A Jungian reflection on projection, narcissistic collapse, nonduality…

*and the moment I finally chose myself.*

He looked down at his plate and declared darkly, “I’m selfish and ambivalent about it.” The answer to a question I hadn’t asked. In hindsight, it was the question I was afraid to ask.

Our relationship had been on and off for some time. It started out incredibly intense. And then he would disappear for months. When he returned, I’d accepted his explanation - too eager to even question the STD’s. I forgave it all. Again and again.

And yet again - right around my birthday, he disappeared again. And when he reappeared, I accepted his invitation to dinner. Yet again, I was making small talk and trying not to think about the fact that he always disappeared on my birthday… and any time that mattered to me, honestly.

The pattern was becoming too clear to ignore. So I was distracting myself with small talk and mentioned that my ex had texted recently. And suddenly I had his full attention! He asked, “Why did he text!?” It was, admittedly, unusual as we didn't really talk anymore. So I sheepishly offered, “To wish me a happy birthday.”

It was like I’d slapped him.

Responding to an unspoken accusation, his eyes darkened and he seemed to shrink into himself, sputtering through several half-starts before landing on, “I’m selfish and ambivalent about it.”

By that time, I had spent nearly a year researching narcissism. A friend in school for counseling mentioned that he was “beginning to sound like a narcissist” rattling off a few symptoms like “grandiosity” and “disregard for boundaries”…

Desperate for validation, I devoured every piece of information I could find. I read articles, watched videos, listened to experts, and took mental notes every time something happened that resembled what I was finding online. The hot-and-cold intimacy. The blame-shifting. The disorienting experience of being intensely important one moment and irrelevant the next.

Every piece of information added up to an explanation that I still didn’t want to accept, so I kept hoping things would change. Maybe I was just too sensitive. I expected too much?

I told myself I was trying to understand him, but that was only partly true. I was also building a case strong enough to give myself permission to say “Fuck this” and leave.

At one point, I took one of those online tests called something like, “Is Your Partner a Narcissist?” It had more than 180 questions. One hundred and eighty questions. As though question 179 might finally tell me something my nervous system had not already been trying to say for months.

The result came back exactly where I expected it to land. And still, I stayed.

That is the part people do not always understand. Knowing something and accepting it are not the same process. You can recognize a pattern intellectually long before you are willing to accept it. And then? You still have to do something about it…

So I kept researching. I kept observing. I kept gathering evidence as though I were preparing a case for a jury that lived entirely inside my own head.

Later that night, I tucked him into bed - without taking my shoes off.

That detail matters because sex had always been one of the ways we returned to each other. It could make us feel reconnected even when nothing had been repaired. Chemistry created the impression that intimacy had been restored, while the actual problems remained untouched.

Not that night. I tucked him in, and I said goodbye - not good night - because I knew it was the last time.

I Was Asking the Wrong Question

Looking back, the most important thing was not that the quiz confirmed my suspicions. It was that I believed I needed a 180-question quiz in the first place.

I already knew.

My body knew every time it tightened while I waited for the next shift in tone, mood, affection, or availability. My anxiety knew. The part of me that felt confused after conversations knew. Even the part that kept translating his behavior into something kinder than it felt, knew exactly what was happening. It wasn’t information I was lacking. It was trust in myself.

I wanted an expert, a diagnosis, an article, a checklist, or someone with authority to tell me that my experience was real. What if I was wrong? What if the real problem was me? Research became a way to avoid the simple truth. I didn’t need to diagnose him to know the relationship was hurting me, and didn’t need to prove that he met some clinical threshold. The pattern was there. The impact was there. And my life was shrinking to accommodate it.

Then I realized: if it walked like a duck and talked like a duck, it was probably a fucking duck. And slowly, the label began to matter less. A boundary does not require a diagnosis. And I didn’t need to win a courtroom case to decide who gets access to my life. I needed to be judge and jury for myself.

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When the Person and the Projection Separate

I loved him. That still matters.

It would be easy to turn this into a simple story about a narcissist and his victim. The simple good-guy-versus-bad-guy movie with all the darkness placed on one side and all the innocence on the other. But that would only replace one fantasy with another. The harder truth is that I loved a real man while also becoming deeply attached to my projection of him.

Projection is rarely a conscious lie. Most of us do not know we are doing it. We meet someone and experience not only the person in front of us, but everything they awaken in us. Old longing, unmet needs, hope, fear, desire, and the future we begin imagining all become part of the relationship. I didn’t only see who was sitting across from me - I saw his potential too. I saw the wounded person beneath the behavior and I saw the man he might become if he felt safe enough, loved enough, and understood enough.

Whenever he was sweet or loving, I treated that moment as proof of his truest self. Everything that contradicted it became a temporary obstruction. I explained his disappearing act as fear of commitment. I tolerated his ambivalence because I wanted to believe he was simply more evolved than I was. And the inconsistency meant he was “complicated” and “interesting.” I kept rationalizing his actions while reality kept giving me the same answer.

