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Whose Feeling Is This? · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to this three-part series entitled Emotional Contamination.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now I realize the title could be at first hearing it could seem somewhat contentious because it's the word contamination, of course, because that implies a destructive action which has an effect upon another.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it also implies that perhaps that's intentional.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here's the truth.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think most often it's not, but of course there are times when it is the intention.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think in the general, in the general sense that we're talking about one person's behavior and their own lack of awareness and their awareness or lack of awareness about how their behavior is likely to be experienced by another person.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about people bringing down the mood.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about people who whose anger is intimidating or actually arouses anger in the other in the other person.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: And what I want to try and do in this first episode is to describe what it means when we think about feelings that we're experiencing that aren't really ours.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is important because in every relationship there is emotional transfer.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Child to parent, parent to child, infant to parent, and vice versa.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: In working relationships, friendships, marriages, partnerships, work, and a whole variety.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Friends, you know, there's a whole variety of contexts in which we can understand this, and it's happening all the time.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's not wrong.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's not wrong, it's it is something which happens.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the value of this series is about helping people to not be burdened by the emotional state of others.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And this arises from a question that I've been asking myself through it throughout my professional life, and not necessarily in every session, but quite often.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: I ask it often enough to become for it to become one of the most important questions I know.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's simply this whose feeling is this?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it sounds like an unusual question because after all, if if if I'm if I'm feeling something and if I'm experiencing something, well then it must belong to me.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm anxious, then it's mine, if I feel guilty, it's mine.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: If I leave a conversation feeling angry or ashamed or emotionally exhausted, it seems obvious that those emotions have must have originated within me.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And yet we all are aware of those situations where we reflect on a particular person and how you are often left feeling after them.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, perhaps you've experienced something similar because I think we probably all have in one way or another.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, you spend time with someone who's deeply anxious, and without noticing how it happened, you begin to feel unsettled yourself.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's as if you've you've ingested the other person's emotional state.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: You might leave a family gathering strangely irritated despite arriving in good spirits.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: You answer the telephone, feeling calm, but by the time the conversation ends, your heart is racing, or you're left with a sense of despondency or just powerlessness.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Or perhaps you've walked into a room where nobody's spoken a word, but somehow you know that something's happened.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: You can feel it.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: The room is different, it's heavier and more tense.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's as if the emotion has somehow settled into the space itself.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And most of us dismiss experiences like these.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: We tell ourselves we're imagining things, we put it down to coincidence.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe we say, This is how this person makes me feel.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's that's okay, but probably there's something else going on.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And what if human beings are constantly exchanging emotional information without saying a single word?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to introduce an idea that I've come to think of as emotional contamination.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a diagnostic term, it's a way of describing something that we've understood in psychology and psychotherapy and neuroscience for a long time.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it kind of draws together the ideas that such as emotional contagion, attachment, transference, counter-transference, projection, and the extraordinary capacity human beings have to influence one another emotionally.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now, those terms I've just used, I will explain.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: We are, whether we realize it or not, remarkably permeable creatures.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Things get into us.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we affect one another continuously, long before we speak, before we explain ourselves, before we consciously think, our nervous systems have already begun communicating.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: In many respects, this begins before we are even born.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: A baby enters the world entirely dependent upon another person's nervous system.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: An infant can't calm itself, it can't organize overwhelming emotion, it can't tell itself that everything will be alright.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, it borrows the emotional stability of its caregiver.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so when a parent gently rocks the distressed baby, when they soften their voice and slow their breathing and hold the child securely, the infant's developing brain gradually learns what safety feels like.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Over thousands of moments, the child's nervous system begins constructing an internal expectation, which goes something like when I feel distressed, someone helps me to return to safety.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the foundations of emotional development.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: And if we think about the preceding series on mentalization, we can see the origins of this, and you'll hear those in episodes one and two.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: But there's another side to this, and if emotional regulation can be shared, then so can emotional dysregulation.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: An anxious parent may unintentionally communicate anxiety, a frightened one, fear.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: An unpredictable environment may gradually teach a child that danger exists even when no immediate danger is present.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the child isn't simply observing these states, they're living them.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: And people very often forget this.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: The child is living the experience.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Children, perhaps more than anyone else, become emotional barometers for the families in which they grow.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Many parents have watched the child become distressed without understanding why.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes there's no obvious explanation, yet when we begin exploring the wider family system, another picture often emerges.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps there's unresolved conflict, there are a variety of different pressures, perhaps one parent is carrying grief that's never been spoken, chronic stress in the household.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: The child knows nothing about these things consciously, yet somehow they feel them.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you think about it, when when when an infant is unable to settle, what happens is that the caregiver will experience the child's emotional state before they think about it.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And they have the capacity to think.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: But this is called attunement.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: The parent becomes aware, but but the awareness isn't cognitive at first.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually felt.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the most remarkable discovery in psychology is that our brains are continually monitoring one another.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we we are so sensitive to facial expressions, voice tones, body posture, breathing, movement, just tiny changes.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: And much of this happens outside of conscious awareness.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: We don't decide to notice these things.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Our brains simply do.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's part of how we've evolved.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because human survival has always depended upon recognizing emotional states in other people.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: We need to know who's safe, who's frightened, and who might be dangerous.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And our nervous systems remain organized around those ancient priorities.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And because of that, emotion is rarely contained within one individual.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: It moves between us sometimes gently, sometimes powerfully.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in psychotherapy, we've long recognized another fascinating phenomenon.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's known as transference.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: The word sounds technical, but the experience isn't.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine meeting someone for the very first time.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, objectively, you know nothing about them, and yet something about them immediately reminds you of someone else.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps they remember a critical teacher, a grandparent, a controlling parent, an old partner, whoever, without intending to, your mind begins filling in the gaps.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: You respond not only to who they are, but also to who they unconsciously remind you of.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when I say unconsciously, that's really important because when when someone says this person reminds me of, that's not transference.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's a conscious connection.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Transference is unconscious.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: It is that something in us has been touched by the other person which fits or which in some way reactivates an old system.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, we rarely meet another person as a completely blank slate.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: We meet them carrying our histories, our memories, our expectations, hopes, and disappointments.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: And this past quietly accompanies us into the present.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that isn't a sign that something has gone wrong, it's part of being human.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And our minds are constantly organizing experience by comparing the present with what's happened before.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: But psychotherapy introduces another equally important idea, and it's called counter-transference.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, originally this referred to the therapist's emotional responses towards a patient.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: And for many years, those feelings were regarded almost as mistakes, something the therapist should avoid.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: But over time, something becomes apparent.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the therapist's feelings are not obstacles, they're information.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: A therapist might suddenly feel projective, guilty, hopeless, confused.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: The question gradually shifts.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of asking, why am I feeling this?
