Transference

Hola mi Gente,

The big news today is the Cleveland Cavaliers, led by LeBron James, won the NBA championship after being down three games to one -- the first team to overcome those odds. LeBron James is often the public’s fave player to hate, so I’m glad he won another championship. If he stays healthy, he will be considered one of the greatest players to play the game.

The Map is Not the Territory

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

-- Simone Weil

Yesterday, I briefly mentioned the concept of transference. Transference is one of the cornerstones of psychoanalytic theory. Literally whole libraries could be filled on what has been written on transference, so it would be hard to give a simple and straightforward definition without falling into the trap of oversimplification. But that’s never stopped me before right? The way I was taught transference is quite simple: transference is a map you create out of your experiences in order to understand and navigate your world. What happens is that sometimes we use old maps that haven’t adapted to the current reality. This, in turn, creates pain.

Transference is important when attempting to understand online behavior and relationships because the potential for transference is huge. One year, I was able to organize an online group for a weekend in NYC. Over 100 people participated. People came from as far as the Artic Circle, California, Puerto Rico, Florida, Hawaii, and Texas, just to name a few places. We had a great time. However, there was a small group (that didn’t participate) that began accusing me of the most ridiculous things. I was shocked when it was brought to my attention that at least one or two people were spreading the rumor that I was hypnotizing people! LOL

::blank stare::

Simply put, transference is the tendency to recreate in our current relationships the patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that were formed early in our life, most importantly in the relationships with our parents and siblings when we were children.

Let’s do a quick exercise:

Think of your significant other, or your romantic relationship, or even a close friend. Think about some important personality characteristic of that individual -- a characteristic or trait in that person to which you have a strong positive or negative emotional reaction. Now think about one of your parents, or perhaps a brother or sister. Do they have that very same characteristic, and are the reactions you have to that aspect of them similar to those concerning your current close relationship?

I don’t need an answer... it’s an exercise. I’m just trying to better illustrate a concept.

I’m no Freudian (who is?) and one of the more salient critiques of psychoanalytic theory is that it places too much emphasis on the effects of childhood and family dynamics on the evolution of one’s personality. I happen to agree with that critique. Certainly, one’s personality continues to develop and change throughout the lifespan as a result of our friends, lovers, and new life experiences. It is not solely determined by how our parents raised us as children.

While we are not simply the products of our families, it still stands that our parents (or other parental figures) and siblings did indeed spend a great deal of time with us during our formative years, when our minds were young, impressionable, and eager to learn about how we humans relate to each other. Based on our relationships with them, we created maps or templates in our mind (schemas) about what makes up the expected ways in which people will behave in relationships. Modern research seems to bolster this claim: Our neurology is like a feedback loop and there is a strong “neurological imprint” created in early childhood. In other words, how we are nurtured (or not) as children has a direct impact on how our brains are formed, which synaptic connections are created, and in that way we are literally created. 

During childhood we formed basic impressions about the kinds of needs, wishes, fears, and hopes that shape relationships and our image of ourselves in those early relationships. Often we don’t realize these are our maps. They may be very different than the maps taking shape in the heads of other people. I had a good childhood friend of mine who was Irish-American and he was shocked and even surprised at how demonstrative my family was emotionally. He came from a family that rarely indulged in public shows of affection. I’m not pointing out this to say his was a better or lesser upbringing, but to articulate how his relationships expectations would be different from mine.

As we mature we carry these maps with us and, operating at an unconscious level, they influence the choices we make and the kinds of people we get involved with, as well as how we experience those people. For example, think of your first boyfriend or girlfriend, and how similar that person might have been to one of your parents (usually your opposite sex parent). This dynamic is often expressed in popular culture. For example, there was the song that claimed the man wanted to marry someone just like their mother. We often attach parental-like labels to our loved ones.

These maps also shape how people select and experience things in their lives that are inanimate, but are so integral to our needs and emotions that we want to instill them with human characteristics. As humans we can’t help but personify the objects of the world around us. It’s part of our neurobiology. We use our internal maps to humanize and shape our experience of cars, houses, pets, and yes, computers.

