Already Free

by Bruce Tift

  We’ve talked a bit about unconditional kindness already. Unconditional actually means unconditional. We practice kindness toward everything that arises in our awareness—good, bad, or otherwise. Whether we like it, don’t like it, or feel neutral about it, we still approach it with kindness and even love. In our culture, I’ve observed that many people doing spiritual work tend to choose practices that focus on the mental experience of clarity more than on cultivating an open heart. An example would be a meditation practice in which you put your attention on your breath, while noticing and letting go of the thoughts that enter your mind, one by one. But in my opinion, for many of us, the practice of unconditional kindness is much more powerful than clarity. It requires us to cultivate an active, heart-opening attitude toward our experience. We begin to feel a sense of YES toward everything. We don’t just say YES; we actually feel it. It’s frankly far less disturbing to be aware of horrible feelings—as in a clarity practice—than to actually feel a YES to these feelings.

  If clients want to go even deeper with unconditional kindness, I suggest they practice feeling a sense of sweet love toward everything, including things they don’t like. In this practice, it’s as if we’re actually holding what we don’t want to feel inside with a sense of sweetness. Recently I was preparing to record the audio companion to this book. Being recorded in a studio is new to me and was quite anxiety provoking. But luckily it occurred to me that I could do one of these practices. I thought, “Oh! I can practice holding my sense of panic with a sense of sweet love.” It didn’t make the panic go away, but something very significant shifted for me. Suddenly it was okay if I felt the panic, because I was ready at any second to practice loving it. I was ready to recognize that it’s me—it’s not something that’s happening to me.

  As you may remember from the beginning of this chapter, Ana had not found any harm or actual threat when she felt the sensations of deadness in her body. Since she was able to acknowledge that she was not in any mortal danger, I invited her to experiment with being kind to these sensations. At first she didn’t like this suggestion! She didn’t like those sensations, she told me, so why should she be kind to them? And what does it mean to be kind to a sensation, anyway? While we each must find out for ourselves just how kindness-with-all-that-arises is experienced, in this work, it often involves opening one’s heart to the experience—bringing a sense of warm engagement and staying with it. I suggested to Ana that the willingness to stay embodied with her sensations was, in itself, an act of kindness toward them. Rather than pushing them away and saying no to the feelings—which are our own vulnerabilities—we learn we can welcome them and hold them with love.

  As discussed in chapter 1, if a client is a parent, like Ana was, I often use the analogy of these unwanted feelings being like a small child. I had Ana imagine back to when one of her children was six months old and inconsolably upset. I asked her whether she could remember what it was like to hold her child in that state and what she might have tried to do to soothe him. She responded that she would try getting him to breastfeed first; then she would try rocking him, taking him outside for a walk, and jiggling her car keys, which he really liked. I asked her to continue imagining that the child was still not soothed, that he was still crying. Then what would she do? Well, Ana said, she would just keep trying.

  Like most parents, Ana seemed to have an instinct for something I might call “unconditional love.” Her inner dialogue might have run like this, “I’m not going to abandon my child, even though I can’t make him feel better. It’s tearing my heart open to have my poor little baby so upset and not be able to help, but I’m not going anywhere.” I use this example to remind my clients of the visceral sense of what it feels like to stay in relationship with inconsolable disturbance or pain. They remember that it’s possible to be that kind. I then suggest they try being as kind to themselves as they were to their children. What would it be like for Ana to be unconditionally kind, even loving, to her own sense of deadness? Many times this inquiry opens a little door to a new, more loving way of approaching our own pain.

  What all of these practices have in common is that they support us in releasing our fascination with the drama of who we are. As we let go of this drama, a more spacious awareness arises. In that more expansive awareness, if we want to, we can continue to investigate these very interesting questions at the heart of the fruitional view: “Well, what exactly is it that’s aware? Has awareness always been there? What’s the nature of awareness?”

  My hope is that this discussion of the fruitional view—which admittedly tends to be abstract and difficult—might at least suggest a direction of inquiry for you. I encourage you to make an experiential investigation into how you can honor your conditioned history (the developmental view), while also learning how to access an alternative to these familiar dramas in your immediate experiencing (the fruitional view). Anyone reading this book has the capacity to challenge, right now—as practice, if not sudden achievement—our habit of taking our experience as if it were about us, as if it were about our worth as a person or the viability of our life. We then may actually find a sense of appreciation—and even enjoyment and humor—in what we would call our “neuroses.”

  With this in mind, the next chapter investigates the dialogue between the developmental and fruitional views. It looks at how I use both views to work with clients, and how you can use them in your personal life. Together, these two views create a rich friction that’s never resolvable; rather, each approach helps address some of the blind spots of the other.

