Your Spiritual Teacher as your Enemy

Your Spiritual Teacher as your Enemy

In psychology, therapists are trained (but not always good at) handling “transference” behavior of clients/patients. At least they receive the training. Healers, Readers, and Spiritual Teachers do not which is detrimental for both Practitioners and those who come to them for services. What is transference?  When people go to healers, mainstream, alternative, or Spiritual, they are hurt, in psychological, emotional or spiritual pain (sometimes manifesting as physical pain).  People mainly are “hurt” by other people, those in their lives where there are emotional connections.  When emotional connections are damaged (real or imagined), people feel hurt, betrayed, abandoned and many other feelings. When seeking healing or teachings (in whatever modality) those feelings of hurt that originated in childhood get transferred to healers and other “authority figures”. The healer becomes the perpetrator by proxy and the student/patient/client will react to the healer in numerous ways with everything from sabotaging the work to outright emotional and physical attacks on the healer.  Handled well this IS part of the healing process that  practitioners use, allowing themselves to become the “symbol” of the person or persons who caused pain so the student/client/patient can re-enact, relive, recall, reconstruct the event or events first to release and then to move on to Healing.  This takes skill, tools, talent and finesse. People not equipped to work with transference not only do not recognize when it is happening, they typically lack the tools to make that part of healing and then transference issues can (and usually do) escalate and derail the work.  (And then there is counter-transference, when Practitioners unconsciously turns their client/student/patient into a proxy for someone who hurt them, and practitioners “take it out” on the one coming for help. This is another area that Practitioners receive no training or information or tools. But that is another discussion.)

What can transference look like in behavior or actions?  First of all it helps to remember that transference is unconscious. That being said, a rattlesnake bite is not personal, however personal or not, it still has an effect.  Secondly, this is a short article and in no way fully covers the complexity of transference, or describes all the possible examples and definitely does not address how a practitioner should respond and this article does not offer tools that can be used. Lastly, the common reaction of counter-transference is not being addressed here at all and that is not only part of the issue, it is a key element that affects the work of all practitioners.

If a person grew up in a dysfunctional home, such as alcoholism, drugs, violence, emotional abuse, abandonment etc. and has not engaged in any shadow and/or healing work regarding their childhood, transference issues will be pronounced, deeply hidden, and usually covered in decades of denial. This will make it even more difficult to catch and identify transference behaviors and issues.  Here are a few (very few) briefly described examples of transference behaviors:

Children from a family with violence learn to make themselves “small”, invisible even. In healing situations, the client will make the practitioner into a parent by proxy. Clients will unconsciously react to the practitioner in the ways they learned to survive their abusive childhood when they were powerless children. They will “shrink” because it is their learned response to any authority figure.  It is hard to heal when the client is trying to (unconsciously) become invisible. If you are working hard to be invisible, speaking and sharing will be almost impossible, and even the body and emotions shut down as clients try to protect themselves by disappearing.  

Emotional abuse in a family teaches children that they losers and that no matter what they do, say, or think, they are wrong and unlovable. Clients like this will work hard to prove they are “wrong” and unlovable before anyone else does that to them. As children, that strategy saved them from hurt.  Since hurt in their childhood was unavoidable, then the best solution became to control how and when you get hurt because that was better than being blindsided. As uneducated, unhealed adults, they will do the same with anyone who tries to help them and unconsciously sabotage any healing work. “See, even you can’t help me” is their cry. Because the injured child that still lives inside of them is sure the reason their parents were cruel to them, was their fault. Now, that is their norm. They are wrong, and they are beyond help.  Uneducated practitioners will, in error, call this being passive aggressive.

Another reaction to childhood emotional abuse is to see everyone as a threat that must be beaten. The world is seen as hammer and nail and abuse taught them it is better to be the hammer. They know nothing else.  These unhealed adults will see any authority figure, even healers, as threats that must be beaten in order to not only survive, but to maintain a sense of self.  They will “prove” to any practitioner that they are smarter and better and will treat their healer as competition. This behavior can in fact escalate in a manner to be quite brutal to practitioners.

These few examples are but a drop in the bucket. Practitioners that are not educated in identifying and working with transference will react to protect themselves from these behaviors without looking for or understanding the root cause.  They will either end up in a dysfunctional dance without quite understanding why, or they will retreat into the safety  of New Age over the top “positivism” because no one reacts poorly (at least in the moment)  to being complemented, stroked,  reassured, or to having “Angels” give predictions and promises of an “amazing” future for their client. (Trust me. I have seen this when people come to Life Path Healings after a few thousand dollars spent on the “feel good” industry of psychics, and new age “healers.”)  What can be learned here?  An unexamined childhood will haunt you and infiltrate all your choices in behavior and relationships as an adult. You incarnated into the family you chose before coming here, while you were in Spirit, with Guides, in order to set up a lifetime of learning while in this current body. Therefore, to ignore what happened to you in your family of origin is to ignore the starting point of the life path journey you chose, before you got here, with your Guides helping you design this life.  The first point of long term healing (if there is no pending emergency) IS family of origin material.  And for practitioners to develop both intuition and skills regarding transference and counter-transference.

Journey On