Transference is like dreams; it's there whether you realize it or not. An expression, mannerism, turn-of-phrase, anything might remind you of your mother, father, sibling, abuser, boss, someone and be positive or negative depending on your initial reaction to that "first" expression/mannerism. Transference is talked about in therapy because we literally don't know much about the other person, the therapist, so it can't be the other person we react to, but something else from our past.

Especially in the first couple years, before you get a good working relationship with your T, no matter what your T does, your head is filtering it through your old defenses. My T would ask questions, to get a better understanding of me and where I was coming from and my history, etc. and I converted it into an interrogation, thought she was trying to trap me because that's what my stepmother use to do. Especially "Why" questions as I never had the "right" answer for my stepmother, they were always double bind questions and I couldn't get there from here. That's the purpose of transference and working with it, to realize that each person you interact with is themselves, not whoever you are in the habit of working with growing up; yes, my therapist could technically have been trying to trap me but I needed to learn to question and figure that out, for each interaction, not "assume" or do the default, why-question-must-always-feel-bad.

If you think about it, it is all in our head; that I decided that my stepmother was always out to get me instead of looking at each interaction (such that later she had to say, "that's an observation, not a criticism" -- I could no longer tell the difference, everything was a criticism), that happens with our head and what we view as "positive". That I view my stepmother as not listening and my T as listening, that's positive transference; I called my T on that once; it was during our silent years, I couldn't talk and while we were just sitting there by the half hour, she started to doodle one day I guess I thought she should be "listening" or "working" or something on my behalf when I was not saying/doing anything myself; it was busy in my head why was it not busy in hers, LOL. But it is all what we "imagine" in our little heads and therapy is about learning to do reality checks and engage in each interaction, independently of the other or of who it is or what happened "last time".