When as a MFT trainee I first started seeing clients I had normal bouts of self-doubt and fear that I wasn’t at all ready to be seeing them yet. Usually after a few minutes into the session I would remind myself just to be there with the client and listen and respond authentically and that all would be well and that was usually enough to make my self-doubts go away. However there was one client that I was seeing that whenever I would sit with him/her no amount of self-soothing or self-talk could make my self-doubt go away. And strangely, even if I had been feeling confident, competent or otherwise effective, as soon as he/she would walk into my office my positive feelings would be replaced with ones like, “You will never amount to anything” or “You are hopeless and you should just stop this now.” I tried to push these thoughts away and just be with the client—only these thoughts and feelings wouldn’t budge. By the time the session would end I would feel like a complete and total failure and an absolute fraud.
At the time I was lucky to have a WONDERFUL supervisor whom, upon hearing how I felt when in session with this client, introduced me to the concept of Projective Identitification. She explained to me that the client was unconsciously communicating to me about their subjective state via how I felt about myself in this client’s presence, i.e. the person was projecting their inner state onto me. The client said with his/her words that he/she was doing okay and all was well but via their unconscious they were communicating to me how he/she really felt about him/herself. As soon as I heard my supervisor’s interpretation it made sense to me. Once armed with this insight I was able to understand the subjective states as transference and what had once felt intolerable now felt like valuable clinical information. However, if I had not had the supervision I might not been able to differentiate my feelings from what was in fact a classic Projective Identification as this is a psychological state that can be difficult to differentiate without a skilled someone on the sidelines.
All of the above is just my attempt to introduce you to the concept, in case this is an idea you are not yet familiar with( and I am sure that many of you are and/or have at least experienced this dynamic in your life with other humans). So when I got back from my trip to Portland I was feeling extremely numb. I felt that I wasn’t able to love. I couldn’t feel my heart. I felt totally disconnected from myself. I had no idea how I was feeling and my thoughts felt strangely distant. My inner life felt foggy and far away and when I tried to access it I felt like I was trying to make out the words and melodies to a song playing on a far away radio. It took me almost four full days for me to figure out that what I was feeling was in fact a Projective Identification. It is not me who is numb and who can’t love or feel my heart or can’t access my thoughts or feelings. I am, for all of my many faults, a person who loves, feels, and is totally connected with my inner life. As soon as I recognized that I was in the midst of a P.I., and that I was feeling the feelings of another who shared my week long journey, I felt the way you do when you are dreaming and you know you are and you want to wake yourself up from it, but you can’t. Don’t get me wrong, knowing it is a Projective Identification makes the pain of being numb less painful—yet I don’t feel fully out of it.
Igor is away on vacation this week and so I don’t have him to help me process all the feelings I had during the trip nor to help me free myself from the Projective Identification that I presently find myself in. It helps to write about it. It helps to have to use my mind and words and notice how I feel as I write them, to do so feels a bit like how when your leg goes numb and you get up and try to shake out the numbness and tingling. Strangely exercise also has helped. Last night was the first time since I broke my toe that I was able to run and feeling my body and my breath and feeling myself move through space also seemed to bring me back to myself a bit. All that said, I still feel a little numb and a little distant and not 100% myself.
The good news is, that even though I have not woken from the Sleeping Beauty sleep of Projective Identification, I have been dreaming. I have been dreaming lovely dreams. Two nights ago I dreamt of being at a gorgeous Italian villa that belonged to a dear friend and I was very happy to be there. Last night I dreamt of an extremely positive Animus figure (i.e. a super hot guy who knew my soul) and we were very much in love. My Prince Charming was an artist who was working at Neiman Marcus doing art installations on all three levels of the store. All was well until we met my mother for lunch and then He left me. I chased after him in the parking lot and tried to get him back to me. I got him to come back into the store. When we went back into the store we saw this kind of sculptural office/playpen set up in which these two parents had created as a way to keep their kids close by as they worked. My Prince saw this and was upset that they had only one way to move and so he was going to create a swing (shaped like a tube) that would allow for more freedom of movement. Both seem like surprisingly positive dreams considering how I am feeling.
Neiman’s, I think, is symbolic of a commercial palace—the kind of palace that I can, on occasion, be imprisoned by. Also, as dreams love word play, it is interesting to note that Erich Neumann was a writer who wrote the definitive work on the Great Mother archeptype. My positive animus is played by a Post-modern Prince Charming( an artist/ a creative/ a guy who works with ideas as the source of his creation). I believe this Prince has been sent by my psyche to wake me from the sleep that the dark witch(played by my mother in the dream). Only the dark witch separates me from the Prince in my dream—it is when I try to get nurturing from the feminine (go to lunch with her) that I lose the relationship with my Animus.
I leave the palace (the mother) and go to the parking lot (where drive is stored) and we come back together through his seeing children merged to their parents. The dream concludes with the Animus attempting to create more movement for the children. My Animus, I believe, is telling me that the way to reconnect with my Self and to separate from the dark mother is through creativity. I think he is telling me that there is a way to be connected to family without being imprisoned by them. I wish that he would have just kissed me and woken me from this Projective Identification I find myself in and besides a kiss is much less work, and he was really hot.
