Already Free

by Bruce Tift

  Often in developmental work, the first step is to help clients see that the recurring patterns they’re experiencing are not caused by, or really about, current life circumstances or current relationships. Moreover, these strategies do not arise from pathology or bad intentions. Instead, they represent our young efforts to take the very best care of ourselves possible. Usually the issue with these strategies is that they are several decades out of date. Darren, like most of us, was still trying to take care of himself in the only ways he knew how—ways that were appropriate when he was a dependent child in his family. He was still trying to never disappoint others by being a “good boy,” avoiding conflict, and ineffectively asserting his own needs. But his repressed anger at never receiving the love and approval he wanted was expressed in passive-aggressive and self-sabotaging behaviors. Of course, such strategies were no longer necessary or appropriate as an adult—in fact, they had become obstacles, keeping him from experiencing a conscious choice about how much effort to give any endeavor he undertook.

  The ways in which our necessary childhood strategies become our unnecessary adult neuroses is a basic theme in Western developmental work. These strategies were usually worth the price tag when we were young, dependent, immature children in our families of origin. But as adults, the benefits we get are no longer worth the price we pay.

  Darren never really tried; he never put himself on the line. In exchange he got the benefit of never having to acknowledge feeling like a failure and a disappointment, because he didn’t stay with anything long enough to fully invest himself. But the price tag was a chronic withholding from life and a corresponding tendency to withhold his full participation in his relationships. Ironically, by avoiding immediate intense feelings of failure and disappointment, Darren lived in a subtler but pervasive atmosphere that perpetuated those same feelings.

  Darren and I continued to discuss the possibility that, in addition to his parents being genuinely loving and supportive, they may also have had their own unresolved, unconscious issues that led Darren to never feeling fully validated or successful. He began to see that he had learned to never give anything his full effort—expecting to be told that he was a disappointment, inadequate, or not enough. Over time, Darren began to tolerate a more complex understanding of his parents; he began to realize that his parents were complicated human beings, just like he was. Not only sane, not only neurotic, but like all of us having their own strengths and limitations.

  As Darren began to realize that he was still paying the price for his parents’ limitations, he began to experience more anger about that history. His childhood strategy of keeping his anger to himself was coming undone. At first this was uncomfortable for him; he worried it meant he was supposed to have confrontations with his parents about his past. But we worked with the view that Darren’s anger was his own responsibility to work with now. It was not about his parents, even if their unconscious issues had deeply influenced his survival strategies. To blame them or anybody else would actually perpetuate the young, victimlike position.

  At this stage of our work we entered territory common in Western therapy: the process of recovering one’s right and ability to embody aspects of oneself that had been disowned as a child. For Darren, it was especially important to explore his anger, his power, and his healthy aggressive energy. We explored his experience of having boundaries, keeping his integrity in relationships, and having constructive conflict with others. In this process, he felt an increasing willingness to work from the position of personal responsibility. He understood, more and more, that for him to feel satisfied in his adult life, he would need to take responsibility for the full range of his emotions. It was helpful for Darren to understand the history that had given rise to his childhood strategies. He realized that these were long-term issues that he brought into his current life and that they were not problems caused by his current life circumstances.

  On one hand, that meant not looking for his worth in pleasing others, and on the other hand, it meant not blaming anyone else for his feelings. Darren experimented with feeling his difficult feelings and with being completely responsible for working with them. As he did this work, he reported feeling more powerful in his relationships, less anxious about what other people thought of him, and more able to assert his needs. As Darren set more effective boundaries, he acted in less passive-aggressive ways, and he reported both better feedback from others and having a greater tolerance of feeling fundamentally alone. At this point we ended our work together. It was too soon to know or predict whether Darren’s pattern of not following through was going to be significantly changed. Perhaps this repetition would be enacted in his therapeutic work as well. But he already reported being aware of his impulses to escape from relationship and work, and he had begun experiencing some choice about whether to act on those impulses.

  From the developmental view, Darren was entering emotional adulthood, which includes the ability to discriminate between feelings and behavior. He recognized that his history would likely give rise to familiar, difficult emotions and that he did not have to allow these emotions to run his behavior or control his life. He began to live a life that was engaged with current realities and to use his current adult capacities, rather than reenact past realities.

  IT’S NOT ACTUALLY ABOUT THE PAST

  While Western therapy is sometimes seen as overly focused on the past, it’s actually about the present. It’s about how most of us are, in a variety of ways, living as if the present were the past. We’re operating as if we’re still young children in our families of origin, especially in the realm of relationships. It’s as if we were given a role in a play, and we got such a good response (and we’ve played the part for so long now) that we’ve actually forgotten we’re playing a role. In truth, there is a larger sense of self—a larger life—that we could be living, if only we were able to drop our unconscious identification with this character and become curious about who we might be right now.

