TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the idea of feeling other people’s feelings. I learned some time along the way in my adult life that I had a real capacity to feel other people’s feelings. Sometimes I had a capacity most strongly to feel the feelings that other people were denying in their own selves. So basically, I was feeling the feelings that they were not allowing themselves to feel.
I also came to realize over time, especially when I was a therapist, where I really thought about this a lot. And certainly, in the well, now it’s 11 years since I stopped being a therapist, that there are quite a lot of people in life who actually like having other people feeling their feelings for them. That certainly happened to me a lot in my childhood. That was a large part of my relationship with my parents, that my parents projected their feelings unto me, and I was the recipient of their projections. In a way, that was my role in a lot of ways in the family. I felt their sadness, I felt their sorrow, I felt their guilt. That’s a big one. I’ve seen in my life a lot of times people can do really bad things, sometimes even bad things to me, and my reaction is to feel guilty. I felt guilty a lot in my childhood in relation to my parents. When I later studied it, I realized, wait a second, they were violating me. They were guilty, and yet I was feeling it. It’s a very curious thing.
Later, many years later, I learned that there was even a word for this. It was called projective identification. There is one person who does the projecting. They have their all unconscious split off buried feelings, and they project them onto someone else. The other person becomes a screen, like they become the movie projector, and the other person becomes the screen, the blank screen. And that other person feels the feelings, or maybe doesn’t feel the feelings. Well, I know some people who reject other people’s projections. More and more, I do that. I would say I reject people’s projections. I don’t want to feel that. But sometimes it’s like this is all unconscious, and I’m not good enough or strong enough to reject their projections for all sorts of different reasons. And when I accept their projections and I become the screen and I feel their feelings, I participate in that, and I become the person who experiences the different defense mechanism of projective identification.
As a therapist, it was a very, very useful thing for me to observe in myself because often it happened so, like, every day basically. It became a big part of my job, which was to step out of myself and look at myself and say, “What am I feeling? Why am I feeling this thing that I wasn’t feeling 20 minutes ago before this therapy session began?” And realize, oh, I’m feeling their feelings. I am engaging in projective identification, and it was very, very useful.
I saw people who, to give an example, this is no actual therapy client, but for example, it might have been someone who comes in who says, “I don’t know what to talk about. I feel fine. I don’t even know why I’m here in therapy.” Talking about their life, they feel very neutral, let’s say, and I am feeling despair inside of myself. And I’m like, I wasn’t feeling despair before they came in. Why? Where’s all this despair coming from? Then I realized, ah, I am picking up all their projected despair or their anger. Or I remember working with people who had severe eating disorders, let’s say severe anorexia sometimes, and I would feel desperately hungry. And it was like, wait a second, I just had lunch before this session, and now I’m feeling famishingly hungry. And they say they’re not hungry even though they’re 30 pounds underweight. It’s like, yeah, I’m feeling their feelings.
Why would I do that? Why would anybody do that? Why would anybody feel someone else’s feelings? Well, one could sort of say in a surface way, “Oh, Daniel, you just have empathy.” People who feel each other’s feelings just maybe have a heightened sense of empathy. And I think in a way it’s true. In a way, I was especially, the more I’ve healed, the more I love myself, the more I care about other people, the more I do have a sense of empathy for others. And therefore, I’m more naturally able to and even desirous of just feeling their feelings. It’s a good way to connect with people, to know what they feel.
But I think in a lot of ways, for a lot of people that I’ve observed, not just myself, but I think some people even really much more extreme than me can feel people’s feelings when it goes way beyond empathy. And I think I used to be more this way. And I think what it really is, is it goes right back to my childhood where feeling my parents’ feelings was a basic survival technique for me. It was a survival strategy, a survival tactic. I denied my own feelings and felt their feelings because that’s what they wanted me to do. That’s why they had me. I felt their feelings basically so that they would love me.
They were scared of their feelings. Their feelings were blocked. If they had felt their feelings, they would have looked back at the violations that happened to them in their childhood, all the different ways in which their parents rejected them. My parents were rejected terribly by their parents, worse than they even rejected me. And so what they did is they violated me in different ways. They acted out what had been done to them. I wasn’t allowed to feel my feelings, and instead, my job was to empathize with them, to feel their feelings. And by siding with them against myself, it almost in a way from their perspective undid what had happened to them.
