Feeding Off The Emotion Of Others – How’s That Work?

lady and the tramp“What he likes is to see my emotion,” I told the soldier, regarding my 8 year old son. He likes it when I cry at movies, or if something scares me. But he especially likes it when I cry and he comes over and looks at me very closely. He wants to see my tears, verify them and make sure they are there.”

He laughed.

“Yeah, he actually inspects them. He looks at my crying face them up close and he likes it along with you and most everyone else I have ever known. You do this same thing! Oh, there goes Elsa, crying at Lady And The Tramp when we were kids. Whoops, there she goes crying at the Green Beret movie. I think my blog likes it too by the way. They want me to emote on those videos. It’s like they want to witness my emotion. Here I am with all kinds of it and they want to see it,” I said.

“I bet they do.”

“But why? Am I a freak on display? I feel that way to an extent. Why is the expression of my pain so interesting? My own son gets a kick out of this; he just can’t hide his pleasure.”

“I understand.”

“He can’t hide his pleasure, I can’t stop emoting and so it’s just this routine spectacle where my emotion seems to make others feel good. Because it’s not like he cries with me. It’s more that he’s pleased and satisfied with the meal. The meal that is made up of my expressed feelings that is, and I can’t say that I really understand this.”

Outside of this being another expression of Neptune in Scorpio (emotion) on the midheaven (public), can anyone tell me what is gained when tapping another’s emotion?

20 thoughts on “Feeding Off The Emotion Of Others – How’s That Work?”

  1. My first husband was like that. He was a Taurus too. I think with him he was just so reserved and stable that he couldn’t express himself with the same level of passion that I did. He wasn’t at all nice about it though and I think he would even push me to the breaking point so he felt relief.

    I think those of us who are emotional and expressive provide that service for others in the same way that you described people like your sister who suffer so others don’t have to. Some people just aren’t going to put on such a spectacle but they are relieved when we do.

  2. This so odd to me…seeing anyone I am close to cry makes me cry too. Even if it’s something like their eyes welling up with tears due to a stubbed toe, my eyes well too. And I hate letting people see me cry so double trouble!

  3. Your son is a Taurus, right? I think I’m remembering correctly. My husband is a Taurus and many of my friends, and in my experience, Taureans (is that the appropriate plural?) are often unable to express their own emotions on the physical plane very well. What I mean by that is they may create art, music, or writing that is very emotional, but being in a room with them? Not so emotional. They aren’t likely to cry while watching a movie or hearing a sad story. At least, not in my experience. So, I have often found that those Taureans in my life enjoy seeing my emotion, almost like they are making it their own. It is like a similar thing to when they write, make art, or make music–they take my emotion and own it, and in that way find it pleasurable, reassuring, and satisfying.

  4. My longest standing friends (13 years) don’t think I cry, and my roomates have probably only seen me cry twice. Which I guess could be viewed as a restricted communication thing, because they all know that I can get upset and sad. Or it could be my virgo moon in the 8th house.

    But, my aunt and my friend Taylor, who are both big crier’s would and were both surprised when they encountered that idea of me as someone who doesn’t cry. My aunt still doesn’t believe it, but my friend Taylor thought about it and came back with ‘You only cry alone and with the lights off’ which is pretty true. In fact she thinks its pretty funny to rent sad movies come over and turn the lights off and have me bawl my eyes out. And I appreciate it because it gives me some release.

    Lupa is right is just eases up pressure I didn’t know I had because hey, if you can cry in front of me then its okay for me to cry in front of you unless I’m supposed to be being strong or there’s some other reason I shouldn’t be crying, which maybe I should stay on the not crying side just to be sure. I can cry when I get home.

  5. What’s to be gained is a basic expression of self: relationships are essentially a mirror, and what may be expressed by your partner can potentially be expressed by you. Your son? Well, for a Sun/Saturn type like him (and my SO, actually) it’s a relief to see that expression. Grief and emotion that’s real, that won’t be hidden by self-directed stoicism.

    I’m a Taurus Sun with Mercury in Taurus. I cried a lot, intensely, and publicly up until I was in my 20s, not so much anymore. I cry a lot less these days, now that I’m going to art school and in ‘productive mode’ all the time. Yup, art as release…
    I do remember a turn-around in crying when my SO almost died. I stayed home and didn’t see anyone but hospital staff–and I kept thinking “When am I going to start crying?”
    Now that that bad time has passed, I cry if I think about it…but at the time so much was riding on my shoulders I felt like if I didn’t keep my chin up I was fucking doomed. After he left the hospital my SO spent about a year crying every day, which was understandable but intense for a Capricorn with their Sun conjunct Saturn. There’s just no way we could both be crying, I really don’t think it would have helped him at all.

  6. Like Foxxy, i seldom cry in a public way – never have. However, being around someone close to me in tears will find me tearing up too (Moon conjunct Neptune). In fact, other’s emotions can be overwhelming & maintaining clarity on who’s feeling what has been a hard won lesson (Saturn sq Sun). I find people who go out of their way to create chaos in their lives because they like the adrenaline rush particularly difficult to be around.

  7. Taurus sun here – Taurus rising too, but I have an airy chart with “no” water and Aquarius on my midheaven. I used to cry easily – I barely made it through my kids school programs I was so blubbery – but I rarely cry now. I used to fight with great drama – now I make peace. I tend to cry if I’m angry – which makes me angrier. Fortunately I have a very long fuse so that rarely happens. Overemotional expressions make me uncomfortable in a strange way. It’s like I want to tell them it isn’t that bad, but I don’t because I figure people know how they feel. Still, I can’t imagine enjoying someone’s pain. And I never cause chaos just to be dramatic. I like calm and rational with an occasional burst of wierdness.

