There is a version of the projection model that I find actively harmful, and I want to address it before going any further.
That version says: because everything in your experience is a projection, you are responsible for what other people do to you. If someone treats you badly, you created that reality. Their bad behaviour is your projection. Take responsibility for it.
This is not what I mean. This reading of the model is the abuser’s philosophy dressed up as consciousness work. It silences the person being harmed and protects the person doing the harm. I want to be unambiguous about that.
What I mean is something more useful and less weaponisable: the things that disturb us most in others tend to have a corresponding version in ourselves, often at a different level of expression, often in a completely different area of our lives. Finding that version gives us leverage over the disturbance. It does not make the other person’s behaviour acceptable or their responsibility ours.
With that clear, here is the method.
Why You Need to Start Specific
The most common error in applying this process is starting too general.
“Trump” is not a specific enough starting point. “My difficult colleague” is not a specific enough starting point. “The state of politics” is definitely not a specific enough starting point.
You need a concrete, nameable behaviour. Something that happened, or that is happening, with enough specificity that you could describe it to someone else and they would know what you meant.
Not: he’s dismissive.
But: in yesterday’s meeting, he cut across me mid-sentence to address someone else.
Not: she’s toxic.
But: she called me selfish, in front of other people, in a raised voice.
Not: the political situation is disturbing.
But: a specific thing a specific person said or did, at a specific moment, that is still sitting in your field.
Get specific. That is step one.
The Chunking Up Sequence
Once you have the specific behaviour, you apply the chunking up process. Ask: what is this behaviour an example of?
Don’t look for the right answer. Go with what comes. If what comes feels too close to the original behaviour, ask the question again of whatever just arrived.
Here is an example worked through: a public figure found guilty of serious misconduct involving women, with the story then minimised and set aside. Ask: what is this an example of?
Treating some people as less worthy of protection than others. What is that an example of? Preferential treatment based on power. What is that an example of? Separation. The belief that some people are fundamentally other — less than, different from, not equally deserving of consideration. What is separation an example of? Disconnection. The forgetting that what you are and what others are is, at the deepest level, the same.
Now ask: where in my life am I experiencing a version of this?
The answer will almost never be: I am also treating women with contempt and getting away with it. The answer is the version of the underlying dynamic that runs in you, at your level, in your context.
For the example above, the question that tends to arrive is something like: where in my life am I treating one thing or person as less important, less worthy, less real than another? Where am I setting something aside because acknowledging it fully would cost me something?
Those are real questions with real answers. And addressing those answers — in your own life, with one concrete action — is where the work is.
When the Connection Is Not Immediately Obvious
Sometimes the chunking up process produces abstraction without the felt sense of recognition. You’ve moved up the chain, you’ve arrived somewhere large and structural, but there is no personal resonance. No click.
When this happens, go higher. Ask the question again. The recognition arrives at different levels for different people, depending on where they are carrying the pattern.
If it still does not arrive, try a different angle: state the highest level you’ve reached, and ask not “where in my life am I doing this” but “where in my life does this feel true about my experience?” Sometimes the pattern is not something we are doing to others but something we experience as being done to us, or as being simply the nature of reality.
For example: if you’ve arrived at “separation,” you might ask not where am I causing separation but where do I feel separated? Where do I experience disconnection from something larger? That question often produces recognition faster than the active version.
The One Action That Shifts the System
Here is the thing about this process that surprises people most: the action required is usually very small.
A participant found the version of her pattern in her business finances. One conversation, one set of invoices raised. Four minutes of work in a completely different area of her life.
The shift was not in proportion to the size of the action. It was in proportion to the accuracy of the diagnosis.
The action does not need to be heroic. It needs to be specific, and it needs to address the actual pattern rather than its surface expression. A general intention to “be more supported” does nothing. A phone call to a specific person about a specific thing: that is the action.
What you are doing with that action is demonstrating to your own system that the underlying dynamic is not fixed. That support is available, that connection is possible. And because the outer disturbance was connected to the inner pattern, the outer disturbance registers the shift.
Not always immediately. Not always visibly. But consistently enough, over enough repetitions of this process, that it becomes one of the most practically reliable tools I know.
The Pattern Is Not the Person
One final thing worth naming: this process is not about developing sympathy for people whose behaviour you find genuinely harmful. It is not a technique for letting difficult people off the hook or for convincing yourself that terrible behaviour is somehow understandable.
It is a technique for freeing yourself from the particular grip that their behaviour has on you. For reducing the charge in your field that their actions activate. For finding the inner lever that is actually within your control, rather than remaining focused on the outer lever that is not.
You can find yourself in behaviour you abhor, do the inner work, and still hold absolutely clearly that the behaviour is not acceptable. These are not in conflict.
The outer work — the naming, the limiting, the structural response — and the inner work operate on separate tracks. Both are necessary. Neither replaces the other.
What the inner work gives you is the capacity to do the outer work from a place of clarity rather than reactivity. From groundedness rather than grip.
That is not a small thing.
