postmodernmulticoloredcloak:

awed-frog:

postmodernmulticoloredcloak:

obsessionisaperfume:

postmodernmulticoloredcloak:

juppschmitz:

squirrelsan:

hunenka:

12×03

Sam: Dean, I
know perfectly how Mom feels, because I’ve been there before myself!
Sam: *is shocked
and surprised when Mary decides to leave*
Dean: *is
sad, but not surprised*

12×06

Sam: Mom, I
know perfectly how you feel, because I’ve been there before myself!
Sam: *is
shocked and surprised when Mary doesn’t deny harboring suicidal thoughts*
Dean: *is
not surprised*

Besides,
what’s with this “I’ve been there myself” thing that Sam keeps repeating? Doesn’t
he remember that Dean’s been there too? Repeatedly?

I’ve noticed this as well. Despite popular opinion, Sam is actually terrible at empathizing (I think possibly because he has a low EQ altogether). In order to cover for this Sam projects. He almost always says the same thing “I get it because this is just like me!” And then proceeds to angst over how HE feels about his own situation (even if their situation doesn’t really match). Either trying to prove something HE needs to believe, or make sure they end up the way HE wants to be.

{I’ve also noticed this in the way he fails to connect with most anyone unless he does this. He often remains aloof from people that he can’t easily project a vision of himself onto. Or he piggybacks off of Dean’s connection to them (For example, Jo, Cass, Garth, Charlie). }

The other person as a separate entity is rarely considered (think Matt from Bugs, Max from Nightmare. Ava or even Madison, most any person Sam tries to with). He has no real concept of their feelings or needs (and doesn’t seem concerned about genuinely finding out).

So yes, Sam is surprised, because he hasn’t truly considered how Mary REALLY feels and what that means. He’s thinking about how HE feels, which is a far less equivalency than he assumes. Similarly, no Sam hasn’t considered that Dean has been there, too. Sam has trouble seeing past his own nose, even when he’s trying to do so.

He did the same thing in 12.04 with stigmata!girl and in 12.05 with Hitler!girl.

He only “connected” because he supposedly shared a similar experience.

This is some interesting food for thought. I am usually very Dean-focused in my analyses of the show so I often end up overlooking Sam, but Sam is a really complex and fascinating character, too…

In my ever-unwritten meta about how the show parallels Sam’s relationship with the supernatural to Dean’s relationship with sexuality throughout the course of the entire story, it’s interesting to notice that Sam connects to people who have experienced something supernatural within themselves in some way, that feel tainted (Magda thought her powers made her evil, Ellie was freaked out by sharing Hitler’s blood, and so on), or who share experiences with family similar to his (as you mentioned, the kid from Bugs, and so on – look at Amy Pond, he made that thing so personal because he had projected himself on her). Dean, on the other hand, connects easily with women and queer men, or at least men who don’t conform to societal ideals of masculinity.

I wouldn’t be so harsh on judging Sam, because in general interpersonal interactions are based on mirror mechanisms; when you look at the other, you see the other as a mirror of yourself, there’s a whole mechanism of projecting and identifying in the other that people more well-versed than me in the topic can explain better than me. So we, in general, “use” the other person as a mirror, so to speak. A (meaningful) interpersonal interaction can be formed when we see ourselves in the other, in some way; that doesn’t necessarily mean that we don’t see the other as their own person. But yes, Sam does seem to have difficulties empathizing but he rather projects his experience on the other person and empathizes with that, so to speak – that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person, we’re talking emotional cognition (if that’s the word, I hope you get what I’m trying to say), not ethics.

At the end of the day Dean has higher interpersonal skills than Sam… and intrapersonal skills too, despite popular opinion. The fandom tends to see Dean as the one who represses all emotions and is clueless about everything emotional, while Sam is seen as the one who is all into talking feelings and stuff. But – at least this is how I see it – Dean has a high emotional intelligence. I find that this is Dean’s tragedy – he knows, he understands, but he doesn’t allow himself to. So he pretends he doesn’t know or understand. It’s meaningful that after all the time and experiences they’ve shared together, Sam has still big blanks in the understanding of this brother. This season’s theme seems to be ‘filling blanks’, so maybe we’re going to see a development here.

This is why I firmly believe that Soulless!Sam was realio, trulio SAM, just without most of his filters.

Because he was REALLY GOOD at faking the soul. Not perfect; I knew from about 6.02 that there was something really WRONG, but Dean didn’t see a lot of what the audience did, and it took him a lot longer to twig.

