This article is an elaboration on this tweet:
Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation and whatever old emotional meanings are getting activated by the current situation. Like dreaming you’re at your high school but it’s also on a boat somehow.
What makes this metaphor really powerful is that, as in dreams, somehow the weirdness of this mashup goes unnoticed until you wake up (and only then if you think about it). And then even though youâve noticed while awake how weird dreams are, youâre just as fooled by the next dream, until you wake up.
This helps explain the vivid reality of peoplesâ experiences. The emotional brain is experiencing something totally realâjust as your high school is real. The part of you thatâs taking in reality is experiencing something totally realâjust as boats are real. But, unless you had a really avant-garde education, there is no real âmy high school, except on a boatâ.
So people experience these mashups in relationships as well, emotionally experiencing their friends & partners as if theyâre a parent, teacher, sibling, or bully from childhood, or an earlier friend or partner. Or someone is an adult but when they talk with their parents, they readily overlay their experience of their parents from childhood, who had absolute authority over them. To be clear, it can be particularly strong & weird with trauma but as far as I can tell this is how meaning-making works in general. It’s just sometimes the mapping is a good fit and other times it’s really weird.
And, as with dreams, no matter how weird it gets, we usually don’t notice when it’s happening to us.
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