conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled The Power of Coincidence about with the genre: Religion & Spirituality, Occult & Paranormal
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Find out how science and psychology merge to create conincidence and make this knowledge work for you.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first three paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Power of Coincidence
  Our feelings about our current relationship may be conscious: "I know I am angry at my partner." But the origin and import of our feelings are often unconscious, as might be the attitudes and expectations beneath them: "I wanted him to speak up for me." Unconsciously, this may be "I expect him to be there for me just as dad was." Our fears or expectations usually grow from memories. Notice that transference can be based on positive memories, not only negative ones.
  Transference is a habit in all people regardless of the quality of their parenting background. We will transfer whether our past was positive or negative in its impact on us. The fact that our psychic development is the result of a lifelong continuum of transference relationships may be a way of maintaining our own sense of personal continuity: "I am still with those I remember from my past, as long as I can transfer onto this new partner. He revives my story."
  Transference is a homing instinct in the psyche. We all feel an urge to return to the past. Why would we want to do this? We are seeking a way to replicate and enact the unfinished business of our childhood or of our primary adult relationships. This inclination of ours can help us when it works to reconstitute the past so that we can explore what our hidden issues are and how they can be laid to rest. This happens in psychotherapy or in any moment in which we revisit our past and work out what is left of it in the present. It takes conscious noticing, catching ourselves in the act of transference, slipping out of the grip of the past, and what may be a fire walk into the real present. Psychological freedom happens when we find the courage to enter the here-and-now reality of ourselves and others, shorn of the decorations and detritus of our history.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: three more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Transference happens when the past intrudes upon the present. One same way of relating is carried forward from decade to decade, from relationship to relationship. Our template from childhood can be so ingrained that we cannot see our present partner clearly. If mom was always loving, we might expect that same quality of love from a narcissistic partner who is unable to provide it. Our loyalty to the template may make us try to force-fit the glass slipper onto the wrong woman: "My experience with my controlling mother makes you seem more controlling than you are, and my wish for a kindly mother makes me hope you will be that way toward me."
  A lack of love from a partner, resembling the lack of love from a parent, may lead us to despair that all we will ever be able to find in others is failed attunement to our needs. This is transferring our original despair onto the world. But, as we shall see, the failure of others may not be so bad. It may be just what we need to help us work on ourselves by dealing with our old hurts on our own.
  Eventually we see that we can't be other than what we are and that means what we are must be just what we need to find fulfillment and just what the world needs as our contribution. Being ourselves is good news to the universe.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Transference also appears in our illusory belief in a bigger meaning than is appropriate to the signals we are getting. For instance, a severely withdrawn person may imagine that he has a girlfriend because the woman next door smiles at him as she passes him in the corridor. He is transferring onto her the expectations he developed from his mother's or schoolteacher's smile.
  Transference is pathological when it becomes abusive or harmful to ourselves or others. For instance, a person who has been the victim of abuse in childhood may transfer his feelings of low self-worth onto someone else and become a persecutor. The original victim now feels in control (as he believes his own abuser was). This is a counterphobic reaction that makes the victim/persecutor feel he is redressing the wrong done to him. This kind of transference may be part of the personality of serial killers. Carroll Cole, for instance, murdered women he believed to be dissolute. In his childhood, his mother was promiscuous and would force him to watch her acting sexually with other men, then later she would beat him to intimidate him into not telling his father. Notice also how his sense of being in control as an adult was confirmed by retaliation, the wounded ego's favorite equalizer.
  A male partner may have unresolved rage toward a mother who controlled or abused him. In adult life he may engage in the game of seduction and withdrawal. He invites a woman into his life and seems available for a committed relationship, but he keeps declaring his "doubts" and breaking up. Then he comes back and draws her in again, only to pull back soon after. What is going on? He is sincerely confused on the conscious level. Unconsciously, he is setting a scene of seduce-and-withdraw, a scene he may repeat often. When he seduces the woman in, he sees her come toward him with nurturing love. This love reminds him of mother's approach that became engulfing. Now, unlike in childhood, he can reject mother/women. The rejection of the woman in the present finally achieves a freedom from his smothering mother in the past. The wise woman will not go through this cycle of seduce-and-withhold more than once. The wise man will hightail it to therapy to work on a transference that has become a fear of and punishment of women. Of course, the roles can be reversed male to female also.
