When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships

by David Richo

We can refuse to engage with others when they are attached to their unwarranted assumptions about us and refuse to open a dialogue with us.

We can show compassion for the pain behind a transference, the pain of unfinished business from a distressing past now foisted onto our relationship.

We can simply notice negative reactions from others without letting them stop or drive us into countertransference reactions.

Transference-like expectations and fears are ubiquitous in daily life, and all actions are influenced to a degree by hopes carried forward from the archaic past. —Ernest Wolf, Treating the Self

Transference fears huddle in our relationships, often without notice or name, but they do not have to stay hidden.

Something happens and we immediately imagine that the worst will certainly follow. We then either become passive or we overreact. Our minds often fail to notice alternatives, but rather keep coming up with reasons to fear even more. Fear is often a failure of imagination, a loss of that most self-expansive of all our gifts.

Yet, we can trust the possibility of love and courage by recalling times when we did act in just those ways.

Early-childhood layers of irrational fear and fixation do not go away; we simply pile new layers on top of them.

Fear and needy craving become habits and they hang on long after there is anything to be afraid of or anything for which to yearn.

We may even conquer fear in some ways, yet continue to believe ...

Irrational fear and addictive fixation are also associated with delusion, since we may fear what is not truly threatening or desire what we do not really need.

For example, we may be fearing rejection because of the isolation into which it thrusts us. Now, as adults, we have built up a reliable support system and yet we still fear rejection by some powerful—that is, transference-laden—individual in our lives.

We also often fear a cause when a consequence can no longer happen. For instance, we may fear abandonment by a partner when a consequence that is applicable only to infa...

There are four tensions that impact all of us. Each is a given of life and a core issue in relationship. Each evokes fear and is a focus of transference. Each originates in our past and moves itself into the present. We cannot eliminate these four hurdles but we can learn to scale them with equanimity. 1. Comings and goings 2. Giving and receiving 3. Being accepted and being rejected 4. Letting go and moving on

Each of these elicits primitive needs, beliefs, feelings, expectations, and reactions—the building blocks of transference. All four become nodes of anxiety throughout our life cycle, because of their connection to our survival and because most of us do not trust our ability to deal with them.

The less trustworthy our world was in childhood, the more complicated are our relationships later.

The four tensions that so often scare us can also be used as defenses or weapons. We might leave as a way of avoiding, escaping, or punishing. We might give as a way of creating dependency on us. We might let go as a way of abandoning our responsibility.

control is impossible in the face of these tensions; they can only be entered with an attitude of “Yes, now what?

Comings may bring up fear of the challenge in something new or fear of the loss of old comforts.

Goings may bring up a fear of abandonment or a sense of being cast adrift, terrifying prospects when so much of what our life is about is tied to other people.

Sensitive people are more apt to notice the subtle forms of closeness and distance...

Our fear of one more betrayal or one more failed connection may be what we are attempting to stave off by our expectations that others never leave us.

Breathing is a living symbol/reminder of how we continually let in what comes and release what is ready to go.

Love is giving and receiving the five A’s: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing.

We say and believe we want to be loved, but it takes courage and skill to be loved by someone. It takes openness to receiving, and that can be scary if we have to be in control of all that happens.

The physical heart is a metaphor for our emotional life. Deep in our hearts we carry ventricles (openings) seeking closeness and love. But sitting on top of them are the atriums (chambers/vaults) of fears and defenses.

We all contain both, but as our self-trust/self-esteem grows, we learn to manage these defenses so that they help us achieve intimacy and handle disappointment.

When we are disappointed or feel shortchanged because we did not receive all that we wanted from someone, emotionally or even financially, we discover a clue to our transference...

In any case, when someone leaves us in our life here and now, the continuing interchanges and attunements on which we thrive come to an abrupt halt. Our identity has now entirely gelled in the other person’s mind with no further chance for input from us.

This is another reason that an abandonment hits us with such a thud. The disengagement results in our image becoming frozen in the latest form in which it occurred to the other person. In effect, we can no longer reestablish a sense of who we are to each other. Abandonment places an embargo on growing, a frightening option for beings who flourish by evolving.

Abandonment may happen as indifference, a disengagement of one partner from the arguments and dramatic expression of feelings that were...

A person may break up with us and then act as if we never had a relationship at all or that it was not as important as he had made it seem originally. He may not validate our own sense of loss or even acknowledge our presence in public at all. That hurts.

I align myself to reality rather than attempt to redesign it to appease the status quo.

Gradually, as we become more conscious, we move into the pure adult present where not all will be given and not all will be received and we can still survive. That “and” is our equanimity. By it we let others off the hook and act in accord with the givens of others’ limitations. Equanimity is not insensitive distancing or cold neutrality. It is rather an embrace of experience without the mind-sets of “grab if pleasant” or “run if unpleasant.” Instead, all conditions are held with equal composure.

Strength is the ability to give and forgive without losing ourselves in the process.

Letting go is tossing away our pennant of control.

The ego uses control to mask its fear or run from it.

The path to liberation from fear is, paradoxically, not to get back in control but to enter into the space around and in our helpl...

This is how we let go of the illusion of control and open to a new kind of power in ourselves, the power to face and handle what life...

The Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik identified the “Zeigarnik effect” in 1927. He demonstrated that incomplete tasks are retained in our memories much longer than completed ones. This accounts for our tendency to hold on to negative or defect-revealing memories longer than positive ones.

Autopoiesis is the inner drive in something to become itself and instinctively to act in ways that foster its own self-realization.

Our full humanity is not only achieved by becoming physically and psychologically healthy but also by becoming enlightened and loving persons.

Autopoiesis happens best when our heart responds rather than our head takes control, when our soul moves us rather than rules and concepts.

when we practice mindfulness in relationships, we are not forcing ourselves to be what we are not. Rather we are aligning our behavior to who we really are in any given moment. We are not rubbing against the grain when we practice loving-kindness; we are going with the grain of love and kindness that underlies, animates, and accounts for our existence. In our deepest being, we want to love everyone, because our deepest being is love.

“My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite.”

We may unconsciously be seeking a partner who will repeat the nonfulfillment of our needs, just as happened in childhood. This may happen in one relationship after another. Ironically, we may associate repetition with safety.

In transference we attempt to complete with new people what is still incomplete with the original people. Transference is, in that way, a technology of autopoiesis, of self-creation. By transference we open the healthy possibility of self-completion. By keeping it unconscious we curtail its benefits; by making it conscious we capitalize on them.

“Have patience with everything unresolved and try to love the questions.”

Abandonment fears thrive on a mistaken belief: “I will die if I am left alone.” This fear is likely to arise when there is a combination of a trigger point, such as waiting for a delayed friend at the airport, and a low ebb in personal strength because of a recent crisis or stress. Then we are more likely to be catapulted into our primitive mode, which is never too far below the level of ordinary consciousness, and imagine the worst is happening.

The psyche is like a file cabinet belonging to someone with very few folders. She therefore has to place files in folders with very general rather than specific or exact titles. “Abandonment,” for instance, is one title of a folder in the cabinet. “He didn’t call back,” “He didn’t notice my new dress,” “He didn’t kiss me the way he used to,” “He didn’t come back home at all”—all these go into the same folder irrespective of their varying levels of importance. They hit with equal impact.