Understanding and working with our transference reactions : Staying With Feeling

I am cut off in traffic.  I take it as a personal insult.  The highway event is not personal, however, since the driver is cutting off a car, not a person.  He is not doing it to insult me but to get to his own destination as quickly as he can, with little regard for courtesy.  Personalizing is the sign of unconscious transferences.  We become conscious of the transference and learn from it when we notice and make our own psychotherapeutic intervention on ourselves.  “This level of reaction show me I am feeling something from my past that is unresolved.  This is not about that driver and me.”

Most of us can never fully imagine how insulted we felt in childhood.  Now, behind the wheel, we feel an insult as giant sized. In childhood we took abuse or insult in stride and made excuses for our family members or blamed ourselves in order to reduce the wallop.  As pain becomes familiar, it no longer registered as pain to us but as routine.  Little bodies could not endure as much as our adult bodies can endure.  Now in the car we can rage wildly, because it is all anonymous and we are ensconced in steel.  We can now feel safely what we could not feel before.  How much of our fury toward the other driver is really rageful grief for how cruel and disappointing our interfering mother was, or how our baby sister’s arrival in the family cut us off from so much of the affection to which we had become accustomed?  Are we recalling someone else who cut off our “Whee!” with a “Whoa!”?

The challenge is to sustain our feelings rather than become possessed by them – that is, swept away by them, compelled to act them out inappropriately.  This is the the powerless child set of reactions that lets feelings in then jams them up in endless recycling.

WE can look at rage as an example of a feeling that recycles hate and hurt within a transference which can be part of a sad and painful cycle, hurt, hate, hurt.  Someone has hurt us in the past.  We hate him for it.  We show our hate by hurting someone in the present who reminds us of him.  But our hurting that person does not satisfy our rage, because we are hurting the wrong person.  We are as upset and enraged as we are partly because what has hurt us in our present conflict recalls a hurt from the past from another person.  We are trying to get back at a phantom through a live person now.  So of course our hurt cannot be resolved, nor can our hate be dissipated.

We interrupt the cycle when we grieve the hurt rather than passing it on  This locates the issue in us rather than maintaining it as a transaction. Grief work leads to our letting go of resentment.   Since grief work leads to forgiveness, it is itself an act of love for ourselves.  Thereafter we respond to those who hurt us not in the manner of a prize fighter who damages his opponent.  Our style, is that of aikido, in which we work with someone’s aggressive energy in nondamaging but nonetheless self protective ways.

We might say that is rage with a blind, insatiable need for revenge.  The insatiable quality give us a clue that the anger is a repetition of transferences and projections that arose from ancient hurts.  Healthy people do not hate because they address and resolve painfu feelings, which is the opposite of feeding the unquenchable need to continue punishing.

People with spiritual consciousness do not hate, because they are committed to loving kindness.  People who are psychologically healthy do not hate, but resolve issues rather than turn them into feuds. People who do hate deserve our compassion, not our retribution, because if the circumstances were extreme enough, we too would probably become as confused as the haters, and become enmeshed in the same self defeating web of recycled retaliation.

Healthy adults let feelings in and through.  We simply stay with what we feel, and gradually a realisation comes. Feelings teach.  In relationship to the events of today, our feelings are our link to our poast.  We are then able to look at how our feelings connect to the past. By dealing with feelings as both real in the present, and connected to the past, we gain double benefit.  Our issues can reveal their roots to us when we take notice of the transference dimension in them.

If we feel stuck in a certain emotional state or resistant to change, we pratice simply staying with ourselves in our stuckness or resistance. We do this as we begin to trust the power of staying/sitting mindfully in our own reality no matter how uncomfortable or how seemingly useless.

We may then notice that nothing stays put for very long.  We notice an automatic, and gentle shift of some kind.  Our stuckness opens in some way.  We have stayed witin the lap of our own truth, and it transformed into a new truth.  To stay with our truth in a pause is to lean into it and, ironically, the learning readies us for standing.  To “stay with” becomes to “stand up.”

To stay with a feeling becomes a comfort, because it is an assurance that we will not abandon ourselves.  That committment to ourselves becomes a kind of protection because it is worth more than all our successes at escaping our feelings and eluding our own condition.  Even staying with our doubt, despondency, and utter vulnerability makes them all legitimate landscapes of our psychic life.

Our practice is to hold and to relate to our feelings as teachings about enlightenment.  The teachings emerged both from waht incites our feelings and from our ways of responding. Sadness teaches us about loss and impermanence.  Anger shows us how we react to unfairness.  Fear teaches us about how we handle danger and threat.  Joy teaches us about how we celebrate life.

We stay with ourselves by giving ourselves the five A’s : attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection and allowing.

When such staying power is applied to another person, it is committment.

(Extract taken from  : When the Past is Present : Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships, by David Richo)