When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships »

David Richo, PhD, is a therapist and author who leads popular workshops on personal and spiritual growth. He is known for drawing on Buddhist thought, poetry, and Jungian perspectives in his work. He is the author of How to Be an Adult in Relationships and The Five Things We Cannot Change. He lives in Santa Barbara and San Francisco, California.

In this book, psychotherapist David Richo explores how we replay the past in our present-day relationships—and how we can free ourselves from this destructive pattern. We all have a tendency to transfer potent feelings, needs, expectations, and beliefs from childhood or from former relationships onto the people in our daily lives, whether they are our intimate partners, friends, or acquaintances. When the Past Is Present  helps us to become more aware of the ways we slip into the past so that we can identify our emotional baggage and take steps to unpack it and put it where it belongs.

Drawing on decades of experience as a psychotherapist, Richo helps readers to:

   • Understand how the wounds of childhood become exposed in adult relationships—and why this is a gift
   • Identify and heal the emotional wounds we carry over from the past so that they won't sabotage present-day relationships
   • Recognize how strong attractions and aversions to people in the present can be signals of own own unfinished business
   • Use mindfulness to stay in the present moment and cultivate authentic intimacy

Introduction     1
What Is Transference?     7
How We Defend     9
Getting You to Feel for Me     11
One of Our Habits     12
The Birth of Our Expectations     16
Do We Hope or Despair?     18
How Childhood Continues into Our Adult Relationships     20
What Transference Does and Why     27
The Clues     28
Causes and Choices     30
Noticing What We Are Up To     31
We Have Good Reasons to Transfer     37
Practice: Address, Process, Resolve, and Integrate     42
Ways We Can Be Together     47
The Real You, the Real Me     51
Practice: Presence, Mindfulness, and Loving-kindness     54
Reactions and Reacting     59
Persons, Pets, Places, and Things     59
On the Job Too     62
Practice: In the Workplace     64
The Critic Within     65
Practice: Releasing Ourselves from Our Myths     69
Why Others Get to Us as They Do     72
Practices
Seeing What Gets in the Way     74
Opening     75
F.A.C.E.-ing Ourselves     75
Searching Questions     76
From Trigger to Anchor     77
Handling Others' Reactions to Us     78
Practice: Power in Responding     80
How Our Fears Figure In     83
Four Fearsome Hurdles     84
Comings and Goings     86
Giving and Receiving     88
Being Accepted and Being Rejected     89
Letting Go and Moving On     91
Practice: Scaling the Hurdles with Grace     92
Our Compulsion to Repeat     96
Events Too Huge     99
Something Ancient and Primitive Within Us     101
Why We Are All So Concerned about Abandonment     103
The Impact on Us     105
Hate and Hurt     106
Practice: Staying with Feeling     107
Memories of Mistreatment     109
Ongoing Stress     112
Our Delicate Timing     114
We Don't All Have to Go Back     115
Practices
Honoring Timing and Lifestyle     117
Identifying What Is Missing     118
The Physical Dimension     120
How the Brain Figures In     123
Practice: Alternatives to Freezing Up     126
Our Yearning for Both Comfort and Challenge      129
Practice: How to Grieve and Let Go     134
Grief in the Family     137
Regrets and Disappointments     138
Practice: Handling Regret and Disappointment     140
Mirrors and Ideals     143
Our Search for Mirroring Love     144
Can't Live without You     145
A Bridge Appears     147
Where Our Ideals Came From     148
The Gift of Self     149
How Our Needs Are Transferred     151
Transference Meets Us Everywhere     155
Practices
New Ways of Trusting     156
Whom Do We Trust?     157
Examining Our Ideals     158
Why I Love You But Don't Really See You     160
Sex and Our Erotic Transferences     160
Sex as Addiction     162
Love and In Love     163
Daring an Adult Love     165
Working Out Our Relationship Clashes     169
How Codependency Arises     171
Practices
Committing to Loving-kindness     172
Entering Another's World     173
Noticing Transferences in Our Relationships     175
Practice: Letting Conflicts Help Us     176
Good-Enough Relating      178
The Introvert/Extrovert Dimension in Relating     180
Working Back in Time     182
We Really Can Be Here Now     183
Practice: Pausing to Check In and Settle In     185
From Transference to Transformation     188
Our Psychological Work     188
Practice: A Checklist     190
How Spiritual Practice Renews Us     191
Hidden Help     193
How It All Comes Together     194
Practice: Opening to Spiritual Shifts     195
Transferring beyond the Personal     199
The Archetypes We Live With     200
Acknowledge or Disavow Our Wholeness?     203
The Example of Patriotism     205
Religion and Transference     207
Light and Dark     210
Epilogue: A Jungian View of Our Larger Life     213