After communicating with them, we feel exhausted, as if deprived of our last strength. Why? What is the mechanism of psychological vampirism and how to protect yourself from it?
One woman came to me for psychological counseling for advice about her nine-year-old son, who was often ill. These were various infections, and their frequency indicated a decrease in immunity of an incomprehensible nature. The mother divorced the father of the child, she worked, and when her son fell ill again, she took him to his grandmother, where he recovered in a few days. She read on the Internet that immunity can be reduced due to mental trauma, and took her son to a child psychiatrist, who did not find that he had a mental illness. Then she decided to contact me.
She talked about her son, I asked her questions about their relationship, but neither from her stories, nor from her answers to my questions, I could make any assumptions. And I thought that it was because of my inability to help her that I felt so uncomfortable. Of course, this was not the first time in my practice when I could not immediately understand the essence of the problem and find the key to its solution, but usually I still did not feel so exhausted during a conversation with a client. When I was able to establish emotional contact with the interlocutor and start a discussion, even if very controversial initial assumptions, in the end such a discussion in itself often turned out to be useful, and I tried to prolong the conversation, feeling that the very fact of emotional contact helped him.
But in this case, I didn’t succeed. The woman listened to me, but did not enter into a dialogue, but again and again obsessively repeated what had already been said. It seemed to me that the very intonations of her speech created in me an underlying feeling of my guilt and at the same time aroused a feeling of protest. I suddenly noticed that I was waiting for the end of her visit. Why didn’t you get along with this woman? I was surprised to catch myself on an unusual feeling for me that I myself was trying to involuntarily fence myself off from her, to create a distance, although in general this was not my position.
- «It’s easier for those of us who have a high level of intelligence»
Several months have passed since her visit, and we met by chance in a completely different setting. We were fellow travelers on the bus. We had a rather long way to go, and she again spoke of her son, in the same style and with the same intonations. And at first I was even glad that maybe I could still understand something and help in some way. She shared with me her plan to go on vacation abroad with her son, so that he would find himself in new conditions, without a grandmother (jealousy was felt in her relationship with her grandson). She spoke, and every minute I felt physically worse, as if falling ill. It seemed to me that this communication drains all my energy. And I suddenly imagined her son, left alone with her for a long period in an unfamiliar place … And I ran away. I got off at the next stop. I only had the strength to say goodbye to her: “I beg you, do not take your son with you.”
I waited for the next bus and gradually came to my senses. I suddenly realized that I was faced with something that I had only heard about before, and did not even really believe in it — with psychological vampirism. I realized that this is precisely what it consists of, that a person seems to be asking for help and sympathy, but at the same time does not enter into emotional contact with the interlocutor, and not because he cannot, but because such contact will prevent him from insisting on his own. And he stubbornly repeats the same thing, causing the interlocutor to feel guilty, because the interlocutor cannot help. He cannot help because such a person does not seek help, he only wants to hang his problems on another.
Perhaps this was the reason for the endless illnesses of her son. When a mother behaves like this with everyone, including her child, and the child is not protected from her emotional deafness and at the same time accepts the imposed guilt, he can get sick. His very illness, which creates problems for her, increases his guilt. Etc.
But I was surprised: how did I survive her visit to me as a psychologist and not fall into a state of exhaustion? I think that my position as a consultant saved me, which allowed me to keep a distance between us. And in a conversation on an equal footing, the distance was reduced, and I was in no way protected from her emotional deafness.