Emotions are not fixed or permanent; they are fleeting, shift, vary, alter, and evolve as you experience the world every hour of the day. This is what makes them so challenging to identify, process, and not to be consumed with, which can lead to feeling paralyzed and unable to function adaptively.
In the world of psychotherapy, being able to analyze shifting emotions—including and especially transferred feelings—is the key to understanding past experiences, making breakthroughs, and treating Mental Health Disorders. Transferred feelings can create ruptures in the therapeutic relationship and create confusion for patients. Under the care of a seasoned and skilled Licensed Clinical Psychologist, however, those same feelings can offer valuable insight into the client’s personal experiences, past history, childhood traumas, adulthood traumas, impairments, the severity of their psychiatric disorders, and the current state of mind.
Learn more about how transferred feelings influence Mental Health treatment with this guide to identifying positive and negative transference.
What Is Transference?
The term transference refers to when feelings that you have regarding someone in your personal life to be projected onto a different person. In many cases, that person can be your treatment provider. For example, someone who has lost a mother or never had the proper care, guidance, parenting, and nurturing from a parent might project their desire to be cared for and nurtured onto another person in their life.
In Psychotherapy, transference refers specifically to when a patient transfers feelings from another past relationship, prior traumatic injuries of childhood, unresolved traumas throughout their life, familiar dynamics in relationship encounters onto their psychologist, therapist, treatment provider, or professional relationships and personal endeavors. There are different types of transference: positive, negative, and sexualized. Each of these involves different emotions and, as a result, different behaviors and reactions.
Transference can be confusing, maladaptive, and impairs your ability to resolve your clinical needs and positively address your psychological disorders. Every type of transference can have varying consequences that can be very taxing, exhausting, challenging, and paralyzing for the patients if they are not able to adhere to treatment protocols and evidence-based treatment plans or continue to project and transfer their own personal feelings by acting out and rehearing the dynamics that have negatively impacted their functioning and outcome in their adult life. That said, patients can also learn to practice positive transference through treatment compliance, humility, vulnerability to be honest, create a positive therapeutic environment by not being disruptive or violative of professional boundaries. Instead, they need to practice decorum, alliance, transparency, rapport, and full treatment compliance to resolve and treat their psychiatric disorders in a positive and collaborative environment. Understanding this is the key to gaining insight from transference when it occurs.
Positive Transference
Positive transference occurs when a client projects the positive feelings of a certain relationship onto their Licensed Clinical Psychologist. This type of transference revolves around happy and enjoyable emotions such as love, care, respect, compliance with treatment, secure attachment, safety, and peace. It causes you to refrain from projecting and transferring your negative childhood experiences or adult traumas onto your treatment provider. You might view them as nurturing, generous, forgiving, skilled, experienced, educated, well-versed, brilliant, and understanding.
It can cause you to respect and trust your Licensed Clinical Psychologist, in order to gain insight and benefit from therapeutic interventions, practicing professional boundaries, and transforming your life and future.
Negative Transference
Negative transference is the opposite of positive transference. It occurs when you project negative parts of your past relationships, childhood traumas, adulthood failures, disappointments, personal or professional challenges onto your Licensed Clinical Psychologist, therapist, and treatment provider. You might see them as uncaring and continue to demand more time and more attention to compensate for your inner void, profound emptiness, lack of social skills, poor cognitive processing of positive feedback, and inability to build, cultivate, maintain, and nurture positive alliance in your therapeutic experience. Negative transference can include feelings of doubt, anger, anxiety, sadness, paranoia, rage, hate, phobia, and fear.
These feelings come from key relationships from your past and insecure attachment with your primary caregivers that have made you feel small, broken, unworthy, unreliable, disruptive, needy, or unwanted. As you learn to positively address those experiences in therapy by refraining from acting out behaviors, attention-seeking, disruptive patterns, doorknob therapy, and instead learn to practice professional decorum and be respectful of professional boundaries, it is easy to turn those negative feelings of the past traumas into positive behaviors.
Sexualized Transference
Sexualized transference occurs when a patient transfers feelings of romantic or sexual attraction onto their Licensed Clinical Psychologist. These feelings stem not from the psychologist themselves, but from past relationship dynamics—especially dynamics you revisit and work through in your therapy sessions. These past relationships can be healthy or unhealthy. Either way, the projection of emotions, attraction, and attachment can create confusion and harm the boundaries you and your Licensed Clinical Psychologist rely on.
It is important to note that sexualized transference is not always explicit in nature. In addition to sexual attraction, it can involve feelings of romance, emotional intimacy, and even reverence. These feelings can create awkward or uncomfortable dynamics that detract from the intention and value of your therapy sessions.
Identifying Where Transference Stems From
Transference can stem from many different kinds of relationships. The emotions you project come from childhood traumas of insecure attachment with primary caregivers, neglect, physical or sexual abuse, past romantic failures, lack of mentorships, or even traumatic experiences with friends, supervisors, employees, or coworkers. For example, maternal and paternal transference occurs when you project feelings from a mother or father figure onto your treatment provider. Depending on the nature of your relationship with your parental figures and childhood styles of attachment, this can create either positive or negative transferences or projections onto your present relationships and endeavors.
Transferences can also stem from the positive or negative sibling dynamics throughout your life. If you have a sibling who you admired or who took care of you, you might subconsciously project that admiration, care, and attachment onto your treatment provider or adult relationships. However, if you experienced negative transferences with your siblings through competitive behaviors and lack of positive alliance or inability to respect and look up to them, then you will learn to repeat the same patterns in your adult relationships.
When Can Transference Help?
Identifying positive negative, and sexualized transference can be a productive part of Mental Health treatment. Licensed Clinical Psychologists work to understand transference when it occurs. They analyze your state of mind, your behavioral patterns, transferences, treatment compliance, ability to build alliance, transparency, rapport, and projections at play so that they can formulate the necessary interventions and plans required to target your cognitive distortions and psychiatric disorders.
By doing so, Licensed Clinical Psychologists can learn more about a client’s thought process, value systems, self-fulfilling prophecies, thought patterns, reality testing abilities, and perspectives in life and relationships. This allows them to accurately identify the varying sources of emotional distress, psychiatric disorders, and negative behavioral patterns to address transference, projections, Mental Health Conditions, and other factors at the root. This is what leads to effective, optimal, successful, and long-lasting Mental Health treatment.
Transference-Focused Therapy
Recognizing when transference occurs is difficult, confusing, and often uncomfortable, but a Licensed Clinical Psychologist can intervene. Through Transference-Focused Therapy, Licensed Clinical Psychologists help clients recognize the driving factors behind unhealthy thought patterns, emotional dysregulation, impulsivity, lack of treatment compliance, acting out patterns, disruptiveness, paranoias, and maladaptive behaviors.
Transference-Focused Therapy is a common form of treatment for Mental Health Disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorders, Anxiety Disorders, and Depressive Disorders. It can also help with anger management, emotional regulation, relationship coaching, social skills building, cognitive processing, communication skills, and more.
If you are looking for a Licensed Clinical Psychologist who provides Transference-Focused Therapy, contact Blair Wellness Group to see how our evidence-based treatment plans can help you.