  8. It’s interesting, you’ve mentioned in the past that people seem to see you as holding it all together / not emoting about huge issues in your life. Maybe there’s a certain relief or “ah okay, she’s letting it out” factor involved with seeing you emote over a movie or other situation where the trigger for your emotion isn’t so close, yet you emote over it. I don’t know if I’m making much sense here, even though I know what I’m trying to say…

  9. Sun/Leo, Scorpio ASC, Moon/Cappy…..I’m soooo emotional. I find it problematic because there are times when I don’t want to show my emotion, and it takes EVERYTHING for me to hold it in. Rather exhausting. For example, my husband and friends know me as super-emotional-I cry really easily. If someone on T.V. is crying (a real person, not a soap opera or anything like that), I’m crying. If a friend is crying, I’m crying. My husband….well, he never cries so that’s not a problem lol. But you get the point. My mom though, she’s even worse than me. And it’s crazy because she doesn’t see me as the emotional type, she thinks I’m cold actually. What she doesn’t know is that all my life I have felt the need to be strong around her since she’s very emotional herself. I think if both of us acted that way together…..well, it would just be too much. I kinda like it though, that SOMEONE in this world thinks I am unemotional.
    I don’t know what it is that makes me so emotional. I just feel deeply. It’s not a chaotic emotional thing at all, I’m very drama-free actually. I wish I could get to the root of it though, so it can ease up a bit.

  10. i guess it’s a release as others have suggested? i don’t know. i emote readily and usually only tap into the feelings when someone else is emoting all over the place. i don’t avoid it in personal life, but sometimes for public issues i do because it’s taxing. but i do know that the emotions have lots of power connected with them. when i do readings occassionally, i get the emotions most clearly. so maybe it’s a form of connection and tapping into someone else’s intense energy…

  11. It can be a way of experiencing emotions vicariously that people feel uncomfortable expressing themselves. A friend, a man, with the Moon in Capricorn, surrounds himself with women who express emotions he rarely expresses himself. He tends to be a male Pollyanna, a silver lining in every cloud kind of guy, which is a good philosophy to live by unless negative emotions are being repressed. So one ex-girlfriend had a lot of inexplicable (to him) rage, another cried a lot, which he couldn’t stand, a female relative has a lot of irrational (in his opinion) fears, and another girlfriend gets mad and vents dramatically to which he responds by getting so far away from her he can’t hear her which makes her even madder. He seems to think he’s superior to all of them because he doesn’t have these emotions, the rage, the fear, the grief, etc…yet there always seems to be women in his life who express them in the extreme. It’s all very interesting. In addition to the Capricorn Moon, he has 4th house planets opposed by Saturn and a Venus-Pluto opposition. Can we say PROJECTION?

  12. What is gained? Honesty. Folks (most anyway) go around with these masks on. All kinds of masks. Parental masks, social masks..even in relationships people arent being their true selves 90% of the time. Emotions are honesty in their truest form.

  13. i think strong emotion is extremely life affirming, oddly. because it’s a very alive thing, no matter the kind of emotion. that’s why i think some people get addicted to, say, the anger of others.

  14. Rkkggg, that is really pretty fascinating what you said about it being a Taurus complex. Taurus does like to own/possess things, why not other peoples’ emotions as well?

    I sometimes get a similar sensation when someone visibly experiences sadness, but I can trace it to my Venus in Scorpio. I love seeing people purge themselves of dead emotional matter, because once the pain is over they can rebirth themselves. It’s the sensation of watching someone dig down through the layers and re-connect with their real self.

  15. You know my partner is abit like this. I dont like to cry too much in front of others (except films etc but its not like i blub, more like a trickle which is easier to hide) but what with pluto n’all it got that much harder to hide. So at times of high emotion there he is, with me trying to bury my face in a cushion, PULLING my face round to look at him..why?? Why does he need to see the tears? It beats me. If someone cries in front of me i just let them. I will hug them, let them talk if they need to, get them tissues, make a cup of tea and probably try to make them laugh but as a Taurean conj saturn, i do not get off on this, in fact it makes me a little uncomfortable cos i feel helpless. So i dont think it is a taurean thing, if anything i’d say it was a male thing..they’re often taught to hide their emotions (if not by their parents then by their peers) so when they see someone crying, i dunno maybe its curiosity or just plain envy. Or like wyrdling says for some its proof of life. Like the tabloids..we’re all endlessly curious to see what its like when someone is breaking down (Britney, Amy, etc all being plutoed) whether we sympathise or not. Thinking about it some more this may even be a scorpio thing – the soldier and your son both have scorpio right? as does my partner who has no taurus..

  16. Interesting, Z. Yes, they both have Scorpio and in their cases I think it is a way to connect with me. They both want this sort of access to me and my emotion allows entry… at least this is how it feels to me. My experience of it.

    I think they want to penetrate, basically, because they know there is a deep well which is probably similar to what (some) people on my blog are looking for as well.

  17. Yeah i see that penetration..and weirdly i find some scorpios are assured by displays of deep emotion. I think they have such a deep well of emotion themselves (which they often painstackingly hide) that when they see someone expressing it, it resonates somehow with them, they understand it. Thats why scorpions can be great to have around in a crisis, they know that feeling.

  18. This thread is helping me to get a glimpse of what’s going on in my/our lives now… the feeding on my suffering.
    My natal Pluto in 7th house Leo… I’ve projected & made it public (in service) … but it’s backfired.
    Now I get to own that power & that’s what my North Node has needed all along.
    Elsa, thanks for all the connected threads that serve @ the right time!

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