"painting your insides onto someone else's canvas" is such a powerful description - and puts just the right words around this enigmatic experience. It's tricky to tease out what is "just contagion" vs what could be projective identification...using your beautiful metaphor of painting on our inside canvases, I often realize I have a copy of someone's insides inside me... but it's hard to know if that person put it there (a violation?), I picked up myself (perhaps a subconscious choice) or it just kinda got replicated from two bodies/energies being in contact (humanity happening). I just loved the artful language in this article and esp the practices for protecting against performing or receiving these "dark arts" <3
Kath, thank you for taking the time to comment! Your inquiry around where this comes from is brilliant and complex. If memory serves, way back in 2020 in/after the Empath Masterclass, you brought up a similar inquiry, which blew my mind since I hadn't really considered the lock-and-key aspect of being an empath and "courting" this kind of regular or extreme contagion with people. This is just me reflecting out loud, but my sense is that we might court the "garden variety" emotional contagion more, and the projective identification variety could occur not just because the person employs it as a defense, but because empaths have had a lifetime of training on being a blank canvas for projections. I think that parenting and caregiving for parents/others can also create the kind of intimacy that transgresses boundaries and makes it hard to paint our own canvas. So all three of the avenues you mention are possible. I wonder, too: The inquiry itself might be really useful, and "mapping" out the difference between them, as in: Do they register differently? Do they last different lengths of time? Do they feel equally disruptive? Big love to you.
"painting your insides onto someone else's canvas" is such a powerful description - and puts just the right words around this enigmatic experience. It's tricky to tease out what is "just contagion" vs what could be projective identification...using your beautiful metaphor of painting on our inside canvases, I often realize I have a copy of someone's insides inside me... but it's hard to know if that person put it there (a violation?), I picked up myself (perhaps a subconscious choice) or it just kinda got replicated from two bodies/energies being in contact (humanity happening). I just loved the artful language in this article and esp the practices for protecting against performing or receiving these "dark arts" <3
Kath, thank you for taking the time to comment! Your inquiry around where this comes from is brilliant and complex. If memory serves, way back in 2020 in/after the Empath Masterclass, you brought up a similar inquiry, which blew my mind since I hadn't really considered the lock-and-key aspect of being an empath and "courting" this kind of regular or extreme contagion with people. This is just me reflecting out loud, but my sense is that we might court the "garden variety" emotional contagion more, and the projective identification variety could occur not just because the person employs it as a defense, but because empaths have had a lifetime of training on being a blank canvas for projections. I think that parenting and caregiving for parents/others can also create the kind of intimacy that transgresses boundaries and makes it hard to paint our own canvas. So all three of the avenues you mention are possible. I wonder, too: The inquiry itself might be really useful, and "mapping" out the difference between them, as in: Do they register differently? Do they last different lengths of time? Do they feel equally disruptive? Big love to you.