Already Free

by Bruce Tift

  ANXIETY AND OUR DISOWNED FEELINGS

  From the Western perspective, anxiety is basically a developmental phenomenon. In the first years of life, we’re subjected to intense emotions and sensations that we’re really not capable of processing. These intense, energetic, emotional experiences threaten to overwhelm our very fragile sense of self, our ability to function; thus, they can provoke intense anxiety in us. To disconnect from the anxiety, we quickly construct internal fences to separate our conscious experiencing from these disturbing emotions. These fences—or defenses—may include repression, regression, projection, intellectualization, dissociation, and so on. Whatever our style, we’re basically trying to get away from the perceived threat. In the process, we sacrifice a part of ourselves—the part that’s feeling disturbed. We cut off from those emotions, so that our more conscious sense of self can operate relatively free of anxiety. As we have discussed, however, the cost of doing this is a fundamental sense of being divided against ourselves. We create a character structure: a positive self—sometimes called “ego,” which is associated with the ability to function and survive—and a negative “not-self,” created out of the disturbing energies we’re not willing to feel. When young, this anxiety-avoidance strategy is healthy and intelligent. It’s very appropriate and very creative. In fact, it requires incredible discipline to learn how to not feel what we’re actually feeling in a consistent way. But by organizing our character structure around the avoidance of these unworkably intense feelings—such as grief, rage, and fear—we paradoxically place these worst fears at the center of our sense of self.

  This is what Jerome, the client we met at the beginning of this chapter, had done. Over the course of a handful of sessions, Jerome started to examine the possibility that what was common across all the problem areas in his life was the avoidance of anxiety. He discovered that the anxiety he felt was pretty much the same in all of these areas; there wasn’t a different anxiety for relationship and another for work, for example. He started to see that the experience of anxiety had been part of his life—perhaps for his whole life. He remembered feeling it as an adolescent, when applying for law schools and when taking the bar exam. He could even remember feeling anxious when he was left home alone or when his parents would fight. Once he recognized that he’d been feeling anxious off and on for as long as he could remember, he became more open to the possibility that anxiety was a valid, necessary part of his human experience—even if it was one he didn’t like!

  To help him become more tolerant of his own anxiety, I had Jerome close his eyes and do a visualization. I asked him to stretch his arm out as far as it could go and imagine that his hand was holding the experience of feeling anxious. I had him try to get as far away from it as possible. Of course, his anxiety would still be part of him; he can’t actually leave it behind. In the visualization, I suggested he try walking forward while attempting to leave the anxiety behind. The anxiety is still in his hand; so if he’s not willing to bring the anxiety with him, he will end up walking in a circle. I had Jerome visualize himself just rotating around and around that central feeling, all the while pretending it wasn’t there.

  This is what happens to all of us when we divide ourselves against feeling certain emotions or sensations. We’re walking forward through life as if things were settled and taken care of, but secretly massive amounts of our awareness, intelligence, discipline, and creativity are going toward making sure we never have to be aware of our disturbance. Ironically, the result is that we begin to organize our lives around the central feeling we’re avoiding. We end up walking in a circle when we think we’re moving forward. If we’re lucky, by the time we’re in our thirties or forties, we start to wake up to these repetitive, habitual patterns. We become curious about and sort of mystified by why we keep re-creating the same painful dramas over and over. We can see that the behaviors are not to our benefit, but we don’t seem to be able to stop them.

  This is when we need to investigate the possibility that we are basically maintaining these patterns as a ritualized avoidance strategy. We’re behaving almost like a planet rotating around the sun. The very experience we’ve dedicated our life to not feeling—be it loneliness, lack of worth, abandonment, anger, or dependency—has become the center of our sense of self. And this sense of self is not a very positive, workable one. In fact, we relate to this core sense of self as quite problematic and threatening. By the time we’re adults, our efforts to avoid the immediate experience of anxiety can result in a state of subtle but chronic anxiety.

  Jerome wanted to challenge his historic conditioning, but to do so, he had to commit to going into his worst fears and dissolving his avoidance strategies. He had to recognize what he didn’t want to feel and bring it back into immediate, embodied experience. This practice unfortunately doesn’t make the difficult experience go away—Jerome will likely feel disturbed by conflict for the rest of his life. It does, however, leave us free to engage with our lives more spontaneously because we’re willing to have those feelings arise at any moment. We learn that we can feel them and they aren’t going to kill us. Gradually, we gain what I think of as the confidence of “so what?” “So what if I feel uncertain and confused? So what if I feel victimized or dependent? So what if I feel hurtful and alone and selfish? So what?” They actually just turn out to be feelings—feelings that can be worked with, feelings that don’t have to be acted upon.

