The Power of Coincidence (33 page)

BOOK: The Power of Coincidence

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During my marriage, I recall occasionally, in my thoughts, confusing my wife with my mother. I also recall being unkind to my wife occasionally, even though she was kind to me. I wondered over the years why I was like that toward her. Recently, I was thinking of my ex-wife and again used the word
mom
. Suddenly I had my answer: I was getting back at mother for her harshness toward me in childhood through my wife, the new significant woman in my life. It was an important insight for me. I explained all this to my ex-wife, now a friend, and I apologized for my unconsciousness. I saw so clearly how transference can be dangerous to a relationship as long as it remains unconscious.

When a transference reaction becomes conscious, we may suddenly recall the exact nature of the original events of our past. For instance, when my sister continually criticizes me and I keep taking it, I may one day recall that this is precisely how my mother treated me. Then I may speak up, usually in anger, and that reaction will be directed at both the sister in front of me and the mother behind her. In another example, a man sees how his wife shows the five A’s to her son and he is envious. Her affection is reminding him of what his own mother did not give him. The signal is envy; the work is grief for what he missed out on. Here is a final, more poignant example: From the way I love my son, I realize my father did not love me.

We were often blamed in childhood, so now we hear blame when others express healthy anger toward us. We feel criticized when others give us reasonable feedback. Even healthy anger directed at us by another feels scary when it is picking up on transferred energy. For instance, it may remind us of how father came at us so menacingly in childhood. The reminding can be conscious (our minds remember) or unconscious (our cells remember). Our fear of others’ anger may keep us always on the alert, and we become adept at smoothing things over so that anger will not erupt. Such alertness is itself a form of pain.

A wife may act like a mother; a husband may act like a father. This is the equivalent of reliving our parent’s life rather than becoming persons in our own right. Erotic passion for our partners fades quickly when we become parent figures. Is the transference then a way of avoiding intimacy?

Transference may explain why we overstay in relationships that do not work so well. We may be too hasty in blaming ourselves as needy or foolish. Perhaps we hang on because we are trying to work out a whole lifetime of issues and this one relationship seems so apt a stage on which to accomplish it. We stay because the dim and flaring lamps of our childhood still light the stage.

A distressed, unfulfilled past calls for grief work before it can be laid to rest. When we find a partner who seems to offer the fulfillment of all that we missed in childhood, we jump into his arms. He stands in as the parent who this time will come through for us. We thus hop over the grief requirement. Then grief becomes the missing link in our journey toward psychological health. Transference makes the missing link look like a bridge. This mistake is trickster energy, since it eventually shows us our skipped step rather than letting us skip it. We soon find all the same issues arising with a partner that we hoped to skip over from childhood. Under the bridge we constructed, our psyche was constructing its own bridge to export its shipment into our adult relationships. But, ah, the missing link of grieving turns out to be a required link between a wounded childhood and healthy adult intimacy.

Transference can happen because of a similarity between a parent’s psychological type and a partner’s. For instance, an introverted husband may trigger our impatience with our distant, introverted dad. We might be attracted to an introverted, unavailable person so that we can finally turn him—that is, dad—around.

Our parents had the power of life and death over us. We had to please them in order to survive in the earliest era of our existence. Now, when we transfer the parental imago onto someone, with the transference might come the same need to please. We give our power over to the other, since survival and likability seem to be identified, as they were in childhood. This is how our unconscious transference can prevent us from growing up.

We might notice transference when we idealize or demonize someone. In such primitive transference we are seeing a person in the larger-than-life size our powerful parents had in our childhood. In such mistaken identity we are apt to give away our power and serenity to the idealized other, who has become so necessary to our happiness, or the demonized other, who so strongly evinces our fear and our need to be on the defensive. Someday we may resent how much of our mental space was taken up by that one little person whom we so inflated. The stature of all our inner figures, like our own ego, has to be reduced to more appropriate dimensions if we are ever to be free.

Problems with authority take the form of automatic opposition or unquestioning obedience. We then find ourselves either unable to trust or overly trusting. Such reactions are often a sign of a parental transference. We are still enraged at the mother who was so controlling. We cannot trust the person who does that because he is attempting to override our deepest needs, values, and wishes—the core of who we are. A controlling father who insisted we meet his expectations engenders anger in a child, and that anger will later find a target at which to aim itself, such as a boss or any authority figure. Anger is specific to a person or circumstance, hence limited; rage is diffuse and without limits. It gathers momentum from long-standing insult and unfairness that has never been addressed or redressed. When we were pressured by our parents not to cry or to show anger or to be afraid, we might have come to believe that feelings could be controlled. That myth can explain our attempts—or our need—to be in control now.

We may notice that a certain touch, especially by a stranger, takes on greater meaning than fits the bill. This can be a clue that we may be so needy for a sense of acceptance that we make more of a touch than is meant by it. Perhaps in childhood we constructed our sense of ourselves from just such fleeting moments and now we transfer that power onto what happens in the present between us and others. But our sense of self was never meant to come from that quarter. What we feel may be a faux sense of self from a misinterpreted moment. Sadly, for some of us, even the sense of neediness sometimes stands in for a sense of self. Then we see a partner as a
source
of happiness rather than as a
context
that fosters it, the more adult version of relating to an intimate partner.

It will be tough to let go of the relationship, even when it does not work, if our identity has melded in with another person.
Could it be that one of the reasons it is so hard to let go is that so much of ourselves has been transferred onto others? This may account for our belief that we will not survive if we leave or lose a relationship
.

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 may act kindly and want to be kind. Yet our unconscious may be mean in spite of our conscious intentions. We occasionally have mean thoughts or do things that are cruel. Both seem out of character, and we wonder, “Where did
that
come from?” It is as if some of our inner territories were never reached by the missionaries of loving-kindness, nor yet colonized by a civilized empire. For instance, we did not intend to be aggressive when we teased, tickled, or pinched our partner. Yet these are indeed aggressive, pain-producing acts. We are consciously playful, but our
hostile unconscious
has kicked in. This may be reminiscent of how our otherwise loving parents or siblings in childhood came at us in similar “friendly fire” ways.

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.”

A final comment on the above example may help us explore one more angle of ourselves. Our childlike reaction to our mother shows that we have a psychological issue that is regressive, still caught in the past. Another example might be that of adult siblings who are still acting like rivals rather than accepting the given that parents will sometimes prefer one of their offspring over the other. We can ask ourselves how many of our issues are those of childhood and how many are truly adult? Not only are we meant to grow up, but our concerns are also. Once we say yes without stammer or stutter to how the past played out for us and truly let go of it, we make room for adult issues, such as building self-esteem, successful relationships, and spiritual consciousness.
Is this what we are trying to avoid when we don’t let go of the past?

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: