The Power of Coincidence (32 page)

In grief, there is an element of inconsolability. In our needs, there is an element of unsatisfiability. In the face of life’s most profound questions, there is an unknowability. This fits with the work of Kurt Gödel, the Czech mathematician, who confirmed the “incompleteness theorem,” which states that in any mathematical system there are indeed propositions that can neither be proved nor disproved. These natural incompletions reflect the first noble truth of Buddhism about the enduring and ineradicable unsatisfactoriness of all experience. This is not only Buddha’s truth, it is the one that some of our children and punk rockers also proclaim.

Yet there is a positive side. Inconsolability means we cannot forget but always cherish those we loved. Unsatisfiability means we have a motivation to transcend our immediate desires. Unknowability means we grow in our sense of wonder and imagination. Indeed, answers close us, but questions open us. In accepting the given of the first noble truth without protest, blame, or recourse to an escape to which we can attach, we win all the way around.

Our realization about the ultimate inadequacy/unsatisfactoriness in life does not have to be a cause of suffering. We can relax into the transitory as natural. We can acknowledge that we are often easy to please but hard to satisfy. We can be content with
moments
of satisfaction, moments of fulfillment, moments of completion. We can notice that satisfaction with what is, in all its temporariness and unsatisfactoriness, grants us a liberating serenity.

The essence of ego-ignorance is its ongoing feud with the givens of life. Our unconditional yes to them lets moments be enough. We can then be like kaleidoscopes, joyous as stunning new designs appear and serene as they make way for other ones, even those not quite as stupendous. We recall the words of the ancient Greek poet Pindar: “Do not attempt to become Zeus; you have it all when just a
share
of beauty comes to you.”

The Birth of Our Expectations

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.

A lack of love means not receiving the five A’s of adult love:
attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection
, and
allowing
us to be ourselves. When we were not fulfilled in the past, we might seek those same five A’s from others, a reasonable direction to take. But without working on ourselves first, for example, by grieving our past, we are likely to solicit need-fulfillment from others with restlessness and compulsion. That spells out as a must-have energy from us that may turn off prospective partners. Transference can then be an obstacle to relationship. The more we can become conscious of our transferences, the more apt we are to find out what we need to work on ourselves, to lay our ancient hungers to rest, to seek out those who can be more effective at loving us. Our whole style becomes less pressured and more relaxed.

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.

Wanting the five A’s is not a sign of weakness nor a sign that a lot was missing in the past. It is always legitimate to want to be appreciated or prized, for instance. It is a sign of health when we acknowledge the legitimacy of our longings. That self-acceptance may settle into us as a
physical
sensation. It is akin to the special moment that occurs when learning to ride a bike. After falls and awkwardness we suddenly achieve a sense of balance, or rather it suddenly happens and permanently lasts. Applied to accepting our longings, this is the shift moment in which we hold these longings in our hearts without being so attached to having them fulfilled nor so angry at the partner who can’t seem to satisfy them. The longings for the five A’s then begin to stand alone rather than as justifiable only if they lead to fulfillment. We notice that we are feeling something existential, shared by all humans, rather than something unique to us. Compassion for ourselves and all humans may then awaken in us. A yes to our longings has led to a spiritual practice.

Like other animals, it is in our earliest relationships that we receive our most significant imprinting. From our experience in our family home, we form a concept about love. Then we are on the lookout for how future relationships match or do not match our model. This is the poignant origin of so many of our disappointments with others who do not measure up to a past they do not know. If our past was negative or hurtful, we may look for partner-candidates who will re-create that hurt, and then we can blame them, since perhaps we never fully felt or expressed our rage at a parent who wounded us that same way. This is how our demanding expectations are born, how our pent-up rage finally finds its chance to explode, how our hopes spring up or die.

Do We Hope or Despair?

If we missed out on one or all of the five A’s, two possible results may occur, both painful: We might now need them in an extreme way. Our heart is then a bottomless pit, never getting enough. A second alternative is despair, not believing that the five A’s of intimacy are there to be had, not trusting that anyone or anything can provide or foster them for very long. Such despair is deadly, since it finds no way to resolve itself.
How can I make despair a question rather than an answer?

