I know what it’s like to look at your grown child and, for a split second, see someone else.
The same tone of voice your narcissistic ex used. The same dismissive shrug. The same way of making you feel small in your own home. And before you can think, your whole body reacts: chest tight, jaw clenched, heart already bracing for the old fight.
It’s a confusing, lonely feeling. You love your child. And yet some part of you is responding as if you’re back in the marriage.
You are not imagining things, and you are not a bad parent. You are experiencing projection. And your child, very likely, is doing the same thing with you.
What Projection Really Is
Projection is what happens when unprocessed pain from one relationship gets placed onto another.
The nervous system is always scanning for danger. When something in the present resembles something painful from the past, the body doesn’t stop to check the details. It reacts to the old wound as if it were happening now.
So when your child speaks in a way that echoes your ex, the anger and grief you never fully felt about the marriage rise up and aim themselves at the person in front of you.
It isn’t a moral failing. It’s a survival response. Your body is trying to protect you from being hurt that way again.
Your Child Is Projecting Too
Here is the part that brings so much compassion when parents see it.
Your child also has pain from the divorce. Grief about the family that came apart. Maybe anger about choices the adults made. Maybe a sense that no one ever made space for what they were feeling, because everyone was too busy surviving.
That pain has to go somewhere. Often it lands on the parent who feels safest to be angry with. Sometimes that’s you, precisely because some part of them trusts you won’t leave.
So in a single conversation, you may have four people in the room: you, your child, your ex in your child’s face, and the grief of the whole family underneath it all.
No wonder it feels impossible.
Signs Projection Is Happening
You might be caught in projection when:
- Your reaction feels bigger than what actually happened
- You feel the exact same body sensations you felt in the marriage
- You find yourself thinking “He’s exactly like his father” or “She’s turning into her mother”
- Your child seems to be punishing you for something that feels older than you
- You leave conversations feeling like you’ve been in a different fight than the one you were having
None of these mean the relationship is broken. They mean old pain is asking to be healed.
How to Untangle It
1. Name it privately first. When you feel the surge, silently ask: “Who am I really reacting to right now?” Naming it, even to yourself, gives you a small space to breathe.
2. Come back to your body. Feel your feet on the floor. Soften your belly. Lengthen your exhale. Projection lives in a nervous system on high alert; calming the body brings you back to the present.
3. Separate your child from your ex. Your child may carry some of your ex’s patterns. They are still a separate person with their own heart, their own hurt, and their own capacity to change. Try to see them.
4. Get curious about their pain. Instead of reacting to the tone, respond to what’s underneath: “You seem really hurt. Can you tell me more?”
5. Take the old pain to its proper place. The anger and grief about your marriage are real and deserve care. But they belong in your own healing, not in conversations with your child. This is where therapy, somatic work and prayer become essential.
The Deeper Healing
Projection eases most when the original wound is tended.
When you allow yourself to feel the anger you swallowed in the marriage, the grief of the family you hoped for, the fear of being small again, your body no longer needs to scan for your ex in your child’s face.
Suppressed anger often lives in the gut. Grief often sits in the chest and lungs. As those feelings move, many parents notice their bodies soften, their sleep improves, and their reactions to their children become gentler, almost without trying.
This is what it means to come home to yourself. You stop living inside the old marriage. You start living in the relationship that’s actually in front of you.
Try This Before You See Them
Sit quietly and picture your child’s face. Notice what rises in your body.
If you feel tension, ask gently: “Does this feeling belong to my child, or to someone else?”
If it belongs to someone else, place a hand where you feel it and say: “I see you. I’ll take care of you. This isn’t my child’s to carry.”
Then picture your child again, as the little one they once were, and as the adult they are now. Let your heart meet them.
A Gentle Invitation
If your family is still carrying the pain of a marriage that ended, and you’d like help untangling it so you can love your children more freely, I offer a free 15-minute consultation.
Book a free 15-minute consultation.
The past doesn’t have to keep sitting at your table.
Go Deeper at Your Own Pace
If this spoke to you and you’d like to keep going on your own time, my self-paced course Heal Your Body: CPTSD & Codependency After Narcissistic Abuse walks you step by step through healing the trauma bonds, people-pleasing and self-abandonment that relational trauma leaves in the body and heart.
If you are in crisis, please call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, US/Canada) or call 911.