  From a Buddhist point of view, our commitment to not feeling disturbing emotions gives rise to a very convincing sense that we have some central, essential nature. Our lives indeed seem to be formed around something, and that something feels deeply problematic to us. By practicing our avoidant strategies over and over, day after day for decades, we become experientially convinced that there must be a central point around which our life revolves. The centerpiece of our being is composed of our core vulnerabilities, which are perceived as problematic. Our life revolves around a problem. And that problem must be our secret self, because it’s always been there and never seems to change.

  Oddly enough, this belief serves us, because it means we don’t have to consider the possibility that there is no center to our lives and no independently existing self. Instead, we can spend our lives in therapy or spiritual practice, trying to somehow heal or take care of the seemingly solid problematic self we’ve created. At this point, we might attempt to improve our experience of the problem through Western therapy, or we might try to experience “no self” through spiritual practices like meditation. But we’re still motivated by a fundamentally paranoid attitude that there is some problem needing to be fixed. But when we actually recover what has been disowned and bring it into our immediate embodied experience—and see that it’s not going to kill us—we begin to dissolve our sense of having an essential self. We discover that, absent a central struggle, we have no center to our life at all. We just show up each moment and deal with our life as it happens.

  BINDING OUR ANXIETY TO A SPECIFIC ISSUE

  As we’ve discussed, when we stabilize our efforts to not feel anxious, the result is a sense of being divided against ourselves. This, in turn, generates distrust in ourselves and a sense of having a basic flaw, as well as many of the issues commonly worked with in psychotherapy.

  Anna Freud coined the term signal anxiety to refer to the function played by anxiety in preparing us to defend against inner threats. She saw this kind of anxiety as a signal that previously unconscious material was threatening to be experienced consciously. Similarly, we can understand anxiety as a signal that there is something we’ve been pushing away that needs to be integrated. Something has been disowned; maybe we ought to check it out?

  Chronic anxiety is the result of our ritualized refusal to stay fully embodied with our present experience. One of the strategies we use when we refuse to experience whatever it is we’ve been pushing away is called binding anxiety. Binding anxiety arises when we identify our anxiety as caused by a particular issue. We tell ourse
lves a story about a particular threat, which binds our anxiety to that localized issue. We sacrifice this part of ourselves as if it were a symptom or problem, as if it were the cause of our anxiety. By apparently containing our anxiety within a specific problem, we create a sense that the rest of our life is free of anxiety. This also gives rise to the fantasy that we could have an anxiety-free life if only we could solve that problem. “If there’s a cause to my anxiety, there must be a solution. If only I had enough money, had children, were single, were enlightened, then my anxiety would be solved.” In truth, if we actually solved this “problem,” anxiety would continue to arise. And so, unconsciously, we actually make sure that we never solve our favorite problem. Or if we do, we find a new problem, a new explanation for our anxiety. Otherwise, we’d have to face the fact that inexplicable anxiety will continue to arise, off and on, as long as we are sensitive, embodied, biological beings.

  A client of mine, Patty, had been married for twenty-four years before divorcing once the children left for college. She’d recently begun dating again, and it was bringing back a lot of bad memories from her younger years. After having been married for so long, she’d forgotten how anxious she’d always been around men she was seeing. Even as a teenager, she’d feel uncharacteristically shy and nervous when out on dates and had a hard time being herself. She came to see me because she was so distressed by this problem and wanted help getting underneath it. Of course, she didn’t much like what I had to say! I suggested to her that perhaps by focusing on this repetitive, apparent problem, she was distracting herself from a deeper vulnerability. She could pin her generalized human anxiety on the issue of dating. “I’m anxious because I have a date this Friday night, and I don’t know if I should cancel,” she could say. “I’m afraid I’ll get a panic attack. If only I could meet the right man, so I could stop dating. Then I wouldn’t be anxious. Because dating is the cause of my anxiety. I’m really not that anxious in other parts of my life.” Like most of us, Patty believed that the generalized anxiety she felt about being human was bound up in this one familiar issue. In our discussions, it became clear that during her marriage, she had not been free of anxiety; instead, she had explained her anxiety as being caused by her natural concerns about her children, finances, and so on.

  Patty, of course, probably had some very real history about her relations with men, perhaps beginning with her father. But her history is in her past. It is not causing the present anxiety, even though it may be triggering it. But now that she’s an adult, it might be useful for her to learn to have a relationship with anxiety as anxiety, without explanation. I worked with Patty on developing a willingness and ability to stay present with her anxiety whenever it might arise. While not easy, she found that she could do it. She also began to see that a refusal to stay embodied with her own disturbance was a type of self-abandonment. This refusal to be intimate with herself made it feel very threatening to explore the possibility of being intimate with a partner. She took on the practice of including the experience of anxiety as a valid part of any experience of intimacy. She started counting on it, rather than treating it as a problem to be solved before a relationship would be possible.

