Already Free

by Bruce Tift

  Darren is a good example of neurotic feminine aggression: He had effectively erased his anger by repressing it and withheld his full authenticity in his work and relationships out of fear of failing or disappointing others. He tried to be a good boy who would always behave positively. People with this style will tend not to assert needs, not to have boundaries, to always be accommodating, to avoid conflict, and to put others first. With this style, we end up feeling like victims because we’re not taking care of ourselves; passive-aggressive behavior often results.

  I recall a time, twenty years ago or more, when I saw a powerful neurotic feminine response in my own life. I had just seen a client who was the husband of a therapist in town. He’d come to me because he and his wife were having difficulties. He felt like she belittled and patronized him, while she felt like he was passive-aggressive and mean. This is territory I work in regularly, so I figured I would be able to help. Yet throughout our first session, he dismissed and refused pretty much every suggestion I offered. No matter what I said, he would reply with “yes, but . . .” He’d say, “Yeah, I’ve heard that before, Bruce, and it hasn’t been helpful to me.” Or, “I think I read that somewhere, but it’s not really relevant here. Do you have any other ideas?” After an hour of this, as we were getting ready to part, I asked him if he wanted to set another appointment. Not surprisingly, he said, “I’ll think about it. I’m not sure if I found this very helpful.”

  The rest of the day I was sitting with an intense feeling of failure. “Geez,” I thought. “I’m a poor excuse for a therapist. Why am I even doing this work? It’s obvious I’m not helping anybody. I need to find a new career.” The torturous, self-aggressive thoughts continued all that day and into the next. I remember being in the shower the next morning, when it finally occurred to me that I might take some of the advice I give my clients every day.

  “What if I just accept all these feelings I’m having?” I thought. “I’m going to let myself feel like a failure. I’ll let myself feel like maybe this is the end of my work as a therapist and that it’s time to find a different career.” This wasn’t easy. It felt like voluntarily dropping into a deep well of despair.

  Almost immediately, the whole inner dialogue dropped away. To my surprise, I started to have some speculations about what was really going on with that client, which were probably more accurate than the likelihood that I was a failure as a therapist. In fact, it dawned on me that this guy had probably been doing to me—another therapist—the same thing he did to his wife. She probably put him down, and he probably responded by being passive-aggressive in a way that made her feel incompetent and powerless. I’d experienced the very dynamic that had brought him into my office. I saw that I now had the potential to actually be of some benefit if we were to meet again. I realized I might be able to bring some awareness to their relationship dynamics based on our own interaction. On the other side of my willingness to feel all of my feelings—even the awful ones—I’d received helpful insight.

  Prior to feeling my feelings, on the other hand, I had been too self-absorbed to sense what had been going on with him. I hadn’t wanted to feel the horrible feelings of shame and failure, so it was extremely difficult to use my mind for anything but my own self-aggressive commentary. Unwilling to stay embodied with these vulnerabilities, I’d had no choice but to dissociate—and my method of dissociation, in true neurotic feminine style, was to beat myself up.

  The more familiar form of aggression is called anger in the Buddhist view or, in Western psychology, the neurotic masculine. This style—which happens to be my primary pattern—is to experience anything that feels threatening as coming from outside ourselves, from others, and then to annihilate that threat. In this case, we attack whatever is causing our disturbance, keeping alive the hope that all disturbance comes from others. If we can keep enough distance and not allow others to disturb us, then everything will be okay.

  Over the course of my work as a therapist, I’ve become aware of one of my many biases: I tend to feel less tolerance and kindness when someone presents as a whiny victim than as an arrogant control freak. Obviously, both persons are doing their best to work with their fear/grief/powerlessness. But, because of my own conditioned history, I am less tolerant of the neurotic feminine style than the neurotic masculine style. In other words, I’m less tolerant of feeling myself as a victim than I am as a perpetrator. (I’m discussing feelings, here, of course—not behavior.) This lack of tolerance within myself is experienced, in the neurotic masculine style, as if it were a problem in the other person. I find I have the impulse to tell “victim” clients to face reality, be responsible, take better care of themselves, and so on. Obviously, this is what I grew up telling myself, and it may be neither helpful nor kind to the person I’m working with. As with all blind spots, I’ve had to make an effort to be aware of this conditioned impulse, to investigate what vulnerabilities lie beneath it, and to act consciously for the other’s benefit, regardless of my own history.

  By externalizing the apparent location of disturbance, the neurotic masculine leads us to blame others when our vulnerabilities surface, thinking they’re the source of our discomfort. We might not want to be bothered by people in general, so we may become fiercely self-sufficient and independent. For those of us who hold this style, as Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people.”

