A Little Psychoeducation

I was talking recently with a friend about all of the personal growth channels that have taken over the internet. Amidst solid content, you have the thoughts of people who aren’t credentialed and the meaning of some psychological terms are getting pretty muddied.

That conversation got me thinking about therapeutic concepts it might be handy to clarify. So, here are some useful definitions of five widely-used terms for your unfolding knowledge.

(By the way, if you’re looking to learn more about the terms narcissism or gaslighting, you can check out where I have already written about them.) 

Projection:

That kid’s playground retort may have been truer than we may think: I know you are, but what am I! Projection is a defense mechanism by which our own intolerable thoughts, impulses and feelings are ascribed to other people so that we can deny they are part of us. 

People often don’t know they are doing this: They see something out in the world that they resonate with but it makes them uncomfortable because it doesn’t fit their self-image, so they make it true of someone else. This can get dangerous when people then demonize the person who represents their own worst shadow side.

One of my clients received a letter from his brother which was full of angry accusations. My client didn’t think this letter described him very well but he wasn’t sure why his brother would have written it otherwise. It closed, “You are a sad, lonely, bitter man — don’t ever contact me again.” I asked my client if he felt those epithets were true of him. He said no, he has problems but those aren’t among them. He then realized that was his brother describing himself via projection, and that similarly much of the rest of the letter was true of his brother – but not of him.

Empathy:

Empathy is often confused with its close cousins, sympathy and pity. Sympathy means feeling badly for someone, as when you might tell someone grieving that you are sorry for their loss. Pity is another form of feeling sorry for someone, although it often has a condescending edge that masks the opinion that someone has brought on their own misery.

If sympathy means feeling for someone, empathy means feeling with someone. You literally can relate, having gone through something similar in your life, so that you have a physiological understanding of their experience.

In my opinion, empathy is taught or modeled by one’s primary caregivers. You watch how they handle a situation. Maybe your mother tried to show you what another little kid was experiencing, (“If someone took all your toys, how would you feel?”) I think it comes very early, just as narcissistic training comes early when a caregiver praises a child only for outward things, such as accomplishments. In fact, a lack of ability to feel empathy is the number one trait associated with narcissism, and a fruitful area for recovering narcissists to work on so they are not underdeveloped in this area.

PTSD

PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, is another of those terms that is thrown around lightly these days. “Man, I have PTSD from that last concert I went to…because I was shoved in the corner and that might happen this time.”

That is not PTSD, that is a bad memory. True PTSD is what results for those who have been exposed to actual threats such as injury, sexual violence, witnessing someone else’s death, or watching domestic violence. PTSD can generate repeated, intrusive thoughts about what happened, leading to nightmares and/or the desire to dissociate from reality, amongst other symptoms.

It’s the difference between having watched 9/11 unfold on TV — a powerful, painful experience for many of us (“I’ll never forget where I was that day”) where we may have been in shock for a few days — and having being in one of the towers, either as an office worker who lost colleagues or a firefighter who had to go in and recover pieces of human bone. 

Codependence

Codependence is another term that is really being thrown around these days. Everybody thinks they’re codependent when they are really just describing being in a relationship with some enmeshed qualities that haven’t been sorted out yet.

A true codependent relationship is where one person feels their life would not have meaning should something happen to the other person. Your whole life becomes about their next move, their needs, their concerns, their daily activities and their movements, so that you stop worrying about yourself entirely.

I know two sisters who are both tasked with taking care of their elderly father. The non-codependent one still participates actively: she picks up her father’s prescriptions, gets his groceries, moves him from the bed to the chair… but she has boundaries. The other daughter lives, breathes, and sleeps her father — she is so consumed with him that she is basically incapacitated. That is codependence.

Trigger

To those born in Generation Z (1997-2012), everything seems to be a trigger. Don’t get me wrong, I am not issuing a blanket statement criticizing these individuals. To some degree, they are more psychologically aware than previous generations, and many of them are in therapy. But the way they use the term trigger to describe any kind of emotion or reaction is not useful.

Returning to PTSD, the classic trigger is where a disturbance in the sky could send a veteran of the Vietnam War diving under the table believing that he was back on the battlefield. A trigger evokes a terrible traumatic memory where unspeakable things occurred. 

Someone who is triggered, therefore, is not mildly peeved but can get violently angry or it can lead them into a dissociated state that can last for multiple days. The question to ask someone who is triggered is: “What’s going with you?” Phrased as gently as you can.

Conclusion

I hope I have provided a little psychoeducation here. My goal has to been to deepen our understanding so we can have more compassion for others who are really going through something.

If you would like more terms like this, let me know in the comments!