by Bruce Tift
Struggle at the Level of Process
At some point, we may achieve the capacity to feel stable enough, safe enough, and self-contained enough that we no longer feel we’re always at the mercy of our immediate circumstances. This accomplishment—the accomplishment of neurotic organization—has incredible benefits. But one price tag of this is a stabilized sense of discomfort that’s not associated with any specific content at all. It comes from feeling divided against the “dangerous” parts of ourselves. As we discussed earlier, this division leads to ongoing or chronic anxiety. The good news is that, at this point, enough confidence has been gained that we can take on the project of recovering experiential ownership of that which has been disowned. We feel some degree of trust in ourselves; we feel adequately intact. Because of this, we can now risk relating to “other” in a more confident way, and we transition to the process level of struggle. Having committed ourselves to recovering ownership of our difficult vulnerabilities, we now focus on how we relate to these experiences.
The process level of struggle is the realm of most Western depth therapies. The basic intention is to make conscious that which has been unconscious or, on a subtler level, to cultivate a more open and receptive attitude toward what we don’t want to experience. In most cases, therapy at this level is focused on an exploration of what got repressed when we were young and, more importantly, how this is still being repressed today. While we continue to work with content, the central issue becomes how we engage with our experiencing, rather than what we are experiencing. Acceptance of self becomes the focus, more than fixing the self. And because we are not so invested in solving an endless display of content-level problems, we are now able to investigate patterns of experiencing. We discover that it is our out-of-date patterns that perpetuate our young survival strategies and that what perpetuates these patterns is our current refusal to consciously participate in our core vulnerabilities. While we may deal with specific thoughts and emotions, we’re actually working with recognizing how we continue to dissociate and with learning ways in which to tolerate more experiential intensity. As discussed previously, a very effective way in which to maintain our repressive strategies is with ritualized struggle. Our conscious experience is either our hope or our fear, and our repressed experience is the opposite—either our fear or our hope. If I grew up in a family in which anger was either prohibited or very destructive, I would be smart to disconnect from any of my own feelings of anger. Growing up, I might believe that I “struggled with anger.” Perhaps I struggled with my own anger, expressed in explosive episodes about which I felt ashamed, or with the anger of others, such as a succession of partners with anger issues. As an adult in therapy, a major part of my work would be to recover a conscious relationship with this disowned aspect of myself. I may find that what I’ve struggled with is not anger but my repression of my anger. It might help to understand my history, to learn skillful ways to express my anger, and so on, all in service of learning how to have an adult relationship with anger.
Bringing repressed material into awareness allows us to feel more integrated, less divided. Of course, one problem is that we will never make all of our experience conscious. Research over the past twenty to thirty years consistently suggests that as much as 95 percent of what we experience never arises into conscious awareness. A massive amount of experiencing, processing, and decision making is happening without our conscious participation. So even if we become receptive to our unconscious experience, I think it’s extremely unlikely we’ll ever be fully aware of everything we’re choosing not to feel. If feeling whole requires that we no longer repress experience, then the Western approach to this level of struggle is an unending project, and in some cases, Western therapy does in fact seem unending.
From the Buddhist view, the process level of struggle can be seen as working with the tendency to subtly define and orient ourselves based on our experience of relationship, especially with emotional energy. I may be taking my sense of self from the quality of my emotional relating, from how well I deal with difficult feelings, or by how much equanimity I am capable of feeling when disturbed. Struggle may now be based on the hope and fear I bring to my relationship with other—whether it be another person or the “other” of my own psyche. I hope that I will feel clear and generous in relating to myself and to others. I fear that I will feel envious and arrogant. I struggle to feel open and calm whenever I’m actually feeling