by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
If You Keep Hitting a Brick Wall in Your Relationship Then You Might Be Stuck in The Projection Cycle
Most people in relationships don’t realise they’re trapped in a cycle of projection that causes them to keep hitting the same old brick walls and to stop them from growing into intimacy:
They might think they’re having arguments; they might think they’re dealing with communication issues; they might think that their partner is the problem – or even that they are – but what’s really happening most of the time is something more subtle, more mechanical, and far more predictable.
It’s a projection cycle.
Once you see this cycle in your relationship, you can’t unsee it (which is great news because ‘Awareness’ is always the first step to making it through the process of true transformation).
Even better, once you understand how it works, you can finally stop trying to ‘fix’ people, defend yourself, or think your way out of emotional chaos and instead learn how to stay real, grounded, and in motion even when someone else isn’t and they’re constantly projecting onto you.
This article will walk you through the Projection Cycle so that you know:
- What projection actually is (in real, practical terms and not psychology jargon).
- Why different people react differently to the exact same situation.
- The stages of the Projection Cycle.
- The critical choice point where the Projection Cycle can be broken and you can set energetic boundaries.
- How to maintain your real energy without blaming, suppressing, or disengaging from life.
- Practical steps you can apply immediately with or without your partner’s participation to break the cycle and keep growing real.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
The Projection Cycle: What We'll Cover In This Article
- If You Keep Hitting a Brick Wall in Your Relationship Then You Might Be Stuck in The Projection Cycle
- The Emotional Reservoir: Why “The Juice” Matters
- Projection isn’t Who Somebody Actually Is – It’s Their Unreality
- The Projection Cycle: A Step-By-Step Guide
- Why Arguing Never Breaks the Projection Cycle
- The Exit Strategy: Staying Real at Stage 3
- How to Stop Feeding Into the Projection Cycle (Without Blaming Anyone)
- Real Action: Where to Actually Direct Your Energy
- Talking to Your Partner About the Cycle
- Practical Steps to Maintain and Protect Your Real Energy
- The Projection Cycle: The Final Word
The Emotional Reservoir: Why “The Juice” Matters
Every human being carries an underlying emotional reservoir that drives their reactions to the things that happen in their lives .
This reservoir is made up of:
- Stored emotion.
- Unprocessed experiences.
- Learned patterns.
- Shame, fear, anger, grief, and unmet needs, etc. (anything that can be found in the Shadow Territory).
Most of the time, this reservoir stays beneath the surface and so people can appear to be calm, reasonable, and regulated but when pressure is applied – when someone is criticised, challenged, ignored, misunderstood, or threatened, etc. – then the reservoir gets squeezed.
And whatever comes out when we get squeezed is the juice that shows what’s really going on inside ourselves.
This isn’t just a nice theory but an observable reality.
We know that it’s true because different people react completely differently to the same event – for example, one person shrugs something off where another explodes or one person gets curious when another shuts down or goes into ‘attack’ mode.
The stimulus is identical but the reaction isn’t which tells us something important:
What comes out says more about what’s inside than about whatever appeared to cause it on the outside.
This is one of the most important and impactful ways for us to learn about the inner worlds of ourselves and others – not by what people do and say when they’re calm but by what leaks out when they’re under pressure.
Projection isn’t Who Somebody Actually Is – It’s Their Unreality
When someone is activated/triggered and projecting, you are not seeing their realness but something that’s actually unreal.
What you’re seeing is:
- Their conditioning.
- Their defensive strategies.
- Their coping mechanisms.
- The places where they’re resisting themselves and life.
- Their unresolved emotional ‘stuff’.
- Their unreal programming.
- Etc. etc. etc.
This distinction is crucial because it shows us that projection is not “the truth finally coming out” or “how they really feel about you” – in fact, it’s not a reliable description of reality at all: it’s just the nervous system trying to regulate itself externally.
A useful thing to know here is that in exactly the same way you can learn to step back from your own thoughts, reactions, and emotional stories and recognise “this isn’t the real me” is something that you you can do with the projections of other people.
This is not about dismissing them or anything like that – it’s just about refusing to mistake unreality for truth.
