I’m Not Your Bin: Evacuation of Psycho-Emotional Debris Into Others

The bin is a useful metaphor to discuss where unwanted debris goes. It’s a receptacle, a container for that which is unwanted, that which is discarded. A bin receives. Once used it’s full of waste, which in turn must also be discarded, emptied out. The cycle repeats. Over and over, filling, emptying, re-filling.

People use others as bins into which they evacuate material they wish to get rid of, avoid, deny. Things they don’t want to look at or sort through. Bins to receive rage, shame, discrimination and historical traumas. In fact a myriad of psycho-emotional and experiential garbage they don’t want to look at or process for themselves.

Unfortunately this occurs a lot in our most intimate of relationships — our securely-insecure bases — whereby for many couples it has become a well-carved groove in the relationship and has taken on a dysfunctional normality.

“Take this!” says spouse abusing Tom who chastises his wife Sue for putting on weight when he returns home from yet another self-worth reducing, shaming day at work. “You know Tom, we have spoken about this before. I need you to speed up on processing those invoices” says the father-identified Team Lead.

For Tom to attend to and work through this real-time shame inducing experience at the office he…