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 you’ve noticed while awake how weird dreams are, you’re just as fooled by the next dream, until you wake up. [...] So people experience these mashups in relationships as well, emotionally experiencing their friends & partners as if they’re 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. [...] In general, as far as I can tell, while how I’m feeling is always a response to what’s happening, the size and shape of that response have more to do with my history than the particulars of the situation. And this goes for other people as well. So when I’m on my game I can notice that a small incident has induced a disproportionate anger or panic or whatever, and then differentiate “my emotional flashback” from “the present live situation” and respond creatively. Depending on the level of trust in your relationship, one useful move here can be meta-communication: “Oh man I’m projecting right now, something like… that I’m back in school and you’re my teacher about to punish me for not having done my homework”, or if you’re not sure what the actual content of the flashback is, simply, “I’m feeling activated and I don’t know why”. [...] I also used to think that if I noticed someone else was in a flashback, the thing for me to do is to point it out to them and try to get them to wake up. Sometimes this works but in my experience it tends to backfire because it’s an attempt at controlling them. If they’re having a flashback in which someone is (on whatever level) attempting to control them, then this is only going to reinforce the very perception I’m telling them is irrelevant! So I’m now seeing ways in which structurally it works a lot better if I’m able to respect the intelligence of the other person’s emotional cognition. Rather than saying “wake up – get out of that flashback – be present with me”, acknowledging that on some level they genuinely are having trouble telling me apart from someone who has (and would) hurt them. That doesn’t mean I am, but I can respect that they can’t tell, and hold a stance of humility that doesn’t say that they’re simply wrong for not knowing—maybe they know something I don’t. From there, I take on a playful improvisational stance that asks “how can I become an invalid target for whatever they’re projecting on me?” If this person feels like I’m their teacher, can I do something their teacher would never do? I may fail at this, but the important thing is I’m actually trying to give them new data to grok as opposed to demanding they reinterpret what’s already happened.
– https://malcolmocean.com/2021/06/dream-mashups/