I mention computers because they can be a basic object for transference in that they are more likely to be perceived as human-like. Unlike TV, movies, or books, computers are highly interactive. We ask them to do something and they do it -- at least, they usually do. With the new generation of highly visual, auditory, and customizable operating systems and software applications, we also have a machine that can be tailored to reflect what we expect in a companion.

Computers, especially when used to engage social networking sites, are especially enticing objects for transference because they are vaguely human in that we believe there are humans at the other end attached to the computer. We develop relationships with people, read their “text,” and then create an image of those individuals. However, without ever meeting these people, where do we fill in the gaps? We fill it in from our experiences -- especially our early childhood experiences and subsequent important experiences. In short, we transfer our inner maps onto the text we’re reading.

One of the first things you discover as a therapist is that if you maintain a relatively neutral posture with your clients, the clients would begin to shape their perceptions of the analyst according to their internal models from childhood. When faced with an indistinct, seemingly malleable “other,” we automatically fall back on our familiar mental maps about relationships and use those maps to shape how we think, feel, and react to this new, somewhat unclear relationship. This whole process often is unconscious. We are so used to these old maps that they automatically start to mold our perceptions and actions without our really thinking about it.

If you don’t know me except for what I divulge here, then how can you attach any personality characteristic to me? Sure, there are actions that take place via cyber space: people meet, have sex and sometimes play out those confrontations in very ugly, humiliating, and public ways. But I am not one of those individuals. My personal life is mostly outside of my readers’ knowledge, so all that anyone knows about me is what I choose to write about. Anything else a reader might surmise is for the most part made up.

According to people I have never met, I am a hypnotist, a racist, a sexist, and a pedophile (there are more, it’s hard to keep track). But are any of these labels true? No one here can attest to the validity of any of these labels. In fact, these recriminations are actually projections -- transferences -- of the people attaching these characteristics. In effect, the individuals who go through these extremes are merely expressing their own experiences as filtered through their transference issues.

In this way, a woman suffering from low self-esteem who was physically or sexually abused by an alcoholic father may react disproportionately to something I might write about sex. To her, if I am advocating for more liberal means of sex education for young children, I am a pedophile. There are no corresponding facts to corroborate her hysteria, except for the action taking place in her mind. Furthermore, transference can be used to understand how persons play out there sexual lives in often humiliating and (online) public ways. How many of us have witnessed the consequences of a real life meeting gone awry and the subsequent social media posts detailing those meetings?

Or, if I write about racism, transference may compel a reader to call me a racist. The same can be said about anything any one of us write. When you attach a personality characteristic to someone you’ve never met, you’re actually saying more about your own experiences than anything else.

Those who demonstrate the most transference are the first to label it as “psychobabble.” However, I would submit that transference is important for understanding online relationships because the experience of the “other” person often is limited to text, there is a tendency for the user to project a variety of wishes, fantasies, and fears onto the figure at the other end.

Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. Our old maps may seem comfortable, but if we’re going to be happy, we must revise our maps in order to overcome pain or dysfunction.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Gift

Hola mi Gente,

The names and physical characteristics have been changed in order to respect confidentiality, but the following is true… I share it because I believe we sometimes forget why we’re here and what it is we’ve been promised. 

* * *

Mr. Mario

I don’t remember how it was he first came to me -- whether it was through my then director or immediate supervisor. Whatever the case, the first time I saw him, he was wearing these dark wrap-around sunglasses, the kind prescribed after cataract removal. When I asked if he had had the procedure, he answered in the negative, stating that he just liked the way they looked.

Then he did something that would come to define him in some ways: he squinched his eyes and despite his advanced age, he grinned that disarmingly boyish grin I would become all too familiar with.

He was in his mid-to-late 60s by the time we met, having been just released for a twenty-year-to-life prison sentence under the Rockefeller drug laws. Believe me: I’ve been around the block a few times -- this man was no drug kingpin. During his sentence, he suffered a stroke that partially paralyzed his left side and impaired his short-term memory. He was a Colombian national who was released with no papers. He had nothing: no social security card, no official ID -- nothing -- though the state knew enough about him to keep him caged for 20 years. He was in desperate need of medical services and a host of other things, but he had nothing. He was living with a cousin nearby my office, but his cousin was threatening eviction if he didn’t do something financially.

I couldn’t think of a more difficult case. If you sat here with me and attempted to create the most difficult case scenario, I doubt we could come up with something more difficult than Mr. Mario.

At first, I considered referring him to another organization since I really didn’t have any expertise with helping senior citizens and when I suggested an organization, he did something he would do again and again: he practically begged me to help him.

“You’re the only one that can help me, Mr. Rosario,” he insisted.

I told him he didn’t have to call me Mr. Rosario, that I preferred to be called Eddie.

“But Mr. Eddie,” he persisted, keeping the honorific, “you have to help me. No one else will help me and I heard you are the man that can help me!”

No matter how much I tried to impress upon him that he would be better served by another organization, he insisted that I was the best man for the job. “I know you can do it, Mr. Eddie,” he encouraged.

I didn’t even know where to start, but something about him touched me. I think it was partly his unwavering faith. I mean, this guy was in some deep shit and he was telling me everything would be fine. What's not to admire? Finally I relented and agreed to help on the condition that if I could find someone better suited than I, he would move on. He agreed to that condition, but with a confidence that it would never be needed.

It took us months and, honestly, there were days I have to admit dreading seeing Mr. Mario, as we would come to call him. But even on my worst days, when I was most busy, he would somehow melt my heart. When we would come up against an obstacle, or something seemingly impossible, Mr. Mario would assure me that I would find a way. Once I asked him, “Mr. Mario, tell me how we’re gonna do this because right now I don’t have a clue.” His answer? “Well, that’s why I come to you!”

The first issue we addressed was his short-term memory. We agreed that he would always carry a little notebook and that he would write important dates and information in that notebook. He was pretty good at that, though I think his short-term memory issues were sometimes selective. So, he would write things down in his little notebook and that took care of a lot of problems except when he would forget the notebook, which wasn’t often. One time, he lost the notebook and he was terrified. He kept at me in my office for about over an hour on that one.

Whether you believe Mr. Mario deserved such a harsh sentence or not is irrelevant, what most bothered me about Mr. Mario’s situation was the complete apathy with which the state dealt with his predicament. For example, one day Mr. Mario came into my office with a huge bruise on his leg and one on his face. He explained that he had slipped on some ice and had fallen on his way to a parole appointment. I was shocked that he was even being forced to visit his parole because he had a genuine medical condition. When I called his parole officer to inquire, her response was that I didn’t know “these people” how they always try to “get over.” When I informed the parole officer that I had copies of his medical condition and that he could probably sue the state if he got hurt, she calmed down a bit. Right after that conversation, Mario informed me that parole called to say they would be making house visits in the future.

My question was, and still is, what was Mario doing on parole to begin with? What harm could he cause? He could barely walk!

And that’s how we fought these battles, Mr. Mario and I. We would take one thing at a time because there were so many problems. And when we would win a battle, he would come to my office and proclaim, squinching his eyes, his face radiant with gratitude, “Mr. Eddie! You are the best, best, best, best friend I have! You are so good to me, Mr. Eddie!” He had this way of screwing his eyes shut and expressing this total gratitude that would make me forget everything-- all the battles, the injustices.

The ladies at the doctor's office loved him. Working together, somehow we managed to get Mr. Mario much-needed treatment before we were able to resolve the problem with documentation. The girls advocated for him and between all of us, we were able to get his Medicare.

Eventually we were able to get his social security and that was a whole other battle in itself. I didn’t want him walking around with cash in his pockets, so we had his check direct-deposited. I taught him how to work an ATM, but he could never really remember all the instructions, though I had him write it down. So when he needed money, he would come to my office and make me walk with him to the nearest ATM and withdraw money for him.

That was a battle… Eventually, he would learn to work the machine. He would take so much pleasure in the little things. Like the time I bought him a slice of pizza. He told me he hadn't had pizza in so long, he forgot how it tasted. He really liked pizza...

One day, I promised Mr. Mario that we would organize a trip and that I would take him and several of my other participants to the movies. He hadn’t been to a movie for more than twenty years. Imagine that... I remember how happy he became, screwing his eyes shut and telling me how much he would love that. Sometimes Mr. Mario would show up at my office because he had nowhere else to go, and eventually, we got him to join with a senior citizen club, but he didn’t like that too much.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to deliver on the one thing Mario most wanted: to have his parole relocated to Florida where his elderly parents still lived. His mother was a retired academic, his father a retired doctor. We tried different strategies: using my parole contacts with the higher-ups, drafting letters to different state departments, meetings with his parole. No matter what we tried, or who we called upon, nothing ever happened. We couldn’t get Mario’s parole relocated to Florida even though his parents owned their home and his brother and family would be able to take better care of Mr. Mario.

It was very frustrating for me and it was a cause of much stress and fear for Mr. Mario. That was the last battle and while we weren’t doing too well on that front, Mario would never tire of reassuring me that we would succeed. Then I didn’t hear from him for a few days. I became worried and when I called, I was informed by his cousin that Mr. Mario was moved to a nursing home. Apparently, Mario started a small fire when he forgot to turn off the stove. 

I was devastated.

A few days later, a social worker called from the nursing home asking me if I could come visit. It seems that Mr. Mario’s condition worsened and he was falling into a depression. Could I please come by, she asked. He was telling everybody I would help him.

A few days later, I went to visit Mario and as soon as I walked into his room, Mr. Mario did that thing he always did, scrunching his eyes and that fuckin' smile, as if his savior had come into the room. I sat and talked with him for little while and all the time he was plotting a strategy to get out of the nursing home. “We can do this, Mr. Eddie!” he hushed.

It was one of the saddest things. To see a man institutionalized yet again. For Mr. Mario, the nursing home was prison all over again and it was the cruelest act, the hardest hit. I had to look at Mr. Mario and let him know that I probably couldn’t help him. As I sat there, I remembered with a deep sadness that we were never able to go to the movies... I couldn't possibly fathom how Mr. Mario felt.

 

I didn’t see Mr. Mario again for about a month or two. I couldn’t bring myself to see him at the nursing home because a part of me knew that it was offering him a false hope. We would talk on the phone occasionally and all he would talk about was the possibility of his living his last years with his parents in Florida. I couldn’t crush his hope, but I couldn’t honestly tell him that I could help either and that’s what he wanted hear.

Time, as is the case, passed and then one day one of my co-workers rushed into my office and informed me she had seen Mr. Mario nearby. After work that day, I passed by his cousin's house -- I was sure it was a case of mistaken identity. The last time I spoke to the social worker, Mr. Mario had taken a turn for the worse, suffering another stroke and his depression had deepened.

Well, when I inquired -- fuckin’ Mr. Mario! -- I don’t know how or when or why, but he somehow managed to get his parole relocated to Florida after all. At least that’s what his cousin told me before slamming the door in my face.

I stood there laughing like a lunatic. Mr. Mario had pulled it off! He became free -- at least for a little while. All I could think of was Mario basking in the Florida sun, squinching his eyes and that look of total gratitude on his face.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Sunday Sermon [Guilt and Forgiveness]

Hola mi Gente,

A friend posted the following the other day and I feel it bears repeating:

“… Tamir Rice's mother was sent a bill for the ambulance transport that took her 12 year-old son to the hospital where he died from a police officer's bullets. It reminds me of the more barbaric countries that send the family a bill for the bullet used to execute their relative.”