  3

  A DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE DEVELOPMENTAL AND FRUITIONAL VIEWS

  I REMEMBER THE MOMENT I first felt the power of psychology. I was in ninth grade, standing by the car in front of my childhood home, and I was having an argument with my mother. I don’t remember the details, but I recall at one moment having the clarity that she was avoiding a point I was making. Moreover, I had the words and the understanding that this was about her, not me—she was being defensive. There was something she didn’t want to feel. Instead of feeling misunderstood, I understood something about her. My mother is intelligent and articulate, so my feelings of clarity probably passed quickly, but obviously this was an important experience for me. Ever since, I’ve been curious about what’s going on for people beneath the surface, underneath the outward display. I like to pay attention to larger issues and unconscious dynamics. It’s no surprise that sooner or later I would find my way to working as a therapist.

  As I said earlier, after college I began a very traditional doctoral program in clinical psychology—and left very quickly. I was only able to return to therapy after I’d discovered that I could take a different approach by incorporating what I was learning from my Buddhist practice and study. In Buddhism, I’d found a view that helped me engage with psychotherapy from a sense of mutual dignity, curiosity, humor, and a confidence that all experience, without exception, is workable. It gave me hope for a type of therapy that would go beyond, as Freud said, transforming “hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” The resulting dialogue—between the therapeutic view and the Buddhist view—has been very alive and very life giving to me for many years. What’s more, I’ve found it valuable for many of the people I work with. No style or approach works for everyone, of course, but this never-resolvable interplay offers a type of open investigation that seems to be helpful for many people.

  So first, a short recap of these two views. The developmental view looks at how, as children, we all create strategies to survive and function well in our families of origin. These survival strategies necessitate a type of aggression toward—a disowning of—the parts of ourselves that are not welcomed by our world. This self-aggression allows us to function and to get the greatest amount of support, love, and approval possible. This is not the activity of pathology; rather, it represents our best efforts to take care of ourselves. But there is a price tag attached, which is a basic sense of being divided against ourselves
. This division becomes stabilized over the course of many years; by the time we’re adults, it results in the unconscious maintenance of a chronic sense of self-absorption. Self-absorption arises out of a type of hypervigilance. We are continually alert to anything that might bring into awareness those feelings that we have organized our life around never feeling. As adults, these avoidant strategies result in the experience of neurotic, or unnecessary, suffering. And while most of us claim we want to resolve these patterns of unnecessary suffering, on an unconscious level, we are actually invested in making sure they are never solved. If solved, they would no longer serve their protective, distracting function.

  When unchallenged, this price tag of a basic split within ourselves usually persists for the rest of our lives. A defense against threatening feelings will not be very effective if we know that we’re trying to not feel something; so a good avoidant strategy must operate out of awareness. As a result, these patterns of neurotic suffering seem to have lives of their own, and we often claim to be mystified by their persistence. A major intention of developmental psychotherapy, then, is to address this split between our conscious and unconscious experiencing. There are many theories and techniques for inviting more conscious participation in exactly those aspects of ourselves that we had to disown and repress while growing up.

  The fruitional approach takes the view that this split does not actually exist. It says that any experience of being divided against ourselves—or divided against life—is created and maintained through a lot of effort, moment by moment. This hallucinatory experience of being an essentially divided separate self, a small self in a vast universe, is seen as the fundamental source of unnecessary suffering. While improving our quality of life is certainly valuable, it is even more valuable to investigate this appearance of alienation. So rather than trying to create an improved experience or an improved sense of self, the fruitional approach encourages us to relax into our human experience as it already is, investigating experientially whether there’s actually any problem. As we gradually find less and less evidence of being a problematic person, our need for hypervigilance and self-absorption gradually dissolves. Our awareness naturally relaxes and becomes more expansive, and we increasingly trust our ability to engage spontaneously, without formulas, with our own experience and with life. At some point, we may become curious about the nature of awareness itself and begin to have increasingly frequent moments when we are aware of awareness.

  This chapter discusses how we might hold both of these views in therapeutic work. We might understand the “dialogue” between the two views in several ways. Simplistically, we might assume there is just one truth, and the dialogue is a way to test our theories in order to discover which is true. Or we might assume that most theories are useful approximations of what’s true in some ways but that they have their own limitations in other ways; so the point of the dialogue is to come up with a synthesis or integration that combines the best of both. Perhaps an even more interesting use of dialogue is to investigate our experience of standing in the middle, with no fantasy of resolution. What is it like to have no ground to stand on, no theory to identify with? To use theories for practical purposes rather than as positions to take?

  The developmental view is especially useful in articulating and working with patterns that exist over time, in recognizing how powerfully our conditioned history shapes the ways in which we relate to our immediate experience. The fruitional view is very helpful in training ourselves to participate consciously in each immediate moment, which is the only moment in which we will ever find ourselves, and to discover if what used to be true is what’s true now.

  Many of us understand the view that our experience of reality is inevitably a reconstructed one, one step removed from whatever is “really there.” All of our experiencing is through our senses, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and it is profoundly conditioned by our personal history, our culture, and our environment. Psychotherapy is mostly focused on the quality of our constructed experience, especially in the realms of emotion and meaning—how can we bring our out-of-date versions of reality into more current and accurate versions of reality? Buddhism investigates the ways in which we construct any version of reality, moment by moment. The focus is more on the process of constructing than on what is constructed.