This is who he is. Not who he might become. Not who he sometimes appears to be. Not who your love could possibly help him become. That distinction was brutal because my projection and my observations could no longer live peacefully together. The fantasy said there was a loving, available man hidden somewhere underneath the pattern.

Reality said - the pattern was the relationship.

The Trigger Was the Distance Between Fantasy and Fact

For a long time, I believed his behavior was the problem. But reality itself wasn’t what hurt most, but my refusal to accept it. Every contradiction created another internal split. The man I imagined and the man I experienced moved farther away, while I exhausted myself trying to reach him.

That is why withdrawing a projection can be so slow and painful. You are not simply grieving the relationship you had. You are grieving the relationship you believed was about to begin. You are losing the future attached to the person, along with the version of yourself who thought love, patience, and insight could change the ending.

Jung understood that we do not meet other people only as they are. We meet them through the unconscious material we place upon them. A relationship can feel larger than life because it is carrying more than two people. It is carrying shadow, old wounds, unlived possibilities, and every part of us that still hopes this time the story will end differently.

Individuation asks us to begin separating the real person from everything we have projected onto them. It sounds elegant when described in a book, but doing it felt more like having heart surgery without anesthesia.

I spent so much time trying to understand his inner world, largely because it kept me from listening to my own. His fear of intimacy was much easier to talk about than my attraction to emotional unavailability.

What Happened at That Dinner Table?

That dinner has stayed with me because it seemed as though something in his internal construction failed. It was like a scene from a sci-fi film in which a robot encounters a line of code that “does not compute” and begins to short-circuit. His mainframe seemed to be searching for a patch that would preserve the simulation—of reality, or at least of our relationship.

I am a coach, not a psychiatrist, physician, or psychologist. I cannot diagnose what happened inside another person. All I can do is describe what I saw. For a moment, reality seemed to catch him off guard.

Sam Vaknin uses the term narcissistic mortification to describe a sudden collision between a constructed identity and a reality that no longer supports it. In his model, someone with deeply narcissistic defenses may relate less to the living, independent person standing in front of them and more to an internal image of that person, what he sometimes calls a snapshot.

Sounds an awful lot like what Jung would call a projection. As long as the actual person continues behaving according to that image, the story can remain intact. The trouble is that people do not remain still. They change. They speak. They leave. They have needs, memories, desires, and entire lives outside the role assigned to them. When the real person begins contradicting the internal version, the result can be shame, rage, disorientation, or collapse.

I’ll never know for sure what happened—but I no longer need to. Still, knowing it was possible helped me inch my way toward acceptance. That my ex was more considerate was clear before his answer, but hearing the unfiltered truth, “I’m selfish and ambivalent about it,” made it impossible to ignore.

We Both Had to Get Real

This is where the story becomes more complicated than villain and victim. I had an internal snapshot too - an idealized picture that no longer matched the evidence. I wanted to believe in my version of him so badly that I excused his behavior. But that does not mean our behavior was equivalent. It simply means reality was confronting both of us. His internal version of me could not fully contain the person I was becoming. My internal version of him “could not compute” the person I’d come to know. As a result, what I used to accept was no longer acceptable.

I fought it, researched around it, bargained with it, softened it, and reopened the door more than once. But beneath all that resistance, something in me had begun to want the truth more than I wanted the fantasy.

That was the real turning point. Every question answered was another, “Fuck this!” moment adding up to what I already knew. Knowing the score didn’t make it easier. When I began asking different questions, the pain stopped being something I needed to explain away and became information. Confusion became evidence that something was wrong, not proof that I needed to work harder. And the triggers that stood in my way became the doorway back to reality.

But defenses are built for a reason, and everyone needs a healthy ego to survive. A false self does not appear out of nowhere. Somewhere along the way, the truth felt unbearable, so another structure was created to survive it.

Am I talking about him - or me now? Both of us had defenses, but mine were the only ones I could do anything about.

Therapist Terry Real describes healthy self-esteem as “an internal sense of worth that pulls one neither into ‘better than’ grandiosity nor ‘less than’ shame.” That gave me another way to understand our dance. He often went one-up; I went one-down. Those positions were not equivalent in behavior or impact, but neither allowed us to meet as equals.

His work would have required more empathy for others, while mine required more empathy and authority for myself.

The Shadow Hidden Inside “Selfish and Ambivalent”

Jung believed that whatever we refuse to recognize in ourselves does not disappear. It moves into the shadow and comes back through attraction, judgment, obsession, projection, and conflict. The qualities I judged most harshly in him were often distorted versions of qualities I badly needed. His selfishness offended me because I had built an identity around being accommodating. Ambivalence destabilized me because I believed love required commitment. He protected his freedom at the expense of connection, while I protected connection at the expense of myself.

