Parenting Beyond Projection

The parents I work with love their children deeply. They devote themselves to making sure their kids feel happy and safe. But sometimes, unresolved shame or trauma interferes with knowing what our children need most. Sometimes, we inadvertently pass our own fears or shame onto our kids, and they end up carrying them as if they were their own.

Something I focus on in my therapy practice is helping parents identify areas where they feel pressure for their kids to be a certain way, and consider how their own histories may be showing up and blocking them from seeing their children for who they are and where they’re at.

Most of us enter parenting with childhood wounds, parts of ourselves that weren’t accepted—maybe we were told we were too sensitive, too loud, or too stubborn. Perhaps we had to perform, achieve, or conceal certain aspects of ourselves just to be accepted. This is where we carry shame, and it often seeps into the parent-child relationship.

Children instinctively sense what makes their parents happy or upset, and we all have a false self that desperately seeks love, hiding parts of ourselves we believe aren’t acceptable. The false self is a natural survival strategy. We need to secure the love of those we rely on most. But there’s a heavy cost when we lose touch with our true selves.

Understanding projection and shame triggers

Shame is a feeling so uncomfortable to hold that we try to get rid of it quickly, like a hot potato. And whoever is nearby, whether it’s a partner, a friend, or a child, we attempt to rid ourselves of this overwhelming feeling by inducing the other person to take it on. It’s connected to our own past experiences of feeling judged or criticized.

Now, here’s where it connects to parenting a neurodivergent child: When that child struggles—whether with meltdowns, school challenges, social differences, or sensory overwhelm—it can stir up the parent’s own buried shame. When we have a child who is struggling, it can trigger old feelings of inadequacy.

Raising a neurodivergent child can make us feel insecure in our parenting. When we struggle to help our children with a particular challenge, we might project our own feelings of helplessness onto them. Sometimes it comes out as pressure: “Why can’t you just try harder?” Sometimes it appears as withdrawal: “I can’t handle this right now.” And sometimes it manifests as subtle expressions of disappointment.

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The child, of course, isn’t aware of the history behind these reactions. All they know is that something about me makes my parents upset. This feeds into the child’s own shame: Maybe I am too much. Maybe I am not enough.

Our society has a problematic relationship with disability. Parents themselves have grown up in an ableist culture that prizes independence, conformity, and achievement. When their child doesn’t fit the mold, parents may project society’s contempt onto the child. The parent may feel shame in public or fear of judgment, which gets displaced onto the child as irritation or disgust.

In our individualistic, hyper-independent culture, we wrestle with internal conflict around vulnerability, and children with disabilities often embody sensitivity and dependency. If a parent has disowned these qualities in themselves (perhaps they were shamed for them as children), seeing them in their child reactivates old wounds. This might play out by rejecting their child as “weak” or “needy.”

Parents may unconsciously project parts of themselves—such as fear, shame, anger, inadequacy, or unresolved trauma—onto their child. Instead of recognizing these emotions as their own, they unconsciously “assign” them to the child. When the child internalizes these projections and acts out the parent’s disowned feelings, psychoanalysts refer to this process as “projective identification.”

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For example, a parent who feels anxious might induce anxiety in the child to hold for them. Alternatively, a parent feeling inadequate at work might judge the child’s performance in school as a way to cope with their own feelings of insufficiency. This can reinforce the child’s own sense of shame or the feeling of not being “good enough.”

Projective identification often repeats across generations. A parent who served as a container for their own parents’ unprocessed feelings may unconsciously pass these feelings to their children. This is how intergenerational shame is handed down—unresolved wounds echo forward.

The effects of projective identification can cause a child to internalize traits that aren’t their own and develop a distorted self-concept. They may feel persistent guilt or shame because they believe they are responsible for their parents’ emotions. The child becomes a caretaker for the parent rather than the other way around, and they often struggle to distinguish their own feelings from those projected onto them.

So what does healing look like?

When we accept our limitations and imperfections, we can work through and reclaim our projections. We can embrace the parts of ourselves that we were taught were unacceptable. If we hold ourselves to unrealistic standards, we will inevitably fall short.

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When we feel contempt for our own “defects,” we might find ourselves judging and criticizing our children. Self-awareness helps us notice when these negative feelings pop up, and we can pause to be curious. It’s almost always related to our own history rather than something our child is doing wrong.

Self-compassion teaches us to be gentle with ourselves, allowing us to accept our humanity. When we become overly concerned with others’ judgments, we might try to control our children’s behavior to avoid feeling uncomfortable or embarrassed. It always ends up feeling terrible when we lose sight of who matters.

The best thing we can do for neurodivergent kids is to carry our own emotional load. When parents do their inner work, we have more patience and genuine joy, and put less pressure on our children to perform or mask. When we recognize and process our fears, shame, or grief, we free our children to carry only what is truly theirs, creating a safe space for them to grow into their authentic selves.