This is where the Projection Cycle comes in:
The Projection Cycle: A Step-By-Step Guide
Let’s walk through the stages of the cycle that traps so many couples (sometimes for the whole of their time together):
Stage 1: Person A is grounded, regulated, and in flow
At the start of the cycle Person A is relatively calm and present which means that they’re in their body and not just they’re head, they’re in flow and taking real action, and they’re connected to their realness and vision.
Nothing dramatic is happening…yet.
This matters, because it shows something that can sometimes be uncomfortable to face:
The cycle doesn’t start because both people are dysregulated – it starts because one person is carrying a reservoir that hasn’t been dealt with to a much deeper degree (everybody has at least some ‘reservoir’).
Stage 2: Person B gets activated and projects their reservoir
What happens next is that something triggers Person B.
This could literally be anything:
- A comment
- A look
- A boundary
- A perceived slight
- Or something that has nothing to do with Person A at all
- Etc. etc. etc.
Whatever happens, pressure is applied, the reservoir gets squeezed and the ‘juice’ comes out but – instead of staying with the sensation internally – Person B projects it outward onto Person A.
This can look like all sorts of things but usually things like:
- Accusations
- Blame
- Emotional intensity
- Rewriting history
- Making Person A responsible for how they feel
At this stage, Person B genuinely experiences the projection as true so they’re not being manipulative in a calculated way – they’re just dysregulated and seeing ‘threat’s where actual threats don’t even exist (because of the way their reservoir is poking at them and activating the nervous system’s fight or flight response).
Stage 3: Person A gets triggered and hijacked by old patterns
(This stage is the energy point where Person A has the most power to be able to break the cycle and shift their energy into realness over ego and old patterns)
This is the critical moment – it’s where Person A, who was grounded a moment ago, now feels:
- A surge of emotion
- The urge to defend, explain, correct, or fight back
- Old shame, anger, or fear being activated
In other words, their nervous system gets hijacked.
The key key insight here is that being ‘hijacked’ like this isn’t a failure (because it’s an automatic survival instinct that we have no control over) – it’s just ENERGY.
Stage 3 is where the most power exists to change things and break the cycle:
Not because Person A should “do better” but because this is the moment before the energy is discharged back into the cycle.
In other words, it’s the CHOICE POINT where Person A can step into cause instead of effect and make a choice for realness over automatic patterns and the same old cycle as always.
If Person A doesn’t make the choice for realness, the cycle just continues and goes onto the next stage:
Stage 4: Person B blames Person A for the reaction
Once Person A reacts and feeds into the projection of Person B – even subtly – Person B now has confirmation that their projection is real (when it’s actually unreal and just an extension of their own emotional reservoir).
Feeling validated by Person A’s reaction, Person B will usually hand responsibility for their own emotional ‘stuff’ over to Person A (when it’s not theirs to take):
“See? This is your fault”.
“This is why I feel like this”.
“This proves what I was saying”.
The projection solidifies into a story that both people then end up trying to live within the context of (even though it’s mainly unreal so will just bring friction, frustration, and misery).
Stage 5: Both people escalate, collapse, or withdraw
The situation at this stage of the cycle is that both nervous systems are now dysregulated and so arguments escalate, someone shuts down, someone (probably) leaves the room, and resentment builds.
Eventually, distance or exhaustion restores regulation but nothing has actually been resolved and so the the reservoirs remains untouched and the cycle resets and waits for both people to hop on for another ride of the merry-go-round.
Why Arguing Never Breaks the Projection Cycle
Most people try to fix this cycle at the level of information instead of energy (this is really important to understand).
This looks like arguing facts, clarifying intentions, explaining themselves, trying to be understood etc. but this never works at a deep level that can actually change things because projection isn’t a ‘misunderstanding’ problem but an energy misdirection problem.
You cannot reason someone out of a nervous system state they didn’t reason themselves into and you can’t stay real while donating your own regulation to someone else.
The Exit Strategy: Staying Real at Stage 3
The way out of the Projection Cycle is not suppression, emotional numbing, or even just a good old-fashioned attempt to try and “be the bigger person”.
The only way out is to find a REAL DIRECTION and take it.
The work here at Stage 3 is simple but not necessarily easy:
Don’t project energy back at whoever is projecting on you and redirect it into real action instead.