  Western psychotherapy has a variety of techniques, theories, and approaches that can help improve the story we’ve been telling about ourselves. While growing up, Darren learned to tell himself that he was apparently never going to be good enough to get the love he wanted and needed. He believed that he would always be a disappointment to others and to himself, so best to cue off of others’ realities, avoid conflict, and resign himself—resentfully—to a life of emotional poverty. He also believed that all of this was, somehow, his fault. In therapy, Darren took the risk of rewriting this story. He learned to think of himself as a more emotionally complex person, as one who could reveal his differences to another and still survive. He learned to discriminate between his current responsibility to work with his feelings and the fact that, as a child, he was not responsible for his parents’ issues. Like most of us, Darren was still identified with a sense of self. But, as long as we’re telling a story about who we are, it’s better to have a good story than a bad story.

  There is a potential problem with looking to the past as a way of better understanding the present: we may start to think that an improved present is dependent on clearing up the past. Out of this belief, many of us try to rework the past. But you can’t rework your past—it’s gone. Any memories about the past are speculative, incomplete, and partial. Our version of our childhood is probably different now than it was ten years ago and will probably be different ten years from now. If we start to believe that the past is causing our present circumstances, then we’ve positioned ourselves as powerless victims. We can’t actually change the past, but we can subtly create the drama of trying to change what can’t be changed. Talking about the past, without realizing that we’re only talking about our current way of relating to our past, can actually function as an avoidance of being fully present. This unexamined project of freeing oneself from the past can result in an endless self-improvement project—as well as endless therapy.

  Many people in therapy find it interesting and helpful to explore th
eir emotional history. However, many others do not. When I’m working with clients, I’m curious about their past—I want to know something about their family of origin dynamics, their parents and siblings, their various life experiences—but I don’t really worry if they don’t want to go into the details. Why? Because in therapy we are looking for patterns of experiencing that are out of date, out of synch with current reality. It can be helpful to understand the past origins of these patterns, but it’s not necessary. If someone feels abandoned when their partner doesn’t immediately return a text, that can be identified and worked with in the present, without needing to know about a history of parents divorcing, an absent father, many moves to new homes and schools, and so forth. All of us are only living in the present moment. That’s the only moment in which we can intervene. So history can be helpful in therapy, but it’s not necessary.

  THE METABOLISM OF EXPERIENCE

  One way to look at Darren’s experience is that he felt deeply divided against himself. He wasn’t willing to feel his genuine feelings of anger, and he wasn’t diving into the life he wanted because he was convinced that he would have to feel like a failure. These “parts”—recurring patterns of experience—were repressed, but they did not go away. Instead, they were operating unconsciously, causing him to feel dissatisfied and unhappy and to behave symptomatically, like being passive-aggressive and not following through. One way of understanding this sense of internal division is to see it as the result of “poor metabolism.” Metabolism is the body’s process of extracting energy from the food we eat. We have to be able to make use of what we eat; otherwise, we won’t have the energy to grow and survive. Metabolism is the process of digesting this food and converting it to energy.

  Using metabolism as an analogy can be useful in the realm of experience. In a certain way, we’re always “eating” our experience. We’re taking it in, processing it, and digesting it. As Aldous Huxley once wrote, “Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” How we process our experience deeply influences how we make use of it. As infants and young children—beginning at conception—we rely on our parents to digest our experience for us. Just as a mother bird digests a worm and then spits it back up for her babies, our parents have to digest our experience and feed it back to us. The realities of life would be too much otherwise. You would not give a one-month-old infant solid food to eat. It’s not that solid food is unhealthy; it’s that the baby can’t digest it. In the same way, parents need to buffer their children from too much emotional intensity. They must interpret intense experience in order to protect the child, to hold the child—both literally and figuratively—to help the child feel unconditionally loved and safe. A parent doesn’t tell a child every day that anyone in the family might die unexpectedly. Even though that’s the truth, a child cannot handle this reality yet. Life is not unconditionally loving and safe, but there seems to be a very important developmental need for a child to experience a certain safety as a foundation from which to deal with the actual complexity of life.

  All of us need to develop appropriate ego functions, or capacities that allow us to deal with the challenges of life—both internal and external. These functions include defending ourselves, discriminating between fantasy and reality, delaying gratification, having a coherent sense of self, and so on. Of course, as infants we’ve developed almost none of these abilities. Our parents’ job is to provide “external ego functions” for us. Much of our developmental work is the gradual internalization of these initially external capacities. Parents provide the child with an adequate experience of safety, engagement, and nurturance. They allow the child to feel loved, to feel as if the child has a place in the world. Of course, all parents—myself included—are limited. We do the best we can, but the ability to give our children these experiences is limited by our own capacity, life experiences, and psychological issues. So all children have to deal with a certain amount of experience that is just too intense; that cannot be properly digested because of their immaturity as little beings.

