It’s strange how quickly the people we love can turn into monsters in our minds—especially when we’re waiting, needing, or not getting what we long for.

One moment, someone feels warm and safe. The next, they seem cold, distant, withholding. And often, this shift doesn’t come from anything they’ve done—it comes from inside us, from some subtle internal slide into a state where vulnerability feels unbearable.

When we’re in that space—especially if we’re alone with it, without context or grounding—the mind begins to protect itself in the only way it knows how. It casts the other person in a new role: not just absent, but punishing. Not just unavailable, but rejecting. Sometimes, even superior in their withholding.

This sadistic internal figure—the one who seems to enjoy our suffering or who feels indifferent to it—isn’t actually the other person. It’s a distorted representation that forms when our longing scrapes too close to old wounds. Often, these are childhood experiences where waiting didn’t feel safe, where needing something and not getting it felt like emotional annihilation or traumatically frustrating.

In those early moments, our minds learned to survive by turning the pain outward: “They don’t care.” “They’re being mean.” “They enjoy making me wait.” These defenses, as harsh as they sound, were ways of preserving dignity—easier to believe someone is cruel than to face the raw grief of being left alone with a need that won’t be met. This tendency is also a natural byproduct of the fact that our inner feelings color our view of our relationships and our fantasies are embedded within them.

As adults, long after those original moments have passed, the templates remain. They don’t show up all the time. But when something in our present brushes against that old pain—an unanswered text, a therapist’s unavailability, a friend’s distracted tone—our minds can fall back into that earlier logic. The present person disappears, and the sadistic figure takes their place.

One of the hardest things about emotional growth is recognizing when our reactions are rooted not just in what’s happening now, but in what happened then. The longing is real. The pain is real. But the story we tell ourselves about the other person in those moments may be a relic of the past or a memory of our projections, not a truth.

Therapy, when it’s safe and attuned, helps us see this. It gives us space to say, “Right now, you feel cruel to me, even if I know you’re not.” It allows the parts of us that still expect punishment or cruelty to find a different ending. Not instantly, and not always easily—but slowly, compassionately.

What helps is remembering: feeling tortured by a wait or an unmet longing isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s a sign that something old is being reawakened. And if we can stay with it, we may come to see the real person again—not the imagined persecutor, but the human being who cares, who’s just caught in the limitations of time or energy or circumstance.

There is dignity in allowing ourselves to question our projections. To say, “This might be mine.” And there is healing in doing so without shame, knowing that this is how the psyche protects itself until it feels safe enough not to.

So the next time someone seems to turn dark in your mind, in a moment of frustration or pain, try to pause. Breathe. Ask: Is this really them—or is a younger part of me trying to make sense of pain in the only way it once knew how?

That question might be the beginning of coming back to yourself—and to the real relationship that exists with an other who may just be trying to juggle their own needs but actually cares about us and wants to respond.