This means learning to:
- Feel activation or having your own emotional reservoir ‘triggered’ without discharging it at your partner.
- Stop feeding the projection with your time, energy, and attention.
- Withdraw from unreality without withdrawing from life (“Gimme something real or GTFO“)>
This is acceptance in its realest form because acceptance is not about approval or what we might ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ – it’s about seeing what’s real or unreal without adding fuel to the fire that the unreality causes.
How to Stop Feeding Into the Projection Cycle (Without Blaming Anyone)
When you stop feeding into the Projection Cycle, a few things can finally start to change:
You stop:
- Defending yourself.
- Explaining your character and how you’ve been mischaracterised (even if you have).
- Trying to correct their (mis)perception in the moment.
- Matching emotional intensity.
Instead, you can finally:
- Stop and pause so you can feel whatever you’re feeling without ‘stories’ added to the sensations.
- Internally refuse the false task you’ve been landed with (“I don’t need to ‘fix’ this”).
- Name reality silently (“This is unreal activation – not truth”).
- Redirect your energy into movement and purpose by making real choices over unreal ones.
This doesn’t require lectures or diagnoses that come with trying to give more information to explain your case – actually, it often requires less talking, not more, so that you can focus on staying in your own real energy instead.
Real Action: Where to Actually Direct Your Energy
Energy cannot disappear and so if it isn’t projected, it must be directed – this is where realness comes in and brings it all together.
Real action in this case might look like:
- Moving your body
- Training
- Walking
- Creating
- Working
- Writing
- Building something that matters
It can literally be anything as long as it comes from a real place and allows purpose (your deepening of your own relationship with life) to become the container for energy – not your partner and their projections.
Over time, something interesting happens:
Either:
- The other person begins to self-regulate.
Or: - The dynamic loses its grip on you
Either way, reality restructures the relationship without force and both of you start flowing more.
Talking to Your Partner About the Cycle
If your partner is open, it can help to talk about this and show them the Projection Cycle diagram above (but only do this if you can come from a grounded place when you do).
Keep this really simple if you do decide to go down this road:
- Talk about the pattern and not their behaviour (so they don’t feel blamed and it causes their projections to flare up).
- Use “when we” rather than “when you” etc.
- Emphasise that this isn’t about blame but about mutual growth.
- Share your intention to take responsibility for your own regulation.
An example of how this might go is something like::
“I’ve noticed we get caught in a loop where emotions escalate and neither of us feels heard – I’m working on not reacting from that place and staying grounded instead“.
If they’re not open, that’s okay because this work doesn’t depend on mutual insight – it just depends on you doing what you can always control which is stepping into your own realness.
Check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you want to go deeper into your own realness and sense of flow with life.
Practical Steps to Maintain and Protect Your Real Energy
Here’s how to start breaking the cycle immediately:
- Train your AWARENESS: Notice nervous system activation early and how it shows up in your body: Tight chest. Jaw tension. Urge to explain. Etc.
- Separate sensation from action: Feeling something doesn’t mean acting it out. You can actually learn to surf the waves without doing anything at all (see this article for more about this: Emotional Mastery Without the BS).
- Limit verbal output under activation: When you’re activated/triggered you fewer words and speak at a slower pace with a neutral tone.
- Redirect energy daily: Your purpose isn’t optional – it’s regulatory and protects your energetic boundaries so always so on purpose as much as possible (this article will help you with this: The Train: A Metaphor for the Good Life and Growing Real).
- Practise staying real outside conflict: Regulation is built before it’s tested so ensure you have healthy habits etc. that give you a foundation of regulation (things like yin yoga and regular nose breathing etc).
- Let reality do the teaching: You don’t need to convince anyone so don’t even try – just know that your steadiness changes the field so focus on steadily growing more real.
The Projection Cycle: The Final Word
This isn’t about ‘fixing’ your relationship and making it perfect – it’s about stepping away from unreality in your relationship as much as possible.
When you stop feeding projection, you stop living inside other people’s emotional weather and you reclaim your time, energy, and attention so you can focus on your purpose and growth.
From this place, relationships either:
- Become more real.
Or: - Reveal that they were built on unreality all along.
Either way, you win because REAL ALWAYS WORKS.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to break cycles of unreality in your own life and start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to take real action and flip the script.
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