Already Free

by Bruce Tift

  One of the interesting considerations that arises when we talk about holding contradictory energies is that we still have to act. Every second, we are choosing to take some sort of action in the world. (Even if we’re choosing the action of not acting.) And every time we act, we are representing only part of our experience. So once we understand the inherently contradictory nature of our experiencing, it quickly becomes clear that none of our choices for behavior or life circumstances will capture the genuine complexity of our feelings. If I choose to spend my money on this car, I don’t get to buy that one. If I live in Seattle, I don’t get to live in Florida. If I decide to split my time—spending my summers in Seattle and my winters in Florida—then I don’t get to experience year-round weather in either location. There’s a certain loss of complexity whenever we translate our feelings into behavior. We never get to represent both sides of our feelings in the same moment. Loss and limitation are inseparable from choice. We don’t get to choose any one thing without, by implication, choosing not to have ten thousand other things.

  This can seem like a problem because, in our culture especially, many of us believe we should be able to have a life without disturbance or limitation. We’ve talked about the fact that our cultural idea of freedom is an absence of limitations. So naturally the fact that we cannot have a life without limitation is disturbing to some of us. It’s especially disturbing to those of us with histories of toxic loss—divorces, self-absorbed parents, or a family always relocating because of business or the military. When we have had very difficult experiences of loss, especially when that loss happened to us as children, we often feel significant resistance, even panic, about taking responsibility for choosing the specific type of limitation we will have to deal with. Many people end up using ambivalence as a form of defense. “I can’t make up my mind,” we tell ourselves. “I’m so confused. I go back and forth. I procrastinate. I just feel paralyzed when I have to decide.” In many cases, these behavioral styles turn out to be defenses against taking conscious responsibility for the experience of limitation and loss that happens every time we make a choice. But as we’ve discussed, the experience of freedom can also be understood as arising from an unconditional commitment to the truth of our experience. Surprisingly, then, the experience of freedom turns out to be inseparable from a commitment to experience loss and limitation. When I’m working with clients who are facing a difficult decision—whether to continue or end a relationship, try a new career, move to a new city—I often suggest that they count on having second thoughts or regrets, regardless of their choice: “If I stay, I’ll be disturbed. If I move on, I’ll be disturbed.” Once we are clear that any choice we make will never represent all of our very real and valid feelings, we can make decisions based on criteria other than the avoidance of disturbance. We can either experience disturbance in the service of neurosis or experience disturbance in the service of sanity.

  GENERATING, AND CHALLENGING, THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING DIVIDED AGAINST ONESELF

  When I’m working with clients, I hold these contradictory views of development and fruition at all times. I do not use a particular formula; at any moment, there’s choice about what issues we work with and which view we work from. That said, I have found specific techniques and practices helpful, and I would like to share them with you. The intention of each of these views is the same: to dissolve the experience of there being any split or division. In developmental work, we’re dissolving the apparent split between the conscious self and the unconscious or repressed self, while in the fruitional view, we’re dissolving the apparent split between personal self—including all relative experience, both conscious and unconscious—and the larger context of nonpersonal awareness.

  One way to approach this work is by understanding how, through progressive levels of disconnection, we can generate the experience of a divided self. This creation of a sense of being a “self divided against itself” requires great effort, creativity, and intelligence. We should be clear, though, that intelligence is not the same as wisdom. As discussed, this sense of a divided self is probably a necessary and inevitable consequence of our efforts to take care of ourselves as children. As adults, however, what was once healthy is now out of date but continues to be maintained without awareness, or unconsciously. The first and most basic level of disconnection is an attitude of fundamental aggression toward the truth of our experience. This attitude is one of refusing to accept our immediate, direct, noninterpretive experiencing as it is. Many teachers have said, in a variety of ways, that the basic cause of unnecessary suffering is wanting reality to be other than it is. In chapter 1, we discussed the three styles of fundamental aggression: positive, negative, and neutral.

  The second level of disconnection is a dissociative relationship to our immediate embodied experiencing. Fundamental aggression is an attitude. We begin to put that attitude into practice through an ongoing dissociation from the obvious truth that we are embodied, impermanent, vulnerable beings. We’ll focus on this specifically in chapter 5, when we discuss embodied awareness.

  As a third level, we add a continuous stream of self-referential commentary to whatever we may be experiencing. As discussed in the previous chapter, we have an experience, and then, in a fraction of a second, we make up a story about how that experience has to do with our “self.” We may pass judgment: “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” We may ask, “How does this experience relate to me? How does it reflect on my worth as a person? Can I ignore it, or is it relevant to me?” We do this thousands of times every day.

  As a fourth level of disconnection, we link moments of experience to one another, creating an impression of continuity as the domino analogy suggested. Just as we’re more likely to be absorbed in a book or movie with a good narrative, we maintain an experience of being a self-absorbed, continuing “self” with familiar narratives. What’s even more fascinating is that we appear to be both the subject and the object of these stories. This linking practice continues and strengthens our sense of being a separate continuing self that relates to life, rather than being an expression of life. We discussed this process in chapter 2.

