Tell Me What You Think About People And I’ll Tell You Who You Are
The way you see other people can reveal a lot about your character and personality. According to the ” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology “, people who qualify others as honest, friendly and stable are satisfied with their own lives. On the other hand, those who have negative opinions about other people are precisely the most antisocial, narcissistic and unpleasant.
This study demonstrates that people who rate their peers positively suffer less from depression and anxiety. On the other hand, people who are overly critical are more susceptible to personality disorders, especially paranoid or antisocial disorders.
An essential feature of paranoid personality disorder is a pattern of mistrust and suspicion towards others in general, so that their intentions are interpreted as malicious. In turn, this implies that people with this disorder interpret neutral or positive messages as insults, teasing, insults, etc. Faced with doubt about the intention of the other, a paranoid always chooses the worst option. That is, it interprets what the other does or says as an attack.
Personality disorders aside, there is always someone who is constantly criticizing everyone and everything. In every environment we go to, there is always someone who thinks the world is full of bad people. According to this study, regardless of whether a person is right or wrong, this kind of thinking does not contribute to their happiness. Also, you are probably elusive and suspicious.
we are mirrors
The exterior acts as a mirror for our mind, we see reflected in it the qualities or aspects of our own being. When we observe something in someone and we don’t like it or feel rejected, somehow that aspect of what we don’t like can exist inside of us. Furthermore, this rejection may just be a reflection of the rejection we feel for who we are.
It is also possible that our unconscious, aided by our projection, makes us believe that the defect exists “out there”, in the other person. Psychological projection is a defense mechanism through which a person attributes to others sensations, thoughts, or impulses that they deny or are unacceptable in themselves.
This mechanism appears in situations of emotional conflict or when we feel threatened internally or externally. To reduce our inner turmoil, we focus on the outside as if all those qualities we don’t accept don’t belong to us. We attribute these qualities to an object or someone far away from us. In this way, our mind puts out this menacing content and fights them in the real world.
A large part of what bothers you in others is just a projection
The inner world tends to color the outer world with its own characteristics. For example, if we are happy, we usually look at the world around us with optimism and joy, expressing ourselves through phrases such as “life smiles on me today”, “what a happy day”.
Obviously, neither the day is happy nor life smiles for anyone. These qualities are really subjective and we are the ones who feel that way. The projection process is part of human mental functioning and therefore helps us to feel and think about the world as something humanized.
Often, what we don’t accept in others is precisely what we don’t resolve within ourselves. If we had solved it early on, it wouldn’t have become a chronic problem. In these cases, acceptance of our shadows and meditation will help us to know ourselves better and integrate various points of view before moving on to interpretations.
