When "Just My Opinion" Is Actually a Wound Being Projected

On oppositional defiance, the feminine competition wound, and why the comments under your posts might not actually be about your work.

Last year, I had to call a boundary with a friend.

A friend — someone I trusted, someone I’d let into my creative world — who had quietly developed a habit of leaving critical commentary under my posts. A pointed observation here. A “well, actually” there. Always carrying a faint sting underneath.

I can’t recall a single comment of support on my content, in the 8 years of friendship with her.

For a long time, I told myself I was being sensitive. That receiving critique is part of putting your work into the world. That a true friend can disagree with you. And this can be true, however, when something is showing up time and time again, and it is not balanced with love and support… well, we this is not just critique. It was something more persistent, more patterned — a subtle but consistent need to find the problem in whatever I created.

When I finally named it and set a boundary, the defensiveness that came back told me everything I needed to know. Because real support doesn't bristle when it's gently questioned.

More on the pattern that I am naming

What I was bumping up against has a name. In psychology, oppositional defiance is typically used to describe a pattern in children — a persistent tendency to resist, argue, or defy authority figures. But its shadow shows up in adult relationships too, especially in digital spaces where we're all performing, publishing, and making ourselves visible in ways previous generations never had to navigate.

In this context, oppositional defiance looks less like a tantrum and more like a quiet, chronic refusal to let something simply exist. It’s the compulsion to meet someone else’s joy, confidence, or creative output with resistance — resistance as a default setting.

Online, you’ll recognise it in specific patterns:

• The person who appears under every post but never with warmth — always with an edge, a correction, a counter

• The “I’m just being honest” that lands harder than honesty ever needs to

• The comment that technically says nothing wrong but leaves you feeling subtly smaller

• The consistent inability to let your work — your celebration, your win, your idea — simply be received

• The person who never shares, never celebrates, never amplifies, but always critiques

And when you feel contracted by this, it is because it is not simply just the discomfort of receiving feedback from someone invested in your growth. This is something more reflexive — a kind of psychological immune response triggered by your visibility itself.

It’s not about your work. It was never about your work.

The Wound Underneath

Here is what I’ve come to believe, both from my own experience and from watching this dynamic play out in creative communities: oppositional defiance, at its root, is almost always a story about the person expressing it — not the person receiving it.

When someone hasn’t made peace with their own creative voice, their own ambition, or their own right to take up space, your confidence becomes a kind of provocation. It is usually not because you did anything wrong. But because your willingness to be seen — to post, to create, to put your name on something and share it — holds up a mirror they aren’t ready to look into.

The psychological term for this is projection: when we unconsciously take an internal feeling we can’t hold — inadequacy, fear, unresolved longing — and redirect it outward onto someone else. The criticism isn’t really about your work. It’s about the feeling your work stirs up in them.

There’s a second mechanism at play too: what psychologists call reaction formation. This is when an uncomfortable feeling — say, genuine admiration or desire for what someone else has — becomes so intolerable that the psyche converts it into its opposite. Admiration flips into dismissal. Longing becomes critique. The person who most wants what you have is sometimes the most vocal about why it isn’t actually that good.

This is a defence mechanism, usually carved out from childhood. The psyche is trying to protect itself from pain it doesn’t know how to metabolise. But the cost of that protection is paid by the people on the receiving end of it — and it’s a tax you didn’t agree to.

The mechanism behind this behaviour usually lies in the nervous system. When we’ve been chronically criticised — by a parent, a school system, a past relationship — our nervous system learns to anticipate threat. We become, over time, wired to spot danger before it arrives. In some people, that hypervigilance turns outward: they critique others reflexively, as a way of pre-empting the criticism they fear is coming for them. Attack before you can be attacked. Find the flaw before someone finds yours.

When you understand this, the sharp comment under your post starts to look less like a verdict and more like a person in a state of low-grade fear — projecting outward because they haven’t yet learned to sit with what’s moving through them inward.

That doesn’t mean you have to hold it for them. But it does mean you can stop personalising it.

And beneath all of this, especially between women, often lives something I think of as the feminine competition wound.

The Feminine Competition Wound

Women have been socialised — for generations, across cultures — to believe that success, visibility, and creative recognition exist in a fixed and limited supply. That there isn’t enough room for all of us. That another woman’s rise is somehow a subtraction from our own potential.

Historically, when there was only ever one seat at the table for a woman — one female executive, one woman on the panel, one token voice — competition between women wasn’t irrational. It was a survival mechanism and the scarcity was real. The tragedy is that the scarcity has shifted in many spaces, but the nervous system hasn’t caught up. We are still, in many ways, running on an old operating system — one that tells us another woman’s visibility is a direct threat to our own.

This conditioning runs deep and it tends to operate beneath our conscious awareness. It often doesn’t show up as overt jealousy and most people carrying this wound would never identify it as that. Instead, it reveals itself as a chronic low-level need to find the flaw. To qualify the praise. To be the one who points out what everyone else missed. To stay above someone else’s work by refusing to be moved by it.

It also shows up as the need to establish expertise at someone else’s expense. The comment that corrects you in public. The observation that positions the commenter as more nuanced, more informed, more discerning than you. The implied message: I know better. Which is another way of saying: I need to be above you to feel safe.

This is how it showed up for me, in the dynamic I was experiencing last year.

