The Switch

Are the negative emotions you are experiencing yours — or someone else’s?

I worked with a client — a well-known influencer on Instagram — whose whole brand was built on looking confident and “winning” in terms of material success. The looks, the car, the mansions, the private jet, the relationships. But when it came to dating in real life, it was like he became a different person: a nervous wreck. As soon as he felt deep feelings for someone he collapsed into anxiety. He became needy and desperate — and was embarrassed about how he felt.

It wasn’t just dating. He was full of insecurity about other parts of his life, too. On camera, he was the most confident person you could meet with one of those A-list lifestyles but off camera he was often miserable and he felt like a fraud. No one in his life knew this was going on in his interior world — certainly not his followers and not even his close friends, and why would they? When friends asked him how he was, he just said that standard answer “fine” or “great”.

First: Where you are is OK

He had spent a lot of effort trying to appear confident. He didn’t want to look needy and desperate — who does — he felt his career couldn’t handle it. But in private he knew it was time to sort it out.

Through this work, I’ve met a lot of genuinely confident people who also have a really insecure side. It makes sense, as I teach insecurity is the “weightlift” for confidence. The problem happens when people battle their insecurity or get ashamed of it — when it’s actually our friend. This insecurity is also a detox — see my previous article Anger detox — and a sign that we’re coming out of our comfort zone and evolving. We want to meet it with unconditional self-acceptance which is key to finding emotional freedom. Then we are free.

And so he embraced and faced his feelings, leaving him empowered. He had never felt more consistently confident. And then I shared with him what I call the switch — when you confuse someone else’s thoughts and feelings with your own, something he hadn’t thought of before.

The Switch: When the storm isn’t your storm

When you are emotional, and also intuitive, it’s easy to tune in to someone else thoughts and feelings — someone you have a connection with. This response happens so quickly that you often don’t realise you’ve done this, instead you find yourself experiencing a mood and corresponding thoughts, and wondering why.

Imagine you feel low about a relationship and you think you feel bad because you’ve been rejected. As your mood dips, you tune into a lower frequency channel and the thoughts flood in. Thoughts like “they are just happy, and you are loser” or “what a loser for bothering with them” or “they are just out to get you”. In truth, nothing has happened. But the mind chatter starts, and before long you are in a complex story. It’s fictional — but it doesn’t feel that way. This happens whatever the negative scenario; the content isn’t the relevant part — it’s what the thinking mind does.

Connecting with the collective

Let’s look at it a different way. You are intuitive and you have connected with the collective. You’ve tuned into a databank of mind chatter. Sometimes, it’s what is sometimes called psychic attack — where we tune our mood down and pick up someone’s negative feelings about us. Sometimes it’s the concerns of our partner. They start going through a lot of insecurity about you. They are filled with fears and doubts. The thing is, our own false self mind chatter is never bothered about their internal world at all — only our own — in fact it convinces us they haven’t got an internal world at all and that’s why people miss the switch.

Other people have a thinking mind just like you do. And they are going through their own process, in their own time, just like you. Forget that they told you their day was fine or great!

Connecting with the collective

So here’s the new way of looking at things: What if your dip in your normally happy mood is because you’ve tuned into the other person’s angst? You’ve been tuned onto their level, and now you are picking up the same thoughts and feelings they’re picking up on?

What if the longing you feel for them is actually the longing they are feeling for you? What if the reason you suddenly start obsessing about him is because he has started obsessing about you? Is it you falling for them, or are you picking up them falling for you? The questions are increasingly more intriguing.

It is a sign of low self-worth if you go into the whole “I’m appreciating them but they are not thinking about me at all.” What if you are picking up on their appreciation of you?This is the more self-affirmative way of seeing things — and, as I’m explaining here, just as likely to be true. Have you considered that?

Let’s go back to this client I mentioned. The switch was profound for him. He added this understanding that he may be picking up on the feelings of his followers and in doing so, he found his power. Over just a few sessions, he got back into his lane so to speak. He stood tall. He started glowing again — off camera aswell as on.

Next time you go into a negative tailspin that seems to bear no resemblance to who you are, before you collapse your self-worth, pause and remind yourself: Could this be someone else’s emotions? Just by knowing this, you free the net that you have been caught with and float upwards to the surface, feeling good again. Know it’s not about you. Say “I send it back to where it came from”, with love.

Either way, as you rise, the thoughts you are attuned to shift from the dire, uninspiring and defeating self-attack to increasingly self-affirmative feelings. And you are centred in the clarity of your Real Self once again.

Michael James is the author of Emotional First Aid and Feel Better, No Matter What which are both published by Watkins Publishing. http://instagram.com/michaeljamesbe