  As a fifth and final level, we stabilize a state of chronic struggle by maintaining the claim that there’s something really important that has to be fixed about “us” or about life. Now the narrative has become a cliffhanger. “Am I worthy of love? When will I finally heal my childhood wounds? How can I enjoy my life when there’s so much suffering in the world?” Of course, the more significant the problem, the more significant we feel. Usually this very important problem presents as some kind of threat even to our survival. Only when it is resolved can we risk being fully present and engaged with our lives. This experience of maintaining chronic struggle is discussed in detail in chapter 4. At this point, we have achieved a very reliable and stable sense of disconnection from the always-open, not-secure, disturbing, and vulnerable reality of our human experience.

  Once we have some understanding of how we generate the experience of basic division or dissociative split, we can then challenge the process. It’s helpful to keep in mind, though, that we will almost certainly encounter very contradictory feelings about doing this work. Most of us identify deeply, and somewhat unconsciously, with our familiar senses of self. While we genuinely want relief from the suffering that this inaccurate self-absorption creates, we will probably feel quite anxious at some point if we actually begin to dismantle the fascinating drama of “our significant self.”

  These levels of dissociative practices are sequential, with each serving as the foundation for the next. Therefore, when challenging this process, it would seem to work best to start at the most relative level and work inward. In actual practice, I jump back and forth quite a bit, but there is a general sense of progression or movement. For example, a client may be identified with a struggle about how it’s wrong to feel selfish. Until this is worked with, it will be difficult to go deeper into that client’s immediate embodied experien
ce of selfishness and even harder to practice kindness to this feeling. So even though I may work with any of these levels at any moment, I generally start with a client’s claim of being in a state of struggle first and then move inward as the client is ready for deeper work.

  Each level of dissociative practice actually implies its own antidotal practice, which usually involves doing the opposite of what we are used to doing. It may be helpful to use my work with a client to illustrate each of these antidotal practices. Keep in mind that in actual sessions, the work would not be so linear.

  I recently met with Vance, a client who had moved from Chicago to Boulder in the past year. In his early thirties, Vance had become aware of a recurring experience of feeling unfairly criticized in his work and even of being attacked by his bosses. “I exhaust myself at work, and they still find fault,” he told me. “I go out of my way to be friendly with my supervisor, but she’s still rude to me.” Vance is describing a familiar type of struggle, which probably had origins in his childhood experience. He told me, “My father drank a lot and was always angry. I tried to never upset him, but he always found something to yell at me about. I just wanted him to be proud of me.” His struggle oscillates between his hope that somehow he’ll get what he wants and his fear that it’s hopeless. In a young, unconscious way, Vance is trying to resolve these contradictory feelings—sometimes believing that he will achieve his hope for safety, love, and recognition, and sometimes collapsing into a depressed belief that he will never get what he most wants. Rather than immediately offering encouragement—for example, by working on skills that might help him avoid attacks and get the approval he wants—I invite Vance into a variation on the worst-fear technique mentioned earlier. My intention is to first disrupt the chronic struggle that he has been using as an unconscious way to stabilize a familiar sense of self. Struggle requires a polarized split in our experience, which we could call our hope and our fear. It’s then fueled with the fantasy that somehow we will get rid of our fear and achieve our hope. One way to challenge this very stable psychic process is to invite one’s fear first into awareness and then into acceptance. It’s hard to struggle when we’re willing to feel and take ownership of what we’ve been trying to avoid.

  I invite Vance to say out loud, “I give myself permission to feel that I will be attacked and will never get the love and approval that I most want, perhaps for the rest of my life.” I make it clear that these are feelings that Vance already has been living with his whole life, not predictions about the future. I find that saying fears out loud, in the presence of another person, is much more impactful than saying them silently and privately to ourselves. Acknowledging our fears this directly is much more exposing and vulnerable, which then allows a more direct assessment of whether something bad is actually happening to us. This is not a one-time practice; it must be revisited many times if we are to develop an experiential confidence that feeling what seems so threatening does not actually harm us.

  To address the fantasy of resolution, I explored with Vance the view that he may have these contradictory feelings—his hope and his fear—for the foreseeable future, just as he has had them most of his life. But, do they really need to be resolved? Why not learn how to respect both feelings—he, in fact, does carry a painful feeling of not being safe and not getting the love and approval he wants; and he, appropriately, has the hope of feeling safe and loved. Both feelings are valid. Can he commit to allowing both to coexist? Can he tolerate a more complex sense of self now that he’s an adult?