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Therapists began asking, Why am I feeling this here with this person at this moment?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that single question transformed psychotherapy because sometimes the therapist would be beginning to experience something that the patient hadn't had been living with for years.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Not because they had deliberately caused it, not because anyone intended it, but because human beings influence one another emotionally in extraordinarily subtle ways.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why therapists spend years learning to recognize their own emotional responses.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Not in order to eliminate them, but to understand them.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it's why we have supervision, because sometimes we get stuck and we get puzzled.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes what we feel tells us something important about another person's internal world.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: So this brings us back to the question we began with.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Whose feeling is this?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer because emotions often feel intensely personal, abstract, and they arise within us.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: We experience them in our bodies somatically, which means physically.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And everything tells us this is mine.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: And yet sometimes it isn't, at least not entirely.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we've become temporary carriers of another person's emotional experience.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: So think about spending time with someone who is persistently pessimistic.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Initially, you remain optimistic.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Gradually, your own thinking begins to change.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: You become less hopeful, more doubtful, not because your life has altered, but because you've been living within another person's emotional landscape.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or perhaps you know someone whose anxiety seems almost contagious.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: They imagine worst-case scenarios, they constantly seek reassurance, repeatedly anticipate disaster.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: After enough time, you notice yourself becoming anxious too.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Again, nothing objective has changed, but emotionally something has.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the reasons why healthy relationships require awareness.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because without awareness, we begin carrying the feelings that may never have belonged entirely to us.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: And this doesn't mean we become emotionally distant, quite the opposite.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Healthy relationships depend upon empathy, and that's the ability to understand another person's emotional world.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: But let's not mistake that for absorption.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because empathy allows us to stand alongside another person's suffering.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Absorption invites us to live in it, and that distinction matters enormously because if we lose sight of that boundary, we begin confusing our emotional life with somebody else's.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it then the empath becomes trapped.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: But if we think about absorption, the we we we kind of lose sight of the boundary, and we do begin confusing our emotional life with somebody else's.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Parents experience this, so do teachers, doctors, police officers, social workers, psychotherapists, everyone.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone who spends time caring for others knows this experience.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: You leave work carrying conversations that are difficult to put down.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: You continue thinking about someone long after you've left them.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: You notice that their sadness lingers inside you, sometimes their anger or their fear.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the emotions remain active even though the interaction has ended.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: Again, whose feeling is this?
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is permission to pause before automatically claiming and holding the ownership of every emotion we experience.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Not because our feelings are unreal, that feelings are always real, but because understanding where they came from may change everything.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps what we're feeling tells us something not only about ourselves, but also about the relationships within which we've been living.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Over the next two episodes, I want to explore this much more deeply.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: We'll look at how people unconsciously transfer unbearable emotions to others.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll explore why some relationships leave us constantly doubting ourselves, exhausted, or feeling used or guilty or responsible for the problems that couldn't possibly belong to us.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll consider how therapists, teachers, parents, and professionals learn how to recognize these processes without becoming overwhelmed by them because there is hope.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Something changes the moment we ask whose feeling is this?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: We create space, space to think, space to reflect.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: But we'll talk about this in more detail.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: Before I finish, I was just reminded as I was as I was recording this of somebody who recently described to me, and this is what this is not in the context of my work, but somebody who recently described to me things that they were feeling.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: And what struck me was they were talking about feeling, they weren't talking about thinking.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And actually it's okay to do both at the same time, or very close together.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: But somehow this I am feeling became a kind of so therefore it must be true, and you have to make it better.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because I am feeling this, and and and it was very apparent, and the the quality as they were describing this the quality of their behavior was noticeably different, and I can remember feeling like I was holding a weight, and I said, Yeah, you're feeling those things, and you're also able to think, and you're feeling them, and I can't fix them, but yeah, you are feeling them in that I was I could see I was at risk of feeling responsible but also acting upon that, and I saw it and didn't do it.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't being aggressive, I was simply stating what's yours is yours, it's not mine, because I'm not feeling that way, and I'm not gonna feel it for you.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I wasn't as explicit as that, but there are times when things aren't quite so obvious.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: There are sometimes where things that are more subtle, and you don't ask yourself who does this belong to.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: We'll look more at this.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry about the unsubtle background noise.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: We'll look more at this in the in the next couple of episodes.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.