If you’re familiar with the psychological term “transferance,” you probably associate it with a person in therapy transferring certain feelings onto their doctor. Yet, the meaning of transference is a bit broader and refers to a redirection of emotions, often that originate in childhood, onto someone in the present. “Transference is a very fundamental process that human beings are constantly doing for better and for worse.” Because this is not a conscious process, it can be very hard to wrap our head around the fact that the projections or assumptions we make about others have a lot to do with something that isn’t even happening in the here and now.
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As human beings, we’re designed to believe our own perceptions. In our relationships with other people, we tend to always trust our own opinion or think we’re right. However, if we were to take into account that some of our emotional reactions are based more on what happened to us than what’s happening to us, we might be a bit more humble. So much of the filter through which we view ourselves and the world around us has to do with our early life and the adaptations we made to our specific surroundings.
Humans are adaptive creatures. As kids, we adjust to our social environment as part of our survival. Our sensory pathways start to develop as early as three months before we’re even born. The first six years are a critical period in which we lay down many neural circuits of our brain. Events that occur in this timeframe can therefore shape how reactive we are and how triggered we’ll be into different states later in life. Because of this, any early adversity we experience heavily influences how we process the world around us.
Our attachment style with key figures in our formative years become internal “working models” we develop of how relationships function, thus influencing how we perceive or experience interpersonal connections throughout our lives. We may grow up questioning if others are trustworthy or if it’s safe to express what we want. We may feel ready for people to turn on us. We may start to see the people closest to us in our adult lives as being similar to people in our family. Our early attachment patterns can skew our reality and distort the ways we see others, believing them to be more critical, rejecting, controlling, possessive etc. than they actually are.
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