Returning now to the day of the argument, we can see that Jesse launches into attributing many of his own characteristics to Bea, saying that she is full of herself, that she dwells on grievances, that she yells, that she doesn’t care about him. This behavior in abusers is sometimes mistakenly referred to as projection, a psychological process through which people attribute their own fears or flaws to those around them. But as we saw in Chapter 3, the process through which an abuser turns reality on its head is not quite the same as projection. Jesse perceives Bea to be yelling because one of his core values is that she’s not supposed to get angry at him, no matter what he does. He thinks she doesn’t care about him because in his mind she can’t care about him unless she cares only about him, and not at all about herself or other people. He thinks she is full of herself because she sometimes gets excited about her own goals or activities, when he believes she should be most excited about what he’s doing. He thinks she dwells on her grievances because she sometimes attempts to hold him accountable rather than letting him stick her with cleaning up his messes—literally and figuratively.