Emotional Vampires and Distance

This was a post in response to a request for opinion on two Youtube clips:

I want to be present (Moojiji)

Being Present in Relationships (Eckhart Tolle)

It was part of a virtual conversation at Global Mindshift (http://www.global-mindshift.org).

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An analogy I found helpful in dealing with relatives, close friends and acquaintances was that of the emotional vampire drawn from a book of the same name by Albert Bernstein and from other sources. Essentially, these are folk who validate themselves through responses from other people and so they try to elicit the desired behaviors by drawing those people into their own dramas. It can be draining on someone who cares about the actor but is unable to maintain healthy boundaries.

I deal a lot with personality disorders - DSM IV Axis II diagnoses (http://tinyurl.com/dj4pua) - and addiction. This gives me more practice with such things than the average Joe, but it also means that I have to be better at the skills or risk providing lower quality care to those patients. Healthcare provider burnout is only one of the serious risks associated with this situation and many of my coworkers have expressed amazement at my "patience" and ability to retain my equanimity.

(As with many, I also run into this flavor of behavior in my personal life. Although it is less frequent, I find it actually more challenging to deal with! Something about the clinical setting affecting my mindset - I'm working on it!)

There are defenses against this kind of thing. A common one is to close off the emotional leaks by cutting the person out of one's life. In this scenario, a lover might break up with an emotionally needy, draining person with the full support of his or her friends and family because the vampire is considered crazy or insane, unbelievably selfish and demanding. This is an oft-chosen solution that is sad, unskilled and unnecessary.

In the videos, we find the key that allows me to deal with my patients: space. I one day had the epiphany that I suffered from their neediness because I was running myself ragged trying to satisfy it. I internalized their need as a personal need to satisfy. Over time, I identified with their issues, losing perspective. My first reaction, of course, was to cut them off in self-defense, using phrases like tough love to justify my withdrawal. Except that it didn't feel like love anymore - it felt like withdrawal.

When I began centering myself in the moment, I suddenly found the problem disappeared. I could still love the people and be willing to help them for as long as it took, but I was no longer feeling drained! I felt instead as though I were a conduit to a vast, bottomless ocean of energy and that I could pipe it through to them as fast as they could suck it up. (I don't know why, but that analogy popped into my mind intuitively and it has stayed there.)

More objectively, I realized that the reason I had felt drained was because I had identified with their stories and run my own internal drama in sympathy. I had drained myself by playing out a storyline of how this endless neediness would go on and on forever, thus overwhelming myself with a fantasy of an eternal future of misery. When I just dealt with this moment as it was without building my own drama extending into the forever, it became trivial to retain my balance.

I had been carrying the emotional baggage of the last interaction into the current one and then spent the incident worrying about how much heavier it would be next time. When I just focused on this conversation without envisioning it as an extension of the last one, I was suddenly dealing with just the one act rather than the whole play. I went from being overburdened in these situations to feeling light as a feather and suddenly I can work with these folks all day long with absolutely no stress.

D