What Am I Putting on Them?
In ancient Israel, there was a ritual in which the community’s sins—its wrongdoing, guilt, and destructive impulses—were symbolically placed on a goat, which was then driven into the wilderness.
We don’t use goats anymore. But we do scapegoat.
We project onto others what we don’t want to face in ourselves: people with different political or religious views, people we believe are getting more—or less — than they deserve, our challenge our assumptions about what we deserve. Even a driver’s careless maneuver can quickly become, in our minds, a judgment about their character.
Projection allows us to put something outside ourselves that may need our attention within.
So perhaps the practice is simply to pause and ask: What am I putting on this person?
Maybe beneath our judgment is fear, an unmet need, an old wound, or a part of ourselves that needs compassion.
When we can recognize and bring tenderness to those places within us, we no longer need to project them onto someone else.
And that begins to bring healing—not just to us, but to everyone involved.
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