It was too easy to simply adopt his values as my own. But “selfish and ambivalent”? I don’t need to become careless or cruel. I needed to uncover the power hidden underneath what I judged.

There is a kind of selfishness that simply says, “My life matters,” without needing to feel superior. And there is a kind of uncertainty that gives you permission to pause, question, and discern. Shadow work asked me to reclaim the parts of myself I had exiled. Relationships consistently provided a mirror to sides of myself I had never seen before.

Relational Sovereignty

Over time, healing became less about detaching from love and more about becoming unattached to the outcome. I could remain committed to honesty without believing my honesty would force someone else to face the truth.

Machiavelli called it the “effectual truth”: the difference between reality as it is and the world we imagine. Relational sovereignty begins when fantasy stops overruling the evidence. I can stay openhearted without surrendering my boundaries, care deeply without making someone’s potential more important than the present, and remain confident enough to question what I don’t understand.

That is relational sovereignty.

It is not becoming cold. Nor is it emotional isolation, indifference, or pretending you no longer care. Love no longer requires you to abandon your throne. You understand your role in the relationship and take responsibility for your actions. But you don’t take responsibility for others’ actions. Instead, you see someone’s humanity and can still remove their access. You can forgive without returning. You can understand and still say no.

Discernment is the sovereign’s responsibility. What kind of king will I be if I can’t rule myself? A king without boundaries is a servant - to his ego.

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One Consciousness, Different Choices

One way I have come to hold the relationship is through a nondual lens. The Gita says, “The Lord dwells in the hearts of all beings.”

I hear that as: “We are all God experiencing human existence.” Looking at it that way the relationship was not simply a battle between a good person and a bad person. It was God meeting Himself - through two wounded human beings with different histories, defenses, and levels of awareness.

One of us pursued connection to feel secure. The other controlled distance to feel secure. I tried to earn love, while he seemed to manage intimacy by keeping it unstable. Both of us were caught in old stories, and mistook them for reality.

It’s easy to take this philosophy and throw up your hands, giving up - “It is what it is.” Or say, “I’m above all that” in order to avoid the pain. Nonduality can become an excuse for spiritual bypassing. The belief that we are ultimately One does not mean behavior stops mattering. Choices still have consequences and boundaries are important. Otherwise, oneness becomes another reason to abandon yourself in order to avoid the real work. Compassion helped me understand why our defenses were formed, but discernment allowed me to see when those same defenses made intimacy unsafe.

Love may recognize the frightened human being beneath the behavior, but sovereignty responds to the behavior that is actually taking place here and now. Sorry. I don’t take IOUs.

A sovereign ruler does what is needed - whether it feels good or not.

The Mirror I Needed

For a long time, I believed he was the one refusing to look in the mirror. And maybe he was, but it doesn’t really matter now, because this story isn’t really about him any more. I focused on his fear of intimacy, so I wouldn’t have to examine my attraction to people who couldn’t choose me. His ambivalence occupied my attention, while I avoided making a clear decision. I cataloged his selfishness while ignoring the part of myself begging for permission to put my own needs first. I desperately hoped he would grow out of it, so I wouldn’t have to.

That was the real gift of the relationship.

I don’t believe harm becomes sacred simply because we eventually learn from it. Pain is not automatically a spiritual lesson. I had to decide what to do with it - the injury could become my whole identity, or it could be my initiation.

The relationship became the mirror I needed. And through it, I saw how often I abandoned myself to preserve connection. Through it, I saw how often I abandoned myself to preserve connection, where empathy became complicity and where understanding became an excuse to tolerate what should never have been tolerated.

I saw my addiction to potential, how uncertainty could feel like chemistry and how intermittent affection could imitate intimacy. That night I finally stopped asking, “What is wrong with him?”

I knew.

Thank God for the Narcissist

“I’m selfish and ambivalent about it.”

At the time, that sentence felt like a verdict, but now, it almost sounds like an instruction. It was almost as though some part of me had sought him out to receive these marching orders. Maybe I needed to become a little more selfish enough to protect the life I had been given and ambivalent enough to put my own needs first.I had spent too long asking an unavailable person, and every expert I could find, to overrule what I already knew.

The answer was never going to come from him, but the relationship showed me what love was not. I wanted to force him to look into the mirror and take responsibility when I needed to do that too.

When I finally looked, I didn’t like everything I found. So I'm taking that note, and trying things differently. Now, the next time someone says, “I love you,” I’ll say, “FUCK YEAH! Me too.”

A Note on Language and Diagnosis

This article is a personal and philosophical reflection, not a clinical diagnosis of another person. Narcissistic traits exist across a spectrum, and narcissistic personality disorder can only be diagnosed through an appropriate professional evaluation. Ideas such as narcissistic collapse, mortification, false selves, and internal representations are used here as interpretive frameworks rather than definitive claims about another person’s inner experience.

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Who’s the Narcissist? I Was Asking the Wrong Question.

A Jungian reflection on projection, narcissistic collapse, nonduality…