So basically, it allowed them to not have to feel bad about the traumas that they had experienced. It allowed them to feel empowered in their relationship with me because back when they had been traumatized, they were not empowered. Their parents were empowered; they were disempowered. So they were able to flip the script. They now became empowered. I had to side with them. I felt their feelings. I felt whatever it is that their anger and their sadness. I sided with them, and therefore I had an acceptable role in my family system. And I didn’t feel my feelings. I put my feelings second, or I put my feelings third or fourth. Or I think often from the perspective of my parents, from these violating sides of my parents, I pushed my feelings down so much that I didn’t really even have feelings of my own. I didn’t really even have much of a self. Often, I wasn’t allowed to have much of a self. That wasn’t my job. I wasn’t being raised. I hadn’t been created to have a real connected self of my own. I was raised to be a recipient for their feelings, for their violations, for their unresolved needs. My job was to love them. They could play things out through me.
And so a lot of my character developed to feel other people’s feelings as a survival strategy to get loved by them, to be loved by people who didn’t really love me and should have. And in a strange, sad way, as I grew up, as dysfunctional as that outlook on life was for me, there were always people who wanted to be close to me because I would serve that purpose. They could be the empowered one. I would feel their feelings. They could do whatever they want, and I would side with them. They could also have the safety of being able to play their feelings out with me. Feeling feelings, especially negative feelings, scary feelings, it’s difficult, it’s hard. How much easier to have someone else who is playing out your feelings, and you can sort of watch the feelings be played out with them, even dislike them for it, put them down for it, hate them for it. Because a lot of times I’ve noticed the feelings that I felt for people, hmm, they didn’t like me more for it. They maybe needed me more. They were willing to be close to me, but they well didn’t respect me more for it.
And so it’s a pattern that I still have to, of some degree. And I think every human who has been violated to any degree and hasn’t worked out all their historical traumas is going to have some.
Degree of feeling others’ feelings, especially one’s parents’ unresolved feelings, but it’s not something that I ultimately want. Except insofar as I, prima, if I have myself back, then I still want to be able to feel others’ feelings as long as it’s not disempowering me in any way.
So I guess what I’m saying is the more that I heal my own historical traumas, the more that I get a self, the more that I develop a real true self, the more that I get rid of being someone who I’m not. Getting rid of those parts that got stuck into me because of my violations, the more I have real true connection with authentic self-loving Daniel. The more I have real empathy for people, and I don’t accept the feelings that they project onto me.
Because I’ve noticed that as I’ve gotten healthier, sometimes in relationship with people who are less healthy, I can say, “No, no, that’s not my feeling that they’re putting onto me.” And I can have different ways of putting boundaries up that don’t accept their projected feelings.
I see less healthy people often don’t like it. Basically, their attitude is, “What right do you have to set a boundary with me? What right do you have to not accept my violation?” People who very unconsciously do a lot of projection, who have a lot of unresolved trauma inside of themselves, have a lot of entitlement to feel that, to do that, to project onto others, to manipulate. A lot of times they don’t like having boundaries set.
That’s a big part of why I couldn’t remain close in relationship to my parents, because they felt they owned me. They felt that they had a right to do all that to me. And the more I set boundaries with them, the less they liked me. The less actually I fit any role in their life. It was like that was something they didn’t like. They didn’t like this new person who had a self.
And I’ve seen that more and more in my life, which has been a real gift in my life. Ironically, that by getting rid of people, by setting boundaries with people who would only violate me, who only wanted me to feel their unconscious unresolved feelings, they wanted to take advantage of my empathy. Basically, the more I’ve set boundaries with them, the more that they don’t like me, rage at me, and then kind of drop away, get rid of me, reject me even more.
And even though while at first it can seem like that rejection hurts, underneath it, it’s like, you know, better to have a life where I am rejected by people who didn’t like me anyways, who didn’t really care about the true me. And instead, what’s left is I can be around people who are actually more respectful, more loving, more caring, true friends, healthier people.
And now when I have empathy for them, when I can feel their feelings, they can actually simultaneously be feeling these feelings. And when I feel these feelings, I can know how they feel, and it can actually give me a chance to be more supportive in a healthy way. And then they can do the same for me.