  If, on the whole, parents are able to protect their child and if the intensity of the child’s experience is not too much, then the child learns to handle reality quite adequately. Some Western therapists would say such a child had an adequate holding environment. When we are adequately held by our lives—by our parents, by our world—we are able to rest in being a mystery to ourselves. Every moment, we can show up, not having to know who we are or how we’re going to handle the next moment. Such a childhood environment is an ideal experience in which to grow. If we can show up without needing to constantly control, plan, or protect ourselves against what might be coming, then every moment is fresh, every moment is a new experiment. Our way of engaging with life can stay current. As we change, as our life circumstances change, our strategies of engagement can change.

  Most of us, however, did not grow up in such a fortunate environment. Instead, we found ourselves facing overwhelming experiences—experiences like grief, fear, rage, panic, physical discomfort, and powerlessness. Because of the intensity of such experiences, we learned to show up in each moment with some amount of defensiveness already in place. We devised our own formulas to protect, process, and defend against the natural experience of being a young human, which is, at times, just too much.

  One of the fundamental ways in which we protect ourselves as infants and children is to do our best to not have to consciously participate in what is most terrifying or overwhelming. We learn to train our attention to ignore what we don’t know how to handle. Out of sight, out of mind. So we divide ourselves into parts that are “safe” to experience and those that are “unsafe.” This defense mechanism is the beginning of what we term neurotic organization, or neurosis.

  THE BIRTH OF NEUROSIS

  The developmental view suggests that, by the ages of four, five, or six years old, we have hopefully achieved what’s called a neurotic level of organization. What this really means is that we have the capacity for a stabilized repression of particular feelings. We can push out of our own awareness those feelings that are too disturbing to handle, digest, or make use of, while retaining awareness of those feelings that we can adequately work with.

  My own parents valued independence and were somewhat phobic around the energy of dependency. So it was very smart for me to learn to not feel dependent. If I felt dependent, I would have acted dependently. If I had acted dependently, in a family where dependency was not embraced, bad things would have happened. Perhaps I would have been pushed away, love would have been withheld, or my parents would have been anxious. I can’t remember the specifics, so it’s somewhat speculative, but I imagine it was very healthy and functional not to feel or behave like a dependent person in my household. Independence, on the other hand, would have allowed me to receive approval and love and to fit into our family. And, of course, independence had its own benefits out in the world as well. The challenge, however, was that I had to find a way to never feel dependent. Dependent feelings would have been associated with a type of survival-level panic.

  As children, we don’t yet have the ability to effectively discriminate between feelings and behavior. We tend to control our behavior by disconnecting from the feelings that might “cause” the behaviors, which could get us in trouble. When we are not able to disconnect from these feelings or when life triggers them, we almost always feel anxiety or even panic. In my experience as a therapist, I find that almost all of us have a sense of annihilatory panic associated with our core vulnerabilities. This is an intense sense of threat, impossible to really put into words—“If I have to feel this feeling, I will cease to exist.” This makes sense since, as children, our actual emotional survival—and sometimes even our physical safety—was often at stake. So what an incredible achievement! Even as a young child, we somehow figured out how to not feel overwhelmed by intense feelings. We protected ourselves from emotions we didn’t know how to handle, and our environment was not han
dling for us. Such a strategy is not pathological; it’s actually very healthy. It’s entirely appropriate, even wonderful, to have that capacity. It allows us to first adapt ourselves to our all-important parents, and then to go out into the world and act in a stabilized, socially approved way.

  There is, of course, a price tag for this achievement. The price tag is that we have managed to push parts of who we are out of our awareness. Very disturbing parts, yes, but very important parts. And just because we repress these parts does not mean they go away. Just because I grew up learning not to feel dependent doesn’t mean that I wasn’t dependent. I was, of course, incredibly dependent—all children are. But I had a very strong motivation to never be aware of my own dependency.

  To the extent that such childhood strategies work, we practice them over and over, and they become structural. Because these strategies are associated with survival-level anxiety, we drive them out of awareness. As unconscious structures, these formulas for engaging with life understandably persist into adulthood. As an adult, then, of course I have difficulty dealing with being a dependent person and with the energy of dependency in others. (What we find unacceptable in ourselves, we often find unacceptable in others.) The price tag for such repression can be especially high in relationships. As we’ll talk about in chapter 6, it’s very, very common for us to “mysteriously” end up with partners who manifest exactly those traits that we have disowned in ourselves—and vice versa.

  But there’s a deeper price tag I’m especially interested in working with as a therapist. When we disown parts of who we are, we end up feeling divided against ourselves. We feel there’s a part of us that is problematic and even dangerous; shameful or embarrassing; unworthy of love from others. To fit into our emotional world, our unique family system, our culture, our gender, and so forth, we turn against this part of ourselves and push it out of awareness. We subconsciously feel that there’s a problem with who we are and that we must never go there; we must never have a relationship with that part of ourselves.