Everywhere You Go, There You Are

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​This is an excerpt from my book, How To Set Boundaries (Without Feeling Like a D*ck)—a guide for anyone ready to speak up, honour their needs, and feel more grounded in their relationships.

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Think of your emotions like items you stuff into a closet.

When life gets busy, you toss your feelings in there, promising yourself you’ll deal with them later—but later never seems to come, does it? Over time, that closet begins to fill up, crammed full with all the stuff you’ve rationalized away, pushed aside or ignored, until it’s so packed the doors won’t even close.

Eventually, just like an overstuffed closet spills its contents into the room, those unresolved emotions start creeping into your daily life. Suddenly, you’re feeling overwhelmed, burned out, and anxious without even really knowing why.

To help manage this overflow, our unconscious mind has developed a way to reflect our unresolved issues onto other people, effectively forcing us to deal with them whether we like it or not. This adaptive mechanism ensures we can't run from our emotions forever. Unfortunately, it also means we sometimes react to other people based not on their actions but on our own unresolved feelings.

This happens through a process known as projection.

Projection is a concept that was first introduced by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and is based on the idea that what we don’t address within ourselves will be reflected back to us by others.[i] Because we are so good at ignoring our feelings, either by rationalizing them or pushing them out of our minds, the only way for us to become aware of our unresolved issues is to see them reflected in someone else.

For example, let’s say you're feeling jealous of a friend's promotion, but instead of acknowledging and processing your jealousy and finding healthy ways to channel this emotion, you instead dismiss your feelings by telling yourself you're being silly, illogical, or overly sensitive. This rejection of your own emotional experience is deeply damaging because it denies an important aspect of Who You Are on the emotional layer of reality. When you do this repeatedly, your mind has no choice but to unconsciously project those rejected feelings onto other people.

You might find yourself thinking your friend is actually jealous of you and may even accuse them of it. In this way, you don't have to face up to your own jealousy—instead, you see it as the other person’s problem. This mechanism is helpful in allowing us to avoid dealing with our own difficult emotions but, as you can imagine, it can lead to a lot of misunderstandings and conflicts in our relationships.

The Role of Triggers

Any time we push down or rationalize emotions we don’t want to deal with, those feelings don’t just vanish into thin air. Instead, they linger in the recesses of our unconscious mind, waiting for something in our environment to trigger them back into our conscious awareness. These unresolved emotions then get projected onto the people around us, which, in turn, triggers us to face what we’ve been avoiding.

Unfortunately, when this happens, we usually think our job is to suppress these feelings even more, or try to become less affected by them. What we don’t realize is that these triggers are actually signals, guiding us to explore and heal what’s been buried.

A few years back, we had some town workers come by our property to bury new lines for an internet provider. Before any digging started, the utilities and gas companies first came around and placed little flags throughout the yard to alert the workers to buried wires or other things underground that needed care or attention.

Much like those little flags, your triggers are your unconscious mind's way of alerting you to where your unresolved issues are buried so you can find and heal them­, instead of having to project them onto other people. While they may feel uncomfortable, your triggers are actually your greatest guides towards emotional resilience.

This means the commonly held belief that being triggered indicates something is wrong with us is completely false. In fact, your triggers are a sign that your unconscious mind is doing its job perfectly! It is simply bringing unresolved issues to the surface to be dealt with—which is exactly what it is designed to do.

The reality is, you were never meant to just "get over it" or push down your emotions indefinitely. Your emotional experiences are a vital part of Who You Are, and denying them isn’t an option.
Since repressing emotions forever isn’t safe or sustainable, our triggers serve as repeated opportunities to confront and heal what’s been buried.

And because they stem from our own unresolved issues or projected insecurities, it means everyone you meet essentially acts as a mirror, reflecting back to you all the parts of yourself you accept—as well as the parts you still struggle with. It is through these interactions with the people around you that hidden aspects of yourself are brought to light, offering you the chance to heal and grow.

So, that coworker who triggers you because they're always rude? It might actually be your projection because you’re afraid of being perceived as rude by others. Or that neighbor who is always being so loud and judgmental? You might be projecting because you worry that others see you the same way.

Freud and Jung believed that projection happens because our conscious ego, which maintains our self-image, can't handle "unacceptable" feelings. To manage this, it buries these feelings under emotional layers and disguises them as traits in others. This mechanism helps us avoid the discomfort of self-recognition by seeing our issues reflected externally and allows us to keep functioning while avoiding the immediate pain of confronting our own inner demons.

The problem is, when we don’t realize this is happening, our triggers and projections can cause misunderstandings as well as unnecessary conflict and drama in our relationships. We might find ourselves triggered and arguing with someone over their behavior, not realizing it’s our own hidden feelings that we are projecting onto them.

By recognizing projection for what it is, we can take responsibility for our own triggers and reclaim our projections, ensuring we create boundaries that are not driven by our past pain or traumas.

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📚 If you enjoyed this excerpt from my book and want to go deeper, How To Set Boundaries (Without Feeling Like a D*ck) is now available on Amazon, Indigo, Barnes & Noble, and as an audiobook on all your favourite platforms 🎧