YOU CAN ONLY LIVE IN YOUR SKIN

Too many people seem to have too permeable, personal boundaries.  They take on the problems of others and try to make choices for them.  Out with a friend for lunch to a p[lace new to me, she knew everything on the menu and was going to tell me what to eat. As she read the menu, she gave a running critique of almost everything on it. She had tried most all dishes.. We were in a Thai restaurant but things looked different than the choices with which I was familiar. I rather like a bit of spice and heat and look for the number pf red peppers beside the description on the menu.  My friend advised that I should not even go above mild as even that was hot. She ordered her meal and I ordered mine, telling the waitress (who didn't seem to understand too much English) that I didn't want sweet (Bel)l, peppers but hot were fine.  This took a while to make clear.  I actually received exactly that for which I asked.  My friend had to ask for a taste of my food.

Have you known the people who talk to a sad friend and spend the rest of the day figuring out how to solve the stated problem, naturally having only a small portion of the facts.  There are those who freely offer advice, unsolicited, and then are offended when it is not followed. Others are brought to depression because they can't stop thinking of the sad tale told by a friend about a situation of distress.

I've never been sure how one gets to be objective. As a therapist for over 60 years, I'm not sure whether I was trained or whether it just came naturally.  I've always known the difference between  the pain of another and empathy (when you can understand the other's experience and even their pain but know that it is not your own.  Don't tell someone they should leave their spouse, let their aged parent live on machines, live by the Bible or not, or anything that is not a choice for your own person. .  The Indian who said, "You cannot know a man without walking a mile in his moccasins"  was correct to a point.  You can never totally know another as you might \get to know yourself.  Never assume that what is right for you is right for someone else.:

It is tough enough to live your own life without trying to live that of another!  So why do so many people try to live in someone else's skin?  Here is a tutorial I found on the subject you find of interest if you need to think more critically about your own boundaries.

WHAT TEACHES PEOPLE TO LIVE IN THEIR OWN SKIN?

Speaking to the son of two extremely narcissistic parents, he told me he had to teach himself to be empathic because neither of his parents were.good at listening to other people's feelings.  We talked about this and I questioned how can a kid know that one should be empathic and actually figure out how to become self-taught as though it is an art. We are exposed to many more than our parents and can see for ourselves that many others have a better way of dealing with life.  That is what mentors are all about.

I believe that some day psychiatry will throw away personality diagnoses in favor of reflecting the results of brain tests of chemistry and watching, with scans,  how the brain handles particular informational stimuli.  For years I watched women diagnosed as 'borderline personalities' only to become perfectly 'normal' when their clinical depressions were properly treated with pharmacology.

Humans  have so many vulnerabilities that inhibit their comfortable adjustment to the society around them.  One of the worst is the empty feeling with which a clinical depression leaves one.  Regardless of how satisfying life may seem be at a given time, that empty hole in their psyche, felt in the pit of their stomach, never allows them to feel loved or worth being loved.  These two states are the most basic and universal desires of humans...to be loved and to feel lovable.  Its basic to most everything we do.

Happiness is certainly felt when one is comfortable in his/her own skin, feels capable of logical thinking and making reasonable life choices, and has many healthy relationships.  Alas, some people never achieve those abilities nor seem to have the equipment to achieve them.  One of the things I tried to impress graduate students who would soon be treating therapy patients was to realize that you cannot 'feel' for anyone else.  If you are caught up in emotions around someone else's experience,  you are not 'feeling for' that person. you are feeling for yourself and need to dig in your own memory for that which was triggered by the other person's experience.  Only by doing that self-exploration to gain insight into yourself will you be able to hold onto where you begin and end.