CATFISH

Catfish

DEFINITION: a person who assumes a false identity or personality on the Internet, especially on social-networking websites, as to deceive, manipulate, or swindle.

A person who uses an identity other than their own to attract the interest of others is often stuck in a severe cycle of self-loathing and inability to accept expressions of value, love, care and appreciation from others. These people feel so worthless that they have to become someone else that they and other people admire so that they can share in the validation and esteem placed on the other identity.

A Catsish is not a bad person. They just use learnt coping strategies to feel valued in ways that they are incapable of experiencing otherwise.  

Being someone else and feeling the value they feel bypasses the chronic worthlessness that their own internal self refuses to allow to experience. It is based on the same principle that watching someone yawn makes you yawn, someone smiling or laughing makes you smile or laugh; someone else feeling valued – become that identity and you can imagine feeling valued.

Fundamentally, after their ego is strengthened through therapy, these people can have a profound capacity for empathy. The very fact that this person can tune into and imagine so deeply how someone else might feel is a skill which if finely tuned in therapy at Counselling Sydney can make them a wonderful, engaging, emotionally sensitive individual.