  When we are strongly out of balance in this way, we can potentially behave toward others as a perpetrator. Because we’re not actually feeling connected or empathic with others—and, in fact, others are seen as the cause of our disturbance—we may feel justified in being outwardly aggressive toward them. This can manifest as a private superiority, relating to others with criticism and judgment, behaving in controlling and intimidating ways, and so on.

  The third form of fundamental aggression is neurotic neutrality, which in Buddhist terms is called ignorance or ignoring. In this style, we’re trying to get out of our disturbance by spacing out and not being fully present. We unconsciously generate the experience of feeling confused, stuck, or paralyzed. We don’t keep agreements and have a hard time making decisions. We might even withdraw from the world, spending our time meditating or doing other spiritual practice, with the unexamined goal of rising above our messy human life—being always calm and accommodating everything. People with this style will often have a floaty type of presence and may let others—or life itself—make their decisions for them. While they may appear to be the opposite of aggressive, there is, in fact, a very self-absorbed quality to their fogginess and an unconscious demand that others take care of the life details that they refuse to be aware of. If they were to gain clarity, they would have to feel disturbances and take responsibilities that they fear they can’t handle. So unconsciously, they will do everything they can to remain apparently confused or disengaged.

  Neurotic neutrality, or ignoring, is the most difficult of the three forms of fundamental aggression to spontaneously wake up from. There is little drama; everything is sort of okay, even if flat. There’s not much contrast. When I work with clients who lead with this style, I tend to become very concrete: What are you feeling in your body right now? When are you going to pay that bill? Is that a yes or no to my question? In doing so, I’m inviting a contrast with their neurotic strategy. The more these clients are willing to feel embodied, to engage in life circumstances, or to talk to their partner, the more they can see their strategy of subtly claiming that they are not really here.

  We all experience all three forms of aggression, though each of us tends to lead with one preferred style. In my experience, this aggression is always serving a function. The developmental view helps us see that our self-aggression is not just a relic from the past; it’s something we choose to reinvest in, over and over, every moment. We actually maintain a practice, with great effort, of being aggressive toward who we find ourselves to be. If we can become curious about the function this serves, if we invite greater awareness, then we might find tha
t we can work with our issues much more skillfully and kindly. The result is an increased aliveness and satisfaction in our everyday lives and an increased ability to engage compassionately with others.

  When we begin investigating our neurotic strategies, we often find that we have a very strong tendency to believe that we ourselves, and our lives, are problematic. Claiming that we are problematic means we don’t have to engage with our lives fully, because we aren’t “ready yet”—there’s something wrong that needs to be fixed first. Before we can be truly intimate, we must heal old relationship wounds. Before we can go for our dreams, we need to resolve our self-doubts. Before we can be fully embodied, we need to lose this extra weight. Once these issues get fixed, then we will actually show up and be fully engaged. But right now, we have a good excuse to not show up. And it turns out that really showing up—being fully present, embodied, openhearted—is often a very intense experience. Having a complaint also gives us an explanation for our difficult experience—and if there’s a cause, there should be a solution. “I should be able to have the life without disturbance that I deserve once this unfair problem is cleaned up.” It allows us to continue our disengagement indefinitely, since there will always be some unfair problem in our lives.

  DROPPING ALL COMPLAINT

  When I’m working with people, I often suggest a little practice as a homework assignment. For some period of time—a month maybe—I suggest they drop any claim that there’s something wrong. No more complaints, resentments, or blame for a whole month, just to see what else is there. Whenever they become aware of a complaint, I suggest they ask themselves: “What am I feeling right now that I don’t want to feel?”

  The usual response I get from my clients is, “You’ve got to be kidding! How can I handle my life without complaining? There’s so much to complain about!” But when people do experiment with the practice, the results are very interesting. They start to realize that their attitude of complaint—of problem—has been serving a function. It has been allowing them to keep their life at arm’s length. It’s given them an excuse to postpone living their life in the moment. You could try this experiment yourself and see what happens.

  VIEW, PRACTICE, ACTION

  So once we recognize our patterns and decide we want to work with them, what’s next? How do we effect sustainable and significant change? From my experience, change can happen in many ways: in the context of relationship, individual emotional work, body work, behavioral disciplines, working with our thinking, spiritual path work, spontaneous insight, and so on. Different methods work for different people, but I always suggest approaching change as a practice. As mentioned in the introduction, “practice” can be understood as a conscious participation in what we are already experiencing or doing, usually with a considered intention to intervene in some pattern that we would like to change. By bringing our attention to our immediate experiencing, we are more able to challenge habitual patterns and experiment with new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. We then continue to bring conscious participation to these changes to see if they help us move toward our intentions. I find that practice is the most reliable vehicle for change and that the attitude of practice can be applied to most methodologies.