  Most of us would rather do what Patty was doing—projecting all of our anxiety onto one single issue. We don’t seem to be ready to welcome anxiety into our everyday lives as if it were a necessary, valid experience. We may understand that anxiety has served for hundreds of millions of years as a useful signal of imminent threat to survival. But who wants to be aware of feeling that their survival is threatened? That experience is very disturbing. Therefore, we have a strong motivation to get out of that anxiety. If we can escape our anxiety, then we will feel safe.

  But just because we feel unsafe doesn’t mean there’s a real threat, and just because we feel safe doesn’t mean that we actually are. Some types of therapy, in fact, emphasize the need to feel safe in order to work with one’s vulnerabilities. It seems true for many situations that a specific environment is needed for specific work, just as we want a sterile operating room for an operation. I don’t have expertise in working with trauma, but my sense is that feeling safe is very important when investigating traumatic organization. Although this safe environment is very accurate as a temporary experience, it may be easy to then think that feeling safe is a requirement for engaging with one’s life. But there is another possibility, which is to develop a confidence in our willingness and ability to experience our fear, anxiety, and negativity and to work with whatever may arise at any moment. Perhaps a confidence based on our own capacities will be more reliable than a feeling of safety that is dependent on circumstances we really have little control over.

  BINDING ANXIETY IN GROUPS

  The phenomenon of binding anxiety can also be seen at a group level, whether that group is a social network, a work team, or a spiritual organization. Most groups are not very conscious of, or skillful in dealing with, the anxiety that’s guaranteed to arise when a number of people relate to each other. Therefore, it’s almost inevitable that any group will experience a scapegoating process. In the same way that we compartmentalize our anxiety and tell ourselves that it’s about one particular issue, a group will unconsciously and frequently select a subgroup to feel an emotion or energy that the other members don’t want to feel. Perhaps it’s anger or sadness or a fear of being left out. The subgroup is usually made up of the person or people with the greatest unresolved issues—and weakest boundaries—around the particular energy the group doesn’t want to feel. In a very powerful, unconscious process of induction, this person ends up expressing, for example, not only her own anger but also the anger of the rest of the group. The rest of the group gets to feel relatively free of anger and, therefore, of anxiety. Meanwhile, this one person or subgroup appears to be the problem. Just as Patty believed dating to be the cause of her anxiety, the group begins to think, “If only we could get rid of this person, then our group would be great.” Often the next step is to actually get rid of “the problem”—that is, the person holding that energy for the group. But, of course, once that happens, it’s only a matter of time until the group starts to experience anger arising somewhere else. The anger is still there in the group; if they are not willing to acknowledge it, feel it, and work with it at the group level, a new subgroup or person will be chosen as the next location of the problem.

  This is also a very challenging issue in working with families. As a family therapist for social services in the 1980s, time after time I would meet with families that would be unconsciously scapegoating a child. Because young children are like psychic, emotional sponges, they tend to absorb whatever their parents have repressed and won’t deal with. The child then tends to identify with that energy and act it out. The parents can then enable the child to continue acting out what they don’t want to feel while punishing or rejecting the child for being that way.

  COMMITTING TO THE EXPERIENCE OF ANXIETY

  When we investigate the experience of anxiety, the Western approach takes the experience itself as its starting point. What triggered the anxiety? How can we work with it? How can we make it go away? How can we improve our circumstances so we don’t have to feel so anxious and divided? As discussed, a Buddhist approach suggests that how we relate to the experience of anxiety is even more important than the details of that experience. If we start by taking our experience at face value, we’re starting from the assumption that this experience has its own real, objective existence. If what I am feeling has an independent reality—that is, if such a “thing” as “anxiety” exists—then there seems to be a subtle but powerful implication that the self who is aware of this anxiety must have its own independent reality, too. “Anxiety” and “I” must be two fundamentally separate things. There is, as discussed previously, the vivid appearance of a self, seemingly with its own essential nature, relating to a world made up of separate objects, feelings, thoughts, and so on. Without examination, we are understandably likely to take this app
earance as an accurate experience of reality. This perpetuates our sense of being a small, separate, alienated self, living in a vast, impersonal universe. This significant, alienated, problematic self seems so vivid that we believe it’s a representation of reality. Since it so obviously appears to be there, it must be there. And so, of course, it makes sense to protect and improve this self.

  This could be called the egoic process—the process through which we generate and maintain the experience of a solid, continuous, significant and personal self. Unfortunately, this project of selfhood is never going to be truly successful. As much as the Western approach might improve our ability to engage with our lives, in reality, everything is always changing. We can never solve our lives. Life is not a thing that can be broken and then fixed. Life is a process, and we can never solve a process. We can only participate in this process, either consciously or unconsciously. We aren’t going to find the perfect formula and then coast our way through life. We can’t make pain go away, although we can reduce unnecessary suffering significantly. The more deeply we investigate, the less we can grasp or even know this apparent self that Western psychology takes as its foundation. From the Buddhist perspective, the nature of life—and of our own mind—is basically open. There is no foundation; no ground to stand on. We can consciously participate in this open nature, but we can’t know it.