Format: Post-call

I want to tell you about something that happens sometimes that I don't talk about often, because it requires admitting something about the limits of my own objectivity.

She called about a heating issue. Standard service call by every external measure. When I got there she was in her mid-sixties, sharp, well-organized, walked me straight to the utility room without any of the small-talk preamble that most people use to establish comfort. She was brisk without being unfriendly. She expected things to be handled competently and without fuss and she made that clear without saying it.

Within about five minutes I noticed I'd already formed a feeling about her. Not quite liking her. A mild resistance to her directness. A faint, irrational annoyance at the way she'd handed me the maintenance history folder before I'd even asked for it , like she was anticipating errors before she'd seen any.

That reaction wasn't about her.

She reminded me of a customer I'd had early in my career. Twenty-something years old, new to running my own work, still figuring out what kind of technician I was going to be. She'd been difficult in a way that had cost me time and money and, more than that, confidence at a moment when I didn't have much to spare. I hadn't thought about her in years. But something about this woman , her posture, the briskness, the folder , triggered something old and I was carrying it before I'd consciously noticed it.

Freud introduced the term transference to describe what happens when feelings from an old relationship get transferred onto someone in a new one , specifically in therapy, where a patient begins relating to the therapist through the emotional template of a parent or another significant figure. The parallel concept, countertransference, is what happens when the therapist's own unresolved material gets activated by the patient.

Modern relational psychotherapy has expanded both concepts well beyond the clinical setting. The basic mechanism is universal: our nervous systems use past relationships as prediction templates for new ones. When a new person resembles an old one closely enough , in manner, in posture, in the precise quality of their directness , the old emotional response can activate before the thinking mind has time to assess whether it applies.

I caught it about ten minutes in.

I was explaining a finding and I noticed I was being slightly more formal than I usually am. A little clipped. Not rude, but less warm than I typically bring to a service call. And I asked myself: what is this? What's actually happening right now?

And the answer came: I've met someone who reminds you of someone who was hard, and you're preloading for hard.

She hadn't done anything to earn that. She was organized. She was clear. She'd had the maintenance history folder ready because she was the kind of person who keeps good records, which is a gift to any technician working on her system.

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