  In Buddhism, there’s the idea that practice is best understood within the organizing principles of view, practice, action. We begin with an understanding, or view, of how things are at present and how we would like them to be. This larger view usually begins as an intellectual understanding; but with continued experience and refined practices, it can slowly become an experiential view. Whatever view we have—that is, what makes sense to us—suggests the practices that may be helpful. For example, if I usually feel pretty resilient but have recently been feeling somewhat depressed, the way I work with this mood will be strongly influenced by my ideas of what might be causing it. If I have a view that depression is evidence of a biological problem, I might try exercise, get more sleep, try a certain diet, or experiment with meds. If my theory is that depression is a response to some underlying vulnerability I’m trying not to feel, I might investigate the possibility that there’s anger, powerlessness, or some other feeling that I’m repressing. I may have the idea that I’m confronting an existential crisis in my life and must now be responsible for looking at the stark reality of my human condition. I may think it likely that a number of factors are involved and try a variety of practices. Action refers to the results that spontaneously arise out of our practices. We might think about our situation, study, discuss, and experiment. We try some new approach that may help bring our experience into greater alignment with our goals. We experiment with these approaches and pay attention to any results that arise in our life out of these practices. We then modify our view and our practices in a circular process of becoming more and more effective in moving toward our intentions.

  In my experience, the practices that carry the greatest potential for transformative change are usually counterinstinctual, meaning we don’t want to do them, or they go against our basic evolutionary survival responses. To work with our neurotic defense mechanisms, we need the willingness to go into exactly those vulnerabilities—the fear, the rage, the grief, the horrible feelings—that we’ve spent decades dedicated to not feeling. But who wants to do that? Who wants to go into feeling stupid or abandoned? No one I know wants to sit with the anxiety that they’re going to turn into a monster if they let their anger out. To sit with these feelings goes against our instincts. So the view part of view, practice, action becomes a discussion, an investigation into all of the reasons it might be in our best interest (and perhaps in the interest of others) to do something so apparently stupid as to intentionally have a relationship with our pain and fear.

  I invite my clients to consider this view by offering my perspectives and interpretations. Many therapists have a style that encourages the client to do most of the talking, but my style is different. I offer my opinions, and I ask a lot of questions. What is the client doing in a particular situation? Why? What’s the benefit? Does the client perhaps have mixed feelings about change? My intention is not for clients to take on what I say as a belief system. But if they can really think about what’s in their own personal interest, they may find it’s to their benefit to do practices they don’t initially want to do and, in fact, may never want to do.

  Another word for doing practices we don’t want to do is discipline. That’s not a favorite word in our culture, but I find discipline to be essential in addressing these difficult, embedded patterns we all enter adulthood with. The results we can expect are the action component. We start to see why we might do these counterinstinctual practices by looking at what the results might be. Why, for example, might I do something so stupid as to practice relating to others from a dependent energy? That is truly counterinstinctual to my neurotic masculine style. Feeling dependent provokes anxiety in me. But if I look at the results—at what might arise in my life if I were willing to feel and behave more like a dependent person—the value might seem worth the effort. I may find myself less critical of others’ dependency, less compulsively resentful as a caregiver, more able to receive love and support, and less at war with myself. If it brings good results to do that work, I might continue that practice. If it doesn’t, I probably won’t.

  One way to work with the very powerful momentum of neurotic organization is to investigate our claim that something horrible will happen if our strategy falls away. Let’s say you have a history of abandonment. Perhaps you had a self-absorbed, narcissistic, or absent parent. Of course, as a little child, you were incredibly dependent. Since your parent is not initiating adequate connection, you start to specialize in being the one to make the connection with your parent. You must learn to read your parent’s mind, to cue off your parent’s moods, and to give your parent hugs so that you, yourself, will get a hug. As you grow up, you tend to be the one trying to make your adult relationships work. Subconsciously, you believe that if you’re not doing all the
work, you will not get the love you want. But, of course, if your specialty were to do 90 percent of the work, your best choice of partner would be somebody who specializes in doing 10 percent of the work. The result is that you once again experience your loved one as not showing up for you. That experience reinforces your style of always being the one doing the connecting. “See? I am always being abandoned. I have to do all the work, or I won’t get the connection I want.” If you want to work your way out of these neurotic strategies, you must begin to participate consciously in your feelings of being abandoned. As much as you may consciously fight those feelings, the truth is that you already have the subconscious belief that you will always be left. However, if you can gradually learn to tolerate feeling abandoned—which is already how you feel; it’s nothing new—you may find it’s not going to kill you. It’s not going to harm you. It’s not giving you cancer. You’re not becoming dysfunctional. It is not pleasant, of course. Perhaps it’s never going to be pleasant, but it’s not actually harmful.