  We call Mother in New York and her first words are, "So you are finally calling me!" We feel judged and guilty. We react with apologies, but she continues to reprove us. Then we erupt into indignation, and an argument begins. Now the full scenario, so reminiscent of our past together, is being played out. We are still caught in a one-note relationship that misses out on the love that certainly exists between us but cannot peep out from under the double blankets of our guilt and her anger. Is the expression of that love what we have feared in one another for most of our lives? Do the guilt-tripping and resultant anger serve to keep us safe from ever being truly intimate with each other? Is this our game? An alternative to such stimulus-response behavior is simply to pause between them long enough to find a way to break the cycle. To pause is, admittedly, hard to do when we are so heated by that one and only still-so-powerful voice at the other end of the phone and of our lives. In any case, in this and in any altercation with a partner or family member, we can always end with our own silent loving-kindness practice: "May you and I love more authentically. May we both act from an enlightened place. May we/you be well and happy."
  Our present partner may serve as the most recent understudy for the original stars of our drama in childhood. We might ask, "What did my psyche see in her that made her so apt an actress for this role? Perhaps she was the most suitable scarecrow on which to hang the tattered rags of my past, rags of childhood promises believed but unkept." How ironic that we can use others in that way even though they have an integrity and personality all their own. It must be that transference is a technology of the psyche to recover its losses as Emily Dickinson says:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: For instance, a severely withdrawn person may imagine that he has a girlfriend because the woman next door smiles at him as she passes him in the corridor. He is transferring onto her the expectations he developed from his mother's or schoolteacher's smile.
  Transference is pathological when it becomes abusive or harmful to ourselves or others. For instance, a person who has been the victim of abuse in childhood may transfer his feelings of low self-worth onto someone else and become a persecutor. The original victim now feels in control (as he believes his own abuser was). This is a counterphobic reaction that makes the victim/persecutor feel he is redressing the wrong done to him. This kind of transference may be part of the personality of serial killers. Carroll Cole, for instance, murdered women he believed to be dissolute. In his childhood, his mother was promiscuous and would force him to watch her acting sexually with other men, then later she would beat him to intimidate him into not telling his father. Notice also how his sense of being in control as an adult was confirmed by retaliation, the wounded ego's favorite equalizer.
  A male partner may have unresolved rage toward a mother who controlled or abused him. In adult life he may engage in the game of seduction and withdrawal. He invites a woman into his life and seems available for a committed relationship, but he keeps declaring his "doubts" and breaking up. Then he comes back and draws her in again, only to pull back soon after. What is going on? He is sincerely confused on the conscious level. Unconsciously, he is setting a scene of seduce-and-withdraw, a scene he may repeat often. When he seduces the woman in, he sees her come toward him with nurturing love. This love reminds him of mother's approach that became engulfing. Now, unlike in childhood, he can reject mother/women. The rejection of the woman in the present finally achieves a freedom from his smothering mother in the past. The wise woman will not go through this cycle of seduce-and-withhold more than once. The wise man will hightail it to therapy to work on a transference that has become a fear of and punishment of women. Of course, the roles can be reversed male to female also.
  We call Mother in New York and her first words are, "So you are finally calling me!" We feel judged and guilty. We react with apologies, but she continues to reprove us. Then we erupt into indignation, and an argument begins. Now the full scenario, so reminiscent of our past together, is being played out. We are still caught in a one-note relationship that misses out on the love that certainly exists between us but cannot peep out from under the double blankets of our guilt and her anger. Is the expression of that love what we have feared in one another for most of our lives? Do the guilt-tripping and resultant anger serve to keep us safe from ever being truly intimate with each other? Is this our game? An alternative to such stimulus-response behavior is simply to pause between them long enough to find a way to break the cycle. To pause is, admittedly, hard to do when we are so heated by that one and only still-so-powerful voice at the other end of the phone and of our lives. In any case, in this and in any altercation with a partner or family member, we can always end with our own silent loving-kindness practice: "May you and I love more authentically. May we both act from an enlightened place. May we/you be well and happy."
  Our present partner may serve as the most recent understudy for the original stars of our drama in childhood. We might ask, "What did my psyche see in her that made her so apt an actress for this role? Perhaps she was the most suitable scarecrow on which to hang the tattered rags of my past, rags of childhood promises believed but unkept." How ironic that we can use others in that way even though they have an integrity and personality all their own. It must be that transference is a technology of the psyche to recover its losses as Emily Dickinson says: