Crazy-Making

Crazy-Making: Yesterday I wrote just a bit about the emotional cost of being around a "difficult" mother. I referred to psychological phenomena called "projection," and "projective identification" (*see the bottom of this post for definitions*). Although these processes are not well understood, it is widely known that certain individuals with mental/emotional problems sometimes express these problems by way of non-conscious interpersonal processes that can influence the emotions, and even the behavior, of others. Expressed in non-technical terms, the problem is that there are some people whose presence, behavior, and emotional states simply make others highly uncomfortable.

If your mother is such a person, you might wish to say to her: I love you, but I can't tolerate being around you. You are making me crazy.

A couple of examples from my own life with my "difficult" elderly mother (and these are not recently emerging phenomena): If I tell my mother I am leaving on a business trip (or any kind of trip), she immediately displays great anxiety and unhappiness, and asks me where I am going. And then, regardless of my reply (it might be that I am just going somewhere close by, or it might be somewhere very far away) she responds as if I have said something shocking and unacceptable. I might say: "I am going to St. Louis." She will inevitably reply: "St. LOUIS???" with a rising tone on the final word. This induces all kinds of negative emotions in me... I feel the need to apologize, explain, reassure her... and I also feel irritation, because her response is so unreasonable, and because it induces all these unpleasant emotions in me.

Another example: when I spend time with my mother, she typically tells me stories about how she has been mistreated by others. Many of these stories are obvious distortions, if not outright paranoid delusions, about people who in fact have been very patient and kind to her. She usually asks me what I think about the situation she has described, and/or what she should do in response to the imagined outrage. This places me in an impossible, and uncomfortable, dilemma. If I urge her not to retaliate against the neighbor (or doctor, or banker, or whoever it might be), then she becomes very angry with me. If I respond as if I believe the truth of her accusations, I feel as if I have entered some kind of twilight zone of insanity.

And one of the worst aspects of this type of mental functioning is that a person can live her whole (unhappy) life with these patterns, without being sufficiently impaired that anyone can effectively intervene. She certainly will not believe that she needs any sort of psychological or psychiatric "help"! Others will avoid her, and she will never understand why...

In a law review article about the Americans with Disability Act (ADA), Elizabeth Emens writes about the barriers to integrating people with mental illness into workplace settings. Here's an excerpt:

"People often discriminate against those with mental illness... because of how those with mental illness make them feel, in ways that are intimately bound up with how people with mental illness themselves feel. Mental illness tends to produce what I call "hedonic costs"-an increase in negative emotions or a loss of positive emotions-in people with mental illness. And the hedonic costs of an individual's mental illness may create hedonic costs for nearby others...

Hedonic costs based on "emotional contagion" form a peculiarly sympathetic and potent basis for discrimination. Emotional contagion is the process by which we absorb the emotions of nearby others through largely unconscious mechanisms. Research on emotional contagion suggests that people with mental illness are likely to cause others to share their negative emotions. For example, spending time around a person with depression-even having a short conversation-typically causes others to feel greater sadness and hostility. And studies indicate that liking someone makes the liker more susceptible to absorbing the other person's emotions. Thus, someone who bears no animus towards people with mental illness, and perhaps cares about or likes certain individuals with mental illness, may for this reason feel an impulse to avoid coworkers and others with mental illness." [emphasis added]

So there are good reasons why it can be difficult to work with people who have mental illness... And it is even more difficult if you like, or love, a person with psychiatric problems.

*Here are a couple of pretty good explanations of "projection" and "projective identification," from the Cross Creek Counseling website:

"Projection:

"Attributing one's thoughts or impulses to another person. In common use, this is limited to unacceptable or undesirable impulses. Examples: (1) a man, unable to accept that he has competitive or hostile feelings about an acquaintance, says, “He doesn’t like me.” (2) a woman, denying to herself that she has sexual feelings about a co-worker, accuses him, without basis, of flirt and described him as a “wolf.”

"This defense mechanism is commonly over utilized by the paranoid.

"A broader definition of projection includes certain operations that allow for empathy and understanding of others. Recognition that another person is lonely or sad may be based not upon having seen other examples of loneliness or sadness and learning the outward manifestations but upon having experienced the feelings and recognizing automatically that another person’s situation would evoke them.

"Projective Identification:

"As in projection, the individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by falsely attributing to another his or her own unacceptable feelings, impulses, or thoughts. Unlike simple projection, the individual does not fully disavow what is projected. Instead, the individual remains aware of his or her own affects or impulses but mis-attributes them as justifiable reactions to the other person. Not infrequently, the individual induces the very feelings in others that were first mistakenly believed to be there, making it difficult to clarify who did what to whom first."

And here's an excerpt from a website ("What Makes Narcissists Tick") that explains, in very down-to-earth terms, how this process of projective identification typically operates when one partner in a relationship is pathologically narcissistic:

"Now and then, you're bound to object to the degrading way the narcissist treats you. He or she will throw a fit at you for objecting, and there will be an argument.

Or... just relate to the narcissist as his or her equal; just behave as though you deserve consideration in some matter. Then look out. Uproar...

A narcissist just has to take a crap on someone every so often to feel better to about him- or her-self.

He knows just how to pick a fight. And when he wants to pick a fight, there's no avoiding it, because... he will keep at it until he gets what he wants. He will work you into some kind of corner, demand something impossible of you there, and then throw a fit when you can't do it.

The narcissist won't even let you walk away. She will follow you telling you how intolerable you are just for being the way you are, saying that she doesn't have to put up with that. If even that doesn't get a rise out of you, when she has you in a corner, she'll assault you, forcing you down on your back and climbing on top of you, saying, "I'm stronger than you." ...

During this fit, the raging narcissist projects his or her anger off onto you and accuses you of being the one who is "flying into one of your rages." ... That's what narcissists do.

When narcissists pull this stunt, they aren't using you only as a dumping ground for their toxic emotions: they are also doing their best to make you act out their fantasy that you are the raging maniac here. In other words, they are trying to enrage you. Get it?

That trick is called "projective identification." ... Indeed, when you're trying to pacify a raging maniac, and she heaps insult on injury by mocking you with the accusation that you are the one "who got mad," the one who's "flying into one of your rages," normal people do get angry.

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