the fish analogy

Imagine that you’re talking to someone and they start telling you about something you weren’t prepared to hear. It could be emotional dumping, telling you stories with vulgar details, or complaining about their day before asking if you were in a space to listen.

Learning unwanted information or details about a person that you weren’t mentally prepared to hear about can sometimes feel like you’re being handed a burden. A new responsibility. Or a smelly, slimy fish.

The fish analogy was something I came up with a few years ago after reflecting on unhealthy friendships. In these unhealthy friendships, I was consistently placed in a therapist-esque position. Meaning that these friends emotionally unloaded onto me. Time and time again. Day after day. Without checking in on my emotional well-being beforehand — except in a handful of instances, which I will give them credit for. Regardless, I was handed these emotional burdens time after time and left to figure out what the hell I was going to do with this slimy fish.

In life, I’ve had significantly more experiences being handed the fish than the other way around. I’m normally more of a listener in conversations and I was more emotionally mature than a lot of my peers from a younger age, so I was typically the problem solver in friend groups. The therapist friend.

Being the therapist friend is a whole other topic I’ll go into another day. Today I’ll be focusing on what it’s like to be handed the fish, and why I believe people do it in the first place.

When you’re handed the fish — by someone you care about, someone who’s emotional well-being matters to you — you’re left feeling some amount of pain or hurt that the fish-hander felt beforehand. While empathy is a beautiful thing and I wouldn’t change my heightened empathy for the world, having to hold onto someone else’s fish unexpectedly while also juggling your own gets to be really difficult at times.

I’ve been in many situations where I had a hard day myself, and then someone hands me a dozen fish out of nowhere, and now I’m surrounded by fish and emotionally overwhelmed. Overstimulated. Then when they’re finished talking, I feel as if they’re not in a position to hear about what I’m going through because I know they had a bad day of their own. I don’t want to bog them down with my own negative emotions, too. I understand that that view may not be correct in the eyes of some people, but that’s how I feel. I’m trying to adjust, to understand that even if someone had a bad day I can still confide in them, but I feel like I don’t have the right to do that when I know they’re already feeling such big emotions of their own. I don’t want to pile on.

I believe I know the reason why fish-handers do this. It’s because they’re trying to emotionally connect. They’re trying to bond and confide in those that they hand the fish to, because they trust them, and that’s a beautiful and wonderful thing in and of itself. I’m willing to bet that people who regularly hand fish to others are individuals who were raised by parents who incidentally taught them that they’re only worth connecting with when they seemed helpless. Their parents only paid close, loving attention to them as children when they were injured, ill, or something of that nature, and that stuck with them into adolescamce and perhaps even into adulthood. Thus, later in life they only feel like they can connect with others by emphasizing their helplessness (Horney’s “Feminine Psychology”).

Fish-handers aren’t malicious, nor do they mean to emotionally overwhelm those that they hand the fish to. They might not even know that they’re handing someone a fish in the first place! Fishes are attempts at emotional connections — unhealthy ones, but they’re attempts all the same.

I wasn’t always aware that when my friends emotionally bombarded me that they didn’t set out to do so — I’m horrible at reading people in the first place, but I digress. While being handed a fish still isn’t enjoyable, I now understand why people do it.

So, how do we fix this? How do we stop throwing fish at people who aren’t ready to catch them? How do we stop being bombarded with fish by the same people, day after day, and feeling like we can’t discuss our own fishy problems with them? It’s simple. Ask if someone is in the mental and emotional headspace to hear about what you want to talk about. Just ask consent. It’s as easy as that. Maybe they’ll say no, but then you’ll have respected their boundaries. Maybe they’ll want to say no, think about it, and then after realizing that you cared enough to ask, will choose to say yes instead. Or maybe they’ll just feel respected that you thought to ask them in the first place and excitedly answer yes.

Being handed a fish sucks, and accidentally handing someone a fish sucks, too. While we might not be able to totally eliminate handing fish to those we care about entirely, if we remember to ask if someone is ready to hear about our fishy problems, then maybe, just maybe we can stop carrying around so many fish with us all the time.