Most of us have heard of the term displacement. It’s when we take our frustrations out on something or someone who had nothing to do with the triggering event. Well, we can think of transference as displacement’s “next of kin” because at first glance, they have core traits in common. Both are the results of transferring our emotions from one event to something unrelated. Displacement is how we “act out” the emotions while transference is more subtle, as it impacts our thoughts and ultimately, our beliefs.
Transference is how we take our thoughts and feelings from one situation and apply it to another. As we experience life, we end up assigning minor tells to new experiences. They are based off our past experiences and they help us anticipate if this is going to be a good experience or a bad one. We need some degree of this in our lives as it gives us a gauge of preparing for what happens next. So, it influences the assumptions we make, like first impressions. It’s also responsible for our triggers, especially those that don’t seem to be related to our past. This applies to both good and bad experiences, known as positive and negative transference.
Positive Transference
In a lot of ways, we can see positive transference as the Law of Attraction’s great influencer. When we notice a minor tell in a person or situation that reminds us of a good experience, we feel secure and therefore more open to them. In positive transference, whatever it is we are noticing is a detail that only happened to be a part of the good experience. In other words, this minor tell had nothing to do with what made the experience a good one. For example, say someone has memories of a close friend who always wore a bomber jacket. They see someone else in a bomber jacket and it triggers good thoughts about the one wearing the jacket.
My father’s side of the family was instrumental in influencing the sort of person I wanted to be. They were down to earth and accepting of others. Unlike my parents, they were naturals at being good, and there was never any effort at putting on appearances. Most of them were smokers, while my abusive parents were not. So, I developed more openness to those who smoked than those who did not. There was a predominance of dark hair, dark eyes, and olive complexions, while my borderline mother was blue-eyed and fair-complected. This influenced my own standards of beauty. I became a great admirer of Hispanic beauty, even though, to the best of my knowledge, there isn’t one drop of Hispanic in our bloodline. And yet, to this very day, all I can think is, “Wow! What beautiful people they are.”
Transference vs. Cognitive Bias
Some degree of transference is a natural part of our brain and body chemistry. It’s there to help us make split second decisions on what’s likely to be a safe, pleasant experience or a threating one. It’s only a problem when we live by the assumption in such a way that we reject contradictory evidence. In which case, we are using transference to build cognitive bias. For example, understanding that the one in the bomber jacket isn’t guaranteed to have any traits in common with a close friend just because they wear the same jacket. Just like I know that not all smokers are good and not all non-smokers are bad. I’m quick to notice beauty in dark hair, dark eyes, and olive complexions. However, I have also seen beauty in fair skin, light eyes, and light-colored hair.
Negative Transference
Negative Transference then, is when we use similar tells to make assumptions based on negative experiences. This one is a little more tricky to work through in real time than positive transference. That’s because the human brain is wired for remembering more bad memories than good. It’s what kept us alive in primitive times because we needed to remember the dangerous places to avoid or guard ourselves against. Our brains are operating the same way today: survive first, and then we can thrive. So, when we’re making our negative assumptions, our thoughts and feelings feel closer in real time than they would if we were making a positive one. It causes us to feel more guarded and therefore, less open to the clues that can assure us that we’re safe.
Let’s bring back the bomber jacket as an example. In positive transference, we would be more open to the one wearing the bomber jacket if it reminds us of a close friend who always wore one. Say this leads us to starting a conversation with this new person. We are more apt to accept the clues that tell us this person is not exactly like our close friend. The warm feelings subside as we see the person more than the jacket.
Now let us give the bomber jacket a different story. This time, we have memories of a schoolyard bully who always wore a bomber jacket. We get approached by a new person who is wearing a bomber jacket. We will be slower to trust this situation because painful memories create stronger emotional distractions, also known as emotional flashbacks (Trauma Glossary 2). To see the person more than the jacket, we must: 1) understand the trigger and 2) fully process the memory.
How Unprocessed Trauma Finds an Outlet
Ideally, home is the child’s secure base. They have a “safe person” that they can turn to and unload their stressful day without feeling judged. However, in an adverse home, there’s a complete breakdown of this. Home is the stressful environment and there is no safe person to help them process the ongoing trauma. Processing is key to seeing the situation clearly and validating our side. When we are unable to do this, our trauma gets trapped in our system. Then it copes by blaming (transferring) our bottled up thoughts and feelings on something safer than the original source of our trauma. This is how we sometimes develop bad feelings towards something without understanding why. And until we ask ourselves – When did this start? and What was the trauma that caused it? – we won’t understand why. Let’s examine my own transference so that you’ll understand what I mean.
My Transference
I love learning but on my own terms. Institutionalized learning (school, college, classrooms in general) makes my flesh crawl. The image of a prison and having my head monitored by the thought patrol spring to mind. I’d rather scour for my own resources, from articles, books, and sometimes videos. But the idea of sitting still in a classroom while at the mercy of one person who might never share intriguing knowledge feels like mental torture.
When did my disgust with classrooms begin?
1987, middle school: that was the year I became a space cadet. I went from an honor roll student to one who barely scraped by. My brain was dissociating (Trauma Glossary 2) on autopilot, but I didn’t know there was a word for it. So, I couldn’t understand why I was easily distracted by random, mundane things outside the class window. Then, the next thing I knew, someone was yanking me out of a blissful daydream.
I got addicted to living inside my head, because it was the only place I felt truly free. Like any addict, I found “good reasons” for neglecting other areas of my life in lieu of my next fix. Everything they were trying to teach me was either useless or I already knew it. So, that became my belief and I felt justified in my pursuit of the fantasy world. My indifference towards school lasted all the way to graduation.
What trauma caused my attention span to collapse so suddenly?
1986 was the year hell itself cracked open and swallowed me. I endured four major traumas that year and blamed myself for every one of them. Over the holidays, we moved out of state. So, in other words, 1987 started a “clean slate.” I was in a new state, new school, and new people. They had no way of knowing what happened to me in 1986, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell them. Check out the thoughts and feelings I received from that year and carried with me into 1987:
My home was a prison with no hope of release until I became a legal adult. Even the law didn’t care about me, so why would anyone else? 1986 taught me that I was weak and shameful, so I needed to just stop being me, but I didn’t know how.
Now compare my 1986 thoughts to where I described my feelings on institutionalized learning. Do you see the similarities? I felt safer inside the classroom than inside my home. Therefore, I transferred my thoughts and feelings onto school. And it became hard-wired into my psyche, all because it would take me until 2019 to process all those traumas of 1986 and then connect the dots.
But I’m trusting you, dear reader, to do one better than me. Processing your trauma into clarity and validation is so precious to your healing. That’s why this site will always fully define the problem and then wrap it up with ways we can work through it.
Tools and Additional Resources
Transference, among many other ongoing problems you may (or may not) have can be found in Trauma Glossary 2. There are also tools listed for it in Master Toolbox 1.
One of the suggested tools is using the cognition sheet. The cognition sheet is one of my favorite tools because we can use it on more than just transference. We can also use it to challenge those faulty beliefs our toxic parents engineered into our psyche. I wrote an article on all the ways we can use it with step by step instructions. That article is here. An interesting side note is, you will see another one of my transference examples and how the cognition sheet helped me connect those dots.
Finally, if you would like to learn more about the beliefs we developed and how they direct our lives, my article from last week and the week before may provide you with additional lightbulbs.