  Both of these views are so important to our human experiencing. Can we learn how to value both without taking sides? Can we live consciously in each moment while we also are informed by the past and plan for the future? It’s the meeting—the interplay—of these modes of engagement that gives rise to the simultaneity of both conceptual clarity and open aliveness. And in this meeting, which is happening every moment, we find the experience of mystery, creativity, and freshness.

  So, instead of hoping for some synthesis or integration, this chapter discusses these two ways of working with our experience in the same way I work with clients in my office—by opening a dialogue between the two views, alternating between them, and seeing what happens. What I’ve learned, after years of working with these differing approaches, is that they offer no guarantees; there is no formula. Both views have a common intention to relieve unnecessary suffering, and both agree that the experience of split or division is at the heart of that suffering. So there is an overlap between them. But there are also significant differences. The developmental approach helps clients develop a range of skillful means and insights they can use to improve their life and experiences. The sense of division addressed is the one between the conscious and the unconscious. The fruitional approach has more to do with returning, over and over and over, to whatever we are experiencing in the immediate moment and asking ourselves whether it’s really a problem at all. The sense of division addressed is that between our fascination with the drama of our “self” and the always-present environment of open awareness, which provides no support for a “self.”

  FROM THE DEVELOPMENTAL VIEW

  We could say that the intention of developmental work is to increase one’s tolerance of experiential intensity through a variety of means—greater understanding, helpful techniques, a corrective relationship experience with one’s therapist, and so on. As mentioned, Carl Jung believed that neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering, and I would say that neurosis is always a substitute for experiential intensity. I find that we tend to avoid intense experiences of vulnerability, intimacy, power, and openness, as well as avoiding negative experiences. If this is indeed the case, then as we increase our tolerance for experiential intensity, we decrease the need for neurosis. We decrease the impulse to escape from the immediate truth of our experience, however intense. We begin to actually dissolve neurotic organization itself, rather than just working with specific neurotic issues.

  I have a client, we’ll call her Marcie, who came to me complaining that whenever her partner raised his voice, it caused her to shut down. Within a few minutes, I established that her partner wasn’t apparently abusive or inappropriately angry; she herself acknowledged that he often had a legitimate reason to be upset, that he didn’t yell or threaten her in any way. But she’d asked him to stop raising his voice, and he didn’t seem able to do so when he was worked up. She told me that he couldn’t “manage his anger enough” for her to stay engaged during conflict, and so she didn’t think she could stay in the relationship.

  It was immediately clear to me that Marcie, like so many of my clients, was pointing a finger in the wrong direction. She was making her partner’s aggression the issue, when in fact his raised voice was triggering her own defensive habit of shutting down. Our partners are almost guaranteed to trigger our core issues, but they are rarely the cause of this vulnerability. Marcie couldn’t be in conflict without having a very intense, reactive, and physical response. In my experience, such responses generally are evidence of an issue that has been with that person all of his or her life. Usually such vulnerabilities have their origins in childhood and perhaps will be with that person until deat
h. These core vulnerabilities are deeply embedded; they don’t just go away.

  I asked Marcie whether this response to conflict was something unique to her situation with this partner or whether it felt familiar from other areas of her life and in her history. Not surprisingly, Marcie reported the response was very familiar. She remembered shutting down in the face of aggression as early as elementary school. When a teacher would reprimand her, she would make herself “as small as possible.” She also remembered shutting down in conflicts with her parents and, to some degree, with coworkers over the years.

  So with Marcie, I started with a developmental approach, calling attention to the possibility that shutting down and trying to escape was a pattern of hers. She had it before she got into this particular relationship, and it would probably remain, even if she were to leave the relationship. Given that her partner’s behavior appeared to be in the normal range of conflict and that, in other ways, the relationship was relatively healthy and satisfying, I suggested it might be helpful for her to work with her experience of aggressive energy before deciding to end the relationship. She might give herself some time, a few months perhaps, to see if her personal work might result in experiencing the relationship as workable. She agreed.

  As soon as we are willing to look at how we relate to our core vulnerabilities, we’ve already taken a big step forward. We begin to no longer feel like a victim of circumstance, of our past, or of another person’s behavior. I helped Marcie see that her partner’s aggression—which was triggering a preexisting vulnerability—was just that, a trigger. Since her partner wasn’t the cause, breaking up with him would not provide a real solution. Instead, I suggested that it might be to Marcie’s benefit to investigate how she could increase her tolerance of her own very intense response. In therapy, there’s always both personal work—how we relate to our own experience and vulnerabilities—and interpersonal work—or how we relate to others and to the world. For Marcie, her personal work was to first learn how to work with her intense, reactive, physical experience of fear and panic. I find the fruitional approach most helpful for this, with a focus on immediacy and embodiment. Her interpersonal work began with finding ways to reduce the frequency with which the trigger occurred. I find the developmental approach most helpful for this, offering a variety of skillful means, including an understanding of her history, so that she didn’t believe she had to engage with her partner to work through this issue; communication skills to help negotiate boundaries and behavioral agreements; and so on.