Hope, expectation, and despair reside in all of us. Whichever happened in childhood lingers on in us and then becomes activated in an intimate relationship. We then transfer onto others our hope that they will come through for us, our expectation that they will make up for all our past deficits, or our despair of them ever really being there for us. We can even
cause
any of these three options to happen:

In the transference based on
hope
we ask those we love, often tentatively and indirectly, to provide us with what was missing from our past. We believe others, some others, can indeed be trusted to be there for us. In the transference based on
expectation
we demand this. In the transference based on
despair
we anticipate and fear repetition of failures at attuning to our needs. We imagine that an adult partner will disappoint us as our parents did, and we shame ourselves for being unworthy or blame our partners for being ungiving.

The first and second may lead us to cling and the third may lead us to run. These oscillate as figure to ground in the course of an adult relationship. Hope helps us trust the givens of our lives as ingredients of growth and helps us to say yes to them no matter what they lead to, that is, unconditionally. Expectation may lead us to attempt to force others to give us what we need, directly or in passively aggressive ways. Despair may turn some basic forms of trust that most people have accepted into disturbing questions, never fully settled:

Does life have meaning?

Am I am worthy to live and be happy?

Does the universe have a loving intent?

Can women/men be trusted to help rather than hurt me?

Is growth and change truly possible?

Relationship is often a forced rerun characterized by a troubled hope that this time around it might be better for us. We transfer our original dashed expectation onto a new source of hope. In that sense, transference represents a touching fact about us. We have an irrepressible longing for love no matter how often we are let down. We keep hoping for better than we had. Alternatively, we may despair of anything improving for us, based on a long-standing negative template. We do all that it takes to make either—or both—of these come true in a new relationship.

Thus, we engage in transference because of our need for a repetition of the negative past or because of our hope for something new in the present.
Perhaps this time my needs will be greeted with fulfillment rather than disappointment
. We may live in hope for what will be better or we may fear what will be the same or worse. Sometimes both happen at once.

Is there a middle way between hope and despair? It is the unconditional yes to the given of life that our needs are sometimes met and sometimes not, that life is not always predictable, that things do not always come out the way we want. Between the extremes of hope and despair there flies a wise owl. He is the one that lands not in the marshes of wishful thinking nor in the desert of despondency but on the tree of life, the reality of how things are in the human world. We can sit with him on any branch of mindfulness. There we feel a sense of divine balance and we realize that our unconditional yes was how we aligned ourselves to it. Wallace Stevens expresses it in his poem
Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction:

. . . not balances

That we achieve, but balances that happen
,

As a man and a woman meet and love . . . .

How Childhood Continues into Our Adult Relationships

In this section each paragraph gives a specific example of how transference moves from childhood into our adult lives and relationships
.

If in childhood our household was full of tension, especially if one or both parents were addicted or psychologically impaired, the cells of our bodies might still hold some of the original level of anxiety. We might notice two possible results. We cannot feel fully comfortable except in an adrenaline-driven relationship, job, or lifestyle. Or we might be on red alert for danger and thus become so self-protective as to be closed off from others. These are examples of how transference burrows into our very cells, even though our minds report there is no danger now. Our minds know well, but our bodies know better.

Instant anger is often a sign of transference. For instance, in a childhood in which a boy’s every move was scrutinized by his mother, his innate need for freedom of movement (the “A” of allowing that is often the dad’s role to ensure) was ignored and he felt stifled. Now when he is comfortably in his office at home and his wife calls to him: “What are you doing in there?” he hits the ceiling—feeling again the sense of intrusion by a woman. If he has explored his past, he may recognize his extreme reaction as part of a displacement from childhood. If he has not, he will take his anger out on her and blame her rather than taking responsibility for the work he has to do on himself. The work is addressing, processing, resolving, and integrating his mother issue.