When the Past Is Present by David Richo

Author:David Richo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

The Impact on Us

Here is another example of a primitive reaction and how it reveals transference: I am cut off in traffic. I take it as a personal insult. This highway event is not personal, however, since the other 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 an unconscious transference. We become conscious of the transference and learn from it when we notice it and make our own psychotherapeutic intervention on ourselves: “This level of reaction shows 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 just how insulted we felt in childhood. Now, behind the wheel, we feel an insult as giant-size. 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 became 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 or 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 powerless-child set of reactions that lets feelings in and then jams them up in continual recycling.

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