No, It's YOUR Fault! How Abusers Do Damage Control by Projecting it All on You

By Lisa Kroulik © March 5, 2011

I could never understand the lengths my ex-husband would go to in order to not discuss, and thereby try to resolve, his own issues. They were ridiculous then and they are ridiculous now. Before going into the total shutdown mode of stonewalling, he would often first try to throw me off balance by countering anything I would say with something very minor that he “had” on me. I have two classic examples that will hopefully shed some light on what psychologists refer to as projection.

Although we were deeply in debt, my ex decided that he should have a brand-new truck. He was driving a truck that was probably 12 years old at the time and he had been talking for a while about replacing it. One of his first comments when I totaled my van a year earlier was "that puts my truck plans on the back burner." Nothing was said about the fact that our oldest daughter, eight years old at the time, and I were unharmed in the accident. We discussed it briefly one weekend and I made the comment that when I had my accident and totaled my van, I'd had to charge the money for a down payment for my next car on a credit card because we had no savings.

A few days later, he called after being gone all day on Saturday and told me he had purchased a new truck. And I do mean brand new. I was in for the second biggest shock of our marriage (the first being his cross-dressing, which I'd discovered only three months earlier) when I asked him how much he had spent and he calmly told me over $31,000. He had put the down payment on a credit card, he informed me, just as I had told him to do when we talked about it earlier in the week. I had? I sure didn't remember that.

He went on to say that I gave him my blessing to buy any truck that he wanted. My goodness, how I cringe when I see the obvious manipulation five years removed from the situation. Also cringe-worthy is his rewriting of history to where I had told him to put the down payment on a credit card and gave him my blessing to be completely irresponsible. Emotional abusers are awesome at rewriting history and manipulating your emotions in order to suit them.

Read carefully and you will see where the projection comes in. I told him I'd said no such things and that we couldn't afford truck payments that were now going to be $415 a month. Ready for it? “Well, what about your car? That costs money too.” Really, ex, was that the best you could come up with? Bringing up a car I had to buy when my previous vehicle was totaled? A car that we agreed on? A car that cost less than one-third of the truck? I should have seen it coming, but I didn't and now I was bamboozled into defending my purchase of an absolutely necessary vehicle for the rest of the conversation. He had succeeded in projecting his own irresponsible spending on to me. I can only describe this as feeling like a carpet being pulled out from under you. You didn't see anyone standing there to yank it away, and you are left lying on the ground, confused and disoriented.

The second scenario involved the “misdeed” (his manipulation, I mean, his word for it) that I alluded to above. In March of 2006, after 10 years of marriage and 13 years of being together, I discovered that my ex had been dressing up in women's clothing all along. It wasn't a matter of putting on a dress now and again; no, this was a full-out addiction that involved buying hundreds of dollars in clothing and lingerie every month, dressing up and then acting out with himself sexually. I also found empty pill bottles indicating my ex was actively trying to change his anatomy by growing male breasts. I told him that he had a serious addiction and he needed help immediately.

At this point, ex was gracious enough to point out that I had an addiction as well. I sure did. Still do. My addiction is to Diet Pepsi. Yes, in his mind having lied to me for over a decade, spending money that we didn't have on a wardrobe for a gender that he wasn't and trying to grow breasts was comparable to me needing lots of caffeine to get through the day. Even back then, when I was so sickly co-dependent, I had to laugh.

I will be honest, it is not an easy thing to do. Emotional abusers have so many tricks up their sleeves for keeping you confused and off-balance that it takes a very strong determination to stand up to it all. Once I caught on to what my ex was doing, I would remain very firm and tell him, for example, that this conversation was not about my caffeine consumption. It was about his cross-dressing and I needed to know what he was going to do about it. If necessary, I would repeat myself several times until he got the message that he wasn't going to project his own issues on to me. Eventually, he grew to hate me for refusing to be manipulated and there was nowhere else left to go other than divorce.

Some other things you can do are be honest with yourself about the abuse and talk to someone you can trust about it, to stop enabling the abuser by making excuses for him, and to put forth the expectation of change. From there, it is out of your hands. It takes a great deal of courage to break old and dysfunctional ways of relating, so regardless if your spouse or significant other wants to change, you are to be commended for showing through your actions that you will no longer tolerate being treated in this manner.