We hear so many stories of transference here. Where people idealise their therapists and almost make them God-like. Then there is the erotic transference which most of us have experienced but how many of you have experienced negative transference? The kind where you hate your t and can't even bare to look at them?
I am very interested in if you were able to work with them and did you work through the transference?

[Perna]

What you describe is not quite what therapists mean by transference. Transference is transferring how you feel about a particular person onto another person. If your unconscious thinks your T looks or acts or sounds like Uncle Murray and you were afraid of and didn't like Uncle Murray you may be afraid of your T and because you don't recognize that you are transferring feelings about someone you know onto someone you don't, you will need to learn to see that.

A lot of our feelings for our T will probably come from feelings about our parents because of how long and intensely we have known, thought, felt, and interacted with our parents.

My husband and I got into a discussion half way through my therapy where I was disappointed and a bit angry with him for wanting to go to the race track instead of doing the dishes one Saturday morning. It turned out he had a backache that doing the dishes right then would have made worse and my need to have the dishes done, right then, by him, came from my deceased stepmother demanding the same of me 45 years earlier. If my T and I had not been working on "disappointment" that week I would not have said anything or had the discussion with my husband, I would have just been angry and resentful of him, not realizing I was transferring what had happened between me and my mother years earlier onto my and his relationship together in the present time. I once had to go to the bathroom right after dinner and when I came out of the bathroom, my stepmother had done the dishes that it was my job to do that night (we're talking about 5-10 minutes after dinner) and was angry at me, declaring I had deliberately used going to the bathroom to get out of doing the dishes. Here it initially looked to me like my husband was skipping the responsibility of doing the dishes to go to the race track and have fun.

To me, that's negative transference I had to learn to recognize so similar events between me and other people do not keep getting caught up in my stepmother's and my previous interactions. My husband had not done anything to make me angry or disappointed, my head/memory/feelings had. My husband did not feel well and I love him and of course told him to go to the race track if he thought the distraction would help him feel better!

I did still have the original difficulty of the dirty dishes problem; I did not want to do them Do I do them anyway "for" my husband or do I let them sit and wait for my husband? The leftover memories and conflicts were still silently submitting their input into my thinking so I could see no matter what I did, it might not feel good or right yet. I wanted the dishes done so I went with doing them myself, since it was what I wanted. I intellectually realized the "for" my husband argument was not correct. Even though he usually does the dishes and we think of it as "his" chore, we often do the other's chores as needed.

I love the Lloyd Alexander quote: I've heard women complain about doing men's work and men complain about doing women's work but I have never heard the work complain about who did it.

I do understand what transference means, maybe I should have explained it better so that people who didn't know

[Perna]

I think much of the extremes of loving/hating one's T that is spoken of on here is a personality disorder symptom not related to transference.

Monalisasmile,

I usually do not reply to threads but I do know what you are talking about with negative transference...but not the being unable to look at him... I may have rolled my eyes at him or sigh heavily or wanted to curse at him a few time..... I think the ability to work through it depends on how open your T is to dealing with it.

ETA: I find it interesting that people don't seem to understand that "love" and "hate" are feeling terms... that means they are relative... I may say I was so upset in T this week and some people will invision crying and sobbing and curled up on the couch but for me it would mean 3 big fat tears ran down my face.... so when someone says they "love" their T or they "hate" their T it might not be the love and hate that comes up for you. I have had feelings of anger towards my T that for me felt like "hating" him... does that mean I have a personality disorder? Well maybe although this T specifically said he doesn't think I have one... but he did say he thinks that lots of times I wasn't talking to him but to someone else and mentioned transference... just saying its best not to make assumptions and judge another person's response... generalized statements are usually not helpful.

I could not agree more readytostop and I also have love hate feelings for t but I do not have a personality disorder. If I do it is called being human and is that I disorder?
It is like saying how somebody reacts to pain or saying my pain is worse than yours, this is not true because we can't feel that persons pain so we can't know whether it is or it isn't.

Perna, I am not sure if you got triggered by this thread, if so I apologise but I am not sure you get the meaning of it. Transferring hate and love onto your t is transference- it might be a simplified way of describing it but it all means the same.