Oh, Soulless Sam is sooo interesting! Without his soul, Sam was extremely rational. He figured out that he wasn’t supposed to be like that; he figured out that he was supposed to act different; and he used the memories of his past to build up an act that would fool people into thinking he was still the same. He didn’t know he was missing his soul specifically, but he was aware that something had happened when he got out of hell that had made him different. And he figured out that it was best to pretend he was still the same. It was a rational decision – he could have gone to Bobby or Dean himself and explain the situation (“alright so I remember feeling things that I don’t feel right now, I believe something has happened that has changed me”) instead he evaluated pros and cons and deduced it was best to pretend he was feeling those things still. And he had to be clever in using memories of behaving in a way that he didn’t understand to figure out how to act to pretend he was the same. Of course Dean doesn’t really take extremely long to start being suspicious, by the time of the vampire accident he is convinced that something is wrong with Sam.

I’m babbling but yeah, I agree. If we consider Demon Dean a kind of “soulless Dean” it’s interesting to see the difference between them. Dean doesn’t want the cure just like Sam didn’t want his soul to be restored; neither of them wanted to go back to being the person they used to be. But Dean was still extremely emotional. And in that very period, Sam, while having his soul alright, acts with rationality over emotionality, something that even Dean as a demon deplores.

Ah, soulless Sam and demon Dean are extremely fascinating topics. Both of them are still them, just with some things removed, so to speak.

This is a truly fascinating discussion, and what it reveals about Sam is quite possibly the very reason why we sometimes feel like we don’t know Sam at all. Because he’s not open about himself, and he doesn’t connect to people and those people he connects with, he sees as mirrors of himself, so we learn nothing new about him. 

I think maybe part of why Sam acts this way is because of the ‘teenager’ coding he’s still dragging after himself? After all, this difficulty in truly perceiving other people as separate from yourself and this conviction that, for good or for bad, your own problems and your own self are somehow the centre of the known universe is quite typical for younger characters (and a recognized psychological phenomenon IRL, too).

You bring out a very interesting point. Yes, Sam isn’t open, either to people or to the audience. It’s not a coincidence he was supposed to be the mirror for the audience, but then that role shifted to Dean. Part of that is because of Jensen’s amazing performance as Dean, but it’s also a thing inherent to Sam’s character. Season 6 is the pinnacle of that, because we, the audience, are completely Dean when Sam is soulless. When Dean becomes a demon, on the other hand, we still identify with him. He’s still the emotional lens for the audience to watch the show. Dean’s loneliness and suffering and frustration are our feelings to feel while we’re watching. For a big portion of season 6, Sam is “other”. It’s not just that the writers don’t know how to write Sam (maybe sometimes); it’s just that this emotional closeness is a quality inherent to Sam’s personality. I don’t want to sound repetitive, but Sacrifice shows this dynamic very clearly – Sam has bottled things up and we, the audience, find them out at the same time as Dean. Just like learning Sam’s pain and jealousy shocks Dean, it shocks us too. Clearly it doesn’t come out of the blue, we are given hints, but the full force of Sam’s feelings hit us together with Dean. Dean, on the other hand, throws his feelings out for people to see. Not always, and especially not with everyone (not with Sam, most notably), but he does. He is remarkably open to talk about his feelings to others that he trusts to be understood by – look at Frank and Charlie, metaphorical reincarnations of Ash. Dean’s healing process after Cas’ betrayal and death has its roots in Dean’s relationship with Frank, although it can only really start when Cas comes back. But I’m digressing.

Sam’s emotional immaturity is a very interesting topic. A Sam ‘stan’ would say that it’s Dean’s fault – never letting Sam “grow up”, always treating him as a child – but I firmly refuse to attribute any accountability for Sam’s emotional development to Dean. Sam’s development was never supposed to be Dean’s responsibility.

And so we land to John, and The Things We Left Behind. Some people have criticized the scene where Dean and Sam tell the CBGB incident as some kind of “John apology” but I don’t think it was like that at all. It was supposed to be enlightening of Dean’s choice to set his awareness aside and Sam’s cluelessness. Dean and Cas are having a different conversation than Sam and Cas. Dean and John have fabricated “stories” for Sam – the “sanitized for Sammy” stories. The story that became the story. Sam still believes in plenty of those stories, while Dean never did, because Dean lived through those stories – Dean chose to accept the story as a self-defense mechanism. I’m going to sound repetitive but I believe than Dean was always aware of the nature of John’s parenting, as he’s always been aware of what’s healthy and what’s not. Simply, he had to build a series of self-defenses, and some of those required him to set that awareness aside and pretend it wasn’t there.

Dean needs to embrace that awareness, and Sam needs to reach it in the first place. They have drastically different pasts; they have been through drastically different ‘stories’. In fact Dean wrote a lot of those stories for Sam. Sam is still living in the stories of his childhood; Dean never had a childhood in the first place (not counting his life before Mary’s death, but that feels like a different life altogether).

Andrew Dabb wrote The Things We Left Behind. He knows what he’s doing, and I’m pretty sure this is what he’s doing. Dismantling the “stories”, filling the blanks. Let Dean reach a healthy emotional place (aka a good self-esteem, because he knows what’s healthy but doesn’t think he deserves it) and Sam reach emotional maturity.