It is an open wound in the psyche of many women; and it is the result of systems that taught women to compete for scraps rather than to build tables.

AND understanding where it comes from doesn’t mean that you have to absorb its impact.

In my friendship, I could eventually see it clearly: she was navigating her own unresolved feelings about creative ambition — her own creative voice she hadn’t yet given herself permission to use. My visibility was activating something in her she didn’t know how to hold. So it came out sideways, through me, as critique.

She wasn’t evaluating my work. She was negotiating her own worth.

Her comments were never a referendum on my creativity. They were a window into her unfinished business with her own.

A Note on What You Can Actually Do With This

Understanding the psychology is one thing. Knowing what to do on a Tuesday afternoon when the comment lands and your stomach drops— well, that’s another. Here’s what has actually helped me.

Practical ground

Name the pattern, not just the incident. One critical comment is feedback. A persistent pattern of opposition is a dynamic — and dynamics require a different response than individual moments do. Before you react, zoom out. Is this a one-off, or has this happened before? The pattern is the data point, not any single comment.

Feel the sting — then locate where it lands. When a comment has that particular quality of sting, pause before you respond or ruminate. Get curious: where in your body do you feel it? What story immediately arose? Often the comments that hurt most are the ones that have found an existing doubt. That’s useful information because it shows you where your own inner critic is waiting to be activated… and it is worth working with this. I have numerous processes that I work with, to support me to work with my own shadows, somatically. If you are curious to know more, I am working on a Somatic Shadow Work program for next month/into May, as next month things are heating up and yall going to need some somatic processing tools. You can find out more about it here.

Get curious about what their response reveals. Ask: what might this be about for them? This isn’t about excusing the behaviour, it’s about detaching your self-worth from their reaction. Their discomfort with your visibility is information about them, not a verdict on you. Someone at peace with their own creative life does not need to persistently diminish yours.

Set the boundary without drama. The conversation I had with my friend wasn’t a confrontation. It was: this pattern doesn’t work for me anymore, and I need it to change. You don’t have to over-explain. You don’t have to convince. A boundary is a statement, not a negotiation. The response to your boundary will tell you everything you need to know about the relationship.

Audit who has access. Not everyone deserves a front-row seat to your creative process. You are allowed to restrict, mute, remove, or distance — on social media, in friendships, in any relationship — without owing an explanation. Protecting your creative energy is not paranoia. It is maintenance. It is professional hygiene.

Resist the urge to shrink. The most natural and insidious response to chronic low-grade criticism is to start pre-editing yourself. Posting less. Hedging more. Showing up smaller. Notice if you’re doing this — and name it for what it is: someone else’s wound successfully colonising your creative space.

Find your witnesses. Equally important to removing the people who diminish you is actively investing in the people who don’t. We need witnesses to our work — people who receive it warmly, who celebrate without qualifying, who make us feel like there is room for us. Seek those people out deliberately. They exist. They are often quieter than the critics, but they are there. Celebrate them / their work in return.

Beyond Your Comments Section

We are living through an extraordinary moment for women in creative spaces. More of us are building platforms, publishing work, charging what we’re worth, and refusing to wait for permission. That is genuinely new. Women in Australia only gained the right to work in the federal public service after marriage in 1966 — meaning many of our mothers and grandmothers were legally barred from having a career the moment they married. The structures have shifted faster than the psychology. And with anything genuinely new, there will be friction.

Some of that friction will come from the expected places — from systems and structures that weren’t designed with us in mind. But some of it — and this is the part that’s harder to talk about — it will come from each other. From women who haven’t yet healed the part of them that was taught there isn’t enough. From communities where support is conditional and subtle ranking is the undercurrent. From the reflexive need to establish hierarchy even in spaces that were supposed to be different.

Social media has amplified this in a specific way. The architecture of these platforms — the likes, the follower counts, the algorithmic reward for engagement over connection — has created a new arena for comparison and competition that previous generations of women simply didn’t have to navigate. We are all, to varying degrees, performing our lives and our work in public. And performance, by its nature, invites evaluation.

But there is a difference between evaluation and opposition. Between honest critique offered in good faith and the chronic low-grade need to be the one who finds the flaw. Between caring about quality and needing to be above someone else’s work in order to feel okay about your own.

The comments section has become, for many women, a place where unprocessed wounds go to be expressed sideways. Where the feelings that can’t be admitted — I want what she has. I’m scared I’m not enough. I don’t know if I’m allowed to take up this much space — get converted into commentary about someone else’s work.

We deserve better than that. From each other, and from ourselves.

And I felt to name this pattern, today, because naming something actually has a very specific impact — one that sais to the pattern “I see you” — and this diminishes its power over you.

The feminine competition wound only loses its power when we stop pretending it isn’t there — when we’re willing to look at the parts of ourselves that were shaped by scarcity and ask: is this still true? Or is this an old story I’m still living inside?

The most radical thing we can do for each other — and for ourselves — is to heal our relationship with our own enoughness. To root so deeply in our own creative identity that another woman’s visibility stops feeling threatening and starts feeling like proof of what’s possible. To move from competition to contribution. From scarcity to surplus.

That’s the work. And it begins with us — not with the comments section.

Build anyway.

Post anyway.

Create anyway.

And protect your energy like the most creative resource you have.

Because it is.

— Sigourney Belle