 -- Caren Kornfield Rago

* * *

Guilt

Love and guilt cannot coexist,

and to accept one is to deny the other.

-- A Course in Miracles

Feeling guilty is just another way to rationalize behavior that defeats your happiness. Feeling guilty is an indulgence -- a selfish and twisted way for you to continue beating yourself into the insanity of committing the same actions and expecting different results.

I once offered forgiveness to an individual who had wronged me and her initial response was to tell me how it cut her to the heart. She went on about how nice I was (I was not), how I didn’t deserve her treatment of me, blah blah blah. Her eventual response was silence. Years later, I ran into her by chance on the street and she began to cry. She told me that she had just come from her therapist and that she had been talking about me -- about how she squandered what could’ve been something special and beautiful. How she always pushed what was good and decent away. She was so beside herself, all I could do was hug her and assure her everything would be all right.

I have a funny feeling I’ve become the subject of too many therapeutic sessions. For the record, I do not want to be anyone’s therapist or therapeutic subject matter. If you are a woman, all I want is for you to wrap your legs around my waist in lustful entanglement. I am kidding! Yeah, yeah, I sometimes trespass certain boundaries, it is OK.

The sacred offering of forgiveness is not about allowing someone to take advantage of you. Few people know that forgiveness -- true forgiveness -- must be first cultivated internally before it can be given away. Once you forgive yourself, you come to the full realization that there is no “other” to forgive. Paradoxically, forgiveness is probably one of the most selfish of acts.

Of course, because I am a very flawed human being, my first impulse, if you commit a wrong against me, is often anger followed by revenge fantasies. But as I (hopefully) evolve into a more conscious being, my interest is in helping you grow out of that mode of living. True growth is the process of becoming willing to have defects of character removed. It’s not even about having them removed. That may never happen. Growth is about becoming willing to have defects of character removed. When you become willing, you shed the guilt and start doing the real work of becoming. Lying, cheating, dishonesty, the whole cast of character defects -- become fodder for your growth:

Yes, I lied to you, this was why, and I want to stop. And I because I love you, I want to work with you so that we can become truly intimate and loving.

The path of less resistance is to continue to feel guilty than to actually grow. When you feel guilt, you are in the grips of your ego. Guilt isn’t about someone else, it is about you because only your ego can experience guilt. Guilt will always disrupt your growth, will always sabotage you, and will always compel you to make the same mistakes.

You will be treated like shit, because guilt demands that you should be treated like shit. You will meet assholes who will defile you because your guilt demands it.

The end of your guilt will never come as long as you buy into the notion that there is a legitimate reason for it. For you to be released from guilt you must first learn that guilt is insanity; it always is and always has been and will always be. Guilt has neither reason nor rhyme.

And here’s why:

Guilt asks only for punishment and as long as you buy into it, you will be punished -- always. You will be punished and be lost in a world of illusions and shadows. My former lover wants to be punished. And in a different (erotic) context, this can be a very attractive trait. However, for reasons that were very valid at one time, she does not understand kindness. And the fact remains that she is not too different from many women and men I know. Be nice to them or take away their reasons for feeling guilty and they will run away. The Ex is attracted to my light, but I have noticed that whenever I shine for her, she disappears. No sooner that my dark side appears, she can’t see enough of me. It is all quite complicated, but I believe that she is uncomfortable with unconditional regard. 

I cannot do that -- I’ve never been able to do that -- to manipulate fear and guilt for sexual or any form of gratification. It is not worth my peace of mind. The Ex replays the scene: she disappears for a little while, suffers some more, and then somewhere in her mind, she remembers the light and calls to me. She suffers a lot, I think, and it saddens me to see her suffer. Many of us suffer in this way... Maybe one day she will come to the realization that she does not have to suffer needlessly. I do not know. All I can do is keep an open heart and radiate light.

A mind without guilt cannot suffer. Your freedom -- indeed, your very salvation -- depends on your escape from the self-made prison of guilt.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…