  As Vance relaxed his unconscious identification with “I am the one who will always struggle to get the safety and love that I will never get,” we were then able to address the level of linking moments of experience—that is, how he continually constructed a narrative that, while familiar and therefore safe-feeling, was creating a lot of unnecessary suffering. Often it’s helpful to first offer some reframes to the client’s story before challenging the story making itself. The first reframe is usually to place the difficult feelings in a historic, developmental context. If Vance is telling himself that the problem is his boss, then he’ll want to work with the issue in that relationship. But if he can see his painful feelings as having been with him all his life, as probably having their origin in his experience as a child, then he’ll be more available to work with the issue as located within himself, as his own core vulnerability. Another helpful reframe is to present all of our out-of-date survival strategies as an expression of our health, our best efforts to take care of ourselves. Another is to offer the view that, whatever happened to us when young, if we want to strengthen our sense of being an adult, it’s important to practice an attitude of complete responsibility for working with our experience, regardless of how it might have been shaped by our history. A next step at this level is to challenge any story about our experience, however positive. Here the practice of immediacy is very powerful. As Vance shared the drama of his struggles at work, I often interrupted to ask, “Excuse me, but what are you actually experiencing right now, without any interpretation?” Vance would at first appear a bit flustered or irritated, but he would then pause and pay attention in a way that, at least for a moment, would undermine his identification with his narrative. Over time, this practice revealed subtler and subtler levels of experiencing. But at first, it simply served to loosen his unconscious fascination with the story he was telling himself.

  Beneath the stories we tell is our tendency to continually add self-referential commentaries to whatever we may be experiencing. We challenge this level of our “disconnection practice” by removing any claim that our experience is about us. This is a very strange idea to many of us, but as we become less identified with our interpretations about our experience and participate more in our experience, we may find no inherent evidence that anything we experience is actually about us. As Vance was able and willing to stay more in his immediate experience and less in his stories, he began to realize that his drama of victimhood was really serving as a defense against deeper feelings of anger.

  “You know, I’m just now getting how angry I am at my father for always yelling at me and putting me down,” he would say.

  “How would it feel to just say ‘I’m angry,’” I asked him, “with no explanation at all?”

  Vance reported that it surprisingly felt even more powerful to do this. I then suggested that he drop the “I am” part of it and just say “angry” and feel angry. What was it like to feel the intensity of that emotion, the energy of anger in his body? To respect it and value it, without the need for it to be about anything—even about him? Any intense emotion is actually an expression of aliveness. But we diminish that raw intensity and aliveness when we make the experience about us—wanting either to get rid of it, if it’s negative, or to hold onto it, if it’s positive.

  A very reliable, deep, and pervasive strategy of disconnection is to dissociate from our immediate embodied experiencing. When we leave our bodies, it’s very easy to feel captured by our historic dramas. When we’re vague about what we’re actually feeling in the moment, it’s easy to interpret our experience in ways that are most familiar to us but that may no longer be serving us. The antidotal discipline is that of embodied immediacy, returning over and over again to our embodied, sensation-level, noninterpretive experiencing. This is not an achievement but a practice we might commit to for the rest of our lives. Because we are only living in each present moment, we may find the most reliable sense of being supported by life in the truth of our experiencing, and not so much in our preferences or theories. With the practice of embodied immediacy, we will always find clarity and support. We may not find what we want to find, but we will find what is actually true in this moment. That’s what we can count on, and that’s what there is to work with.

  As Vance and I worked together, I would regularly invite him to bring his attention to his immediate sensation-level feelings, with no interpretation at all. He would describe a tight throat, pressure on his ches
t, a sick feeling in his belly. But he discovered that although it was anxiety provoking to intentionally stay with these sensations, there was no evidence of any harm or damage. Although this practice is often disturbing, it is exactly what cultivates the confidence that all of our experiencing is workable and not actually a problem. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we take on some new belief system of “There are no problems;” rather, we can practice discriminating between our actual immediate experience and our interpretations about this experience and find for ourselves which is most true.

  Our most basic practice of disconnection—our fundamental aggression to the truth of our experience—is challenged by the dual disciplines of awareness and unconditional kindness. These two disciplines are major themes in this book and are discussed in a variety of ways. As is true of all of the antidotes, our understanding and capacities will probably increase with practice. But to work with any issue, we must first bring it into awareness. And as we become gradually more aware of all the ways in which we refuse to accept reality as we find it, we become more aware of how much unnecessary suffering we are creating for ourselves and for others. In turn, our motivation to practice unconditional kindness increases spontaneously and organically. In my work with Vance, once his awareness of a deeper level of experiencing became familiar, I introduced the view of being kind to whatever he might feel.

  “When your boss criticizes you in a meeting,” I would say, “you can expect to feel anxious and angry. What would it be like to say yes to those feelings?” Vance was increasingly able to see that these difficult feelings were not being done to him, but were experiences of his own vulnerability. He reported that he was more and more frequently catching himself in his commentaries, asking himself what he was feeling that he didn’t want to feel, and then doing his best to be kind to these feelings—to be his own best friend.