
09 Oct Transference Remembering in Psychotherapy
“Transference is also an assimilation of what might happen in the future if we act on the impulse in the here and now, also as mirroring of the past”
Such reenactments are crucial disclosures about un-integrated, un-symbolized unformulated experience. Understanding the unconscious communication within a reenactment is often pivotal point in relationships or romantic relationship with a traumatized adult, in particular a sexually abused adult. Seen in this light, enactment is a way for a loved one to allow himself/herself to be known by co constructing, with his/her partner, a means of living out a new, less disabling version of the original trauma. In this co construction, cognitive symbolization of trauma occurs when the trauma is reenacted within a romantic relationship, reproducing the original interpersonal context but not leading to the original outcome. Once this happens, dissociated experience is transformed to internal conflict and human relatedness, which are more available for verbal consideration in psychotherapy or and in the relationship. By working through reenactments in the relationship with a skilled coach thus gradually obtaining access to the various multiple dissociated self-states which is liberating but also allows us to experience a much richer fuller life experience and helps us to love deeply.
Recurrent themes affecting the transference/countertransference {conflict} with people in relationship who have suffered trauma in early childhood, start with the a wariness of the relationship and the dangers involved in intimacy. In addition, dependency, reliance and counter dependent and counter phobic defenses tend to emerge, often-cloaked in overt idealization of the relationship or partner. In this idealization, you may expect your partner to be all attentive, nurturing, and non abusing parent who will heal and undo the trauma.
“Transference is the source of conflict but also expression of conflict”
Behavioral reenactments in relationships allow us to communicate previously dissociated and therefore unsymbolised, material to our loved ones. By exploring verbally what has been communicated through behaviour via conflict repair thus initiating a process by which the dissociated material becomes encoded in language, and therefore available for conscious consideration. Behaviours associated with a reenactment in the relationship are unconscious messages from one to another and to him/herself about a traumatic past. They represent an attempt to bypass the need for symbolized experience. Reenactments are most likely to occur when we might have a reduced capacity for self-reflection, another result of being unable to verbalise traumatic experiences that were never encoded when they first occurred, as a result of not having a present witness to their pain. Memories became trapped encased within a wordless world. Incapable of articulating what has never been symbolised verbally, we repeat behaviourally or reenact an aspect of this dissociated trauma.
The exploration of the reenactment is embedded in the romatic relationship. Each partner is both the magnet that draws out the reenactment and the architect of a transitional arena in which the partner experiences of self and other can be reconfigured in more harmonious ways.
In seeing relationships this way, thus relationships rely upon the hope that lovers together will become enmeshed in complicated reenactments of early unformulated experiences with significant others, that can shed light upon our current interpersonal and intrapsychic difficulties by reopening them in the romantic relationship, prematurely foreclosed areas of experience. If the reenactment is to be integrated as other than the original trauma, however something essentially different must happen which we call a corrective emotional experience. The relational models of transference and countertransference {Relational Conflict} are reenactments of different aspects of the dissociated relationships involved in victimization by a parent or a caregiver. The more trauma experienced in childhood, the more complicated the conflict and the greater difficultly with repair. Often abusive aggressive and painful reenactments are an inevitable part of the relationship with an abused especially sexually abused person and also an inevitable part of the working through in a romantic relationship with a sexually abused partner.
“We learn about normal function through pathology when things are working right you don’t notice them. Transferences comes to observation when it is maladaptive and non flexible”
Conflict is often Transference – countertransference reenactments in relationships which are vehicles for communication to each other about the internal relational experience of the child as he/she was being abused. As such they are powerful tools but they are also forceful and often coercive catalysts in the romantic relationship. Reenactment compels the coulples to experience each other’s original reactions to abuse, reactions that are dissociated aftermath to a deeply traumatic childhood experience. To heal the partner of the trauma, the other must experience that trauma in some way. The reenactment may be symbolic of the abuse but the feelings engendered in the relationship are very real. Theses may include helplessness, impotence, rage, inadequacy, shame, guilt, idealisation, omnipotence, overstimulation, humiliation, torture and fear, all internal states with which the couple is very familiar. Thus helping each other whose relationships and personalities are organised by dissociation involves a challenge psychological encounter with the trauma that caused the dissociation in the first place. We can can easily feel traumatised under such circumstances as strong reenactments and conflict in the relationship, yet it is important to remember that neither reenactments nor conflict reactions to them are necessarily mistakes rather they are unavoidable phases in the working through of traumatised dissociated people or unavoidable phases in the working through of a romantic relationship with a traumatised dissociated partner. A large premise of interpersonal neurobiology is that the brain is also pursuing healing. So we are compelled to reenact creating conflict in order to invoke a repair.
Transference
“The road to an increasingly secure relationship is usually and exceedingly rocky one precisely because the defenses we use to avoid the painful past often wind up provoking it’s recreation in the present.”
It has commonly been noted that a previously abused or neglected child who is now an adult in relationship tends to identify with their abusers and then to be transferentially
abusive/neglectful to their partners within the interpersonal/romantic relationship. In doing this they are repeating with their partner what happened to them as children. The abuse-victim relational configuration is particularly upsetting conflict within a romantic relationship because of its ubiquitous intense transference and countertransference enactments.
“The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence of that very doubling back upon himself, becomes in a flash able to raise himself into a new sphere. In reality, another world is born. Pierre Teilhard De Chardin”
4 stages of Transference Remembering in Romantic Relationship.
1.Relational memories from the triangular family life of the four to six-year-old child are generally revived by means of words, stories, symbols, and impulses that were painfully repressed at the time;
2.The self-consolidation and self-fragmentation relationship memories from the three-year-old relationship era are later remembered in the ways that people seek out, demand, and utilize or fail to utilize self-confirming interpersonal resonances in the present;
3.The four to twenty-four month relational bonding memories become available in the romantic interaction through the affective ways in which we experience each other and our interactions as good, ideal, and enhancing or as bad, abandoning, and damaging;
4.The relational traumas from the last trimester of intrauterine development and the first four months after birth are somato-psychically recalled later in life by people coming to experience intimate trust relationships as being characterized by cruel neglect, terrifying rejection, and life-threatening, body- shaking, and mind- shattering confusion and hatred which become systematically projected into the therapeutic/romantic situation and onto the person of the therapist and/or romantic partner.
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