that changes for you today. Simply put, boundaries are our deeply held, internal ‘no’, and when our boundaries have been violated, you feel it. Think about the feeling you get in your body when you’ve waited for a parking space, and someone steals it, or when you’ve loaned someone money that they fail to repay; these are boundary violations. Boundaries are the line we’re not willing to cross in our interactions with others, and that line is your responsibility to maintain. For example, you may have a boundary that dictates you don’t loan money; but, if someone asks you to borrow money and you give them the loan, you have violated your own boundary, and that feeling is far worse than violations from the outside. When you don’t know and/or do not articulate your boundaries you are hurting yourself, and that type of behavior sets you on a course for a world of pain. When you fail to take responsibility for your boundaries it becomes difficult to trust and depend on yourself; and if you can’t trust and depend on you, who can you really trust? Bottom line, boundaries are ingrained into the fabric of our person, they don’t go away; and boundary-setting and protection are necessary skills to develop in order to become a confident and self-assured human who is fulfilled in life. If you struggle with identifying and honoring your boundaries, Becoming Her Again is the gamechanger you need to step into the woman who no longer shrinks or settles for less than she deserves. The course is coming soon, join the waitlist to be the first to access this powerful resource. (P.S., it comes with 2 bonuses: The Boundary Starter Pack & Scripts for Difficult Conversations)
Dirt path winding through green, grassy mountains under a partly cloudy sky.
By Kerrie Hudson October 8, 2025
Why Heal? Healing has become a buzzword in the company of words like self-care, peace, and mental health. They’re certainly a bit overused, but are nonetheless vital components of the life we all want to live. So, what is healing? Healing is wholeness. What makes us “unwhole”? Trauma. Many of us don’t believe that we’ve experienced trauma, and that’s understandable because this type of trauma is so common it doesn’t seem very traumatic. But here we’re talking about what we call “little t” trauma. Some examples are the separation or divorce of parents, emotional neglect (no one to talk to/childhood loneliness), or a parent suffering with mental health challenges (anxiety and depression are most common). When children have experiences like these, they often have parents or caregivers who are unavailable or incapable of providing for their needs, and instead of the parent taking responsibility, the kid blames themselves – that’s the trauma. When you are at fault of anything, you naturally correct or fix yourself; so, when you blame yourself for something you weren’t responsible for you overcorrect and rid yourself of attributes and qualities you actually need. There’s no way of knowing this process is taking place in childhood, the damage is done. The good news, however, is it’s reversible, and reversing the damage is called healing. There’s also no way to instinctively know what we need to heal until we begin living; life tells us where we need to heal. The easiest way to identify areas where healing is needed is when we want something, especially basic life necessities like love, and we can’t seem to achieve it, we do the same thing we did as kids, we fix ourselves. And when the fixing doesn’t work, we either settle, or we give up. We settle, because we believe the lie that this is the best we can get, and we’d rather have this than nothing, or we quit because we believe the lie that this is the best we can get, and we’d rather have nothing. There is some truth to the idea it doesn’t get better. The truth is, this is the best you can get if you don’t change, and change comes with healing. This is why you may feel stuck in certain areas of your life. You’ve fixed everything you believe needs fixing, but you haven’t healed. We can see this very thing play out currently with Cardi B who within the past year has separated from her husband Offset, had a baby, met a new man Stefon, and is currently pregnant again. In her new album she reflects on the events of the past year, and likely before. She’s gotten a new man, new clothes, and upgraded her body, but she hasn’t described any updates on her heart. Same Cardi, different man, same problems; and the same is true for us all. When we invest heavily in the superficial things that we believe will get us what we want (and we will undoubtedly start with the superficial things) yet we fail to do the real heart work, we’re deceiving ourselves. Why heal? Because it’s necessary to achieve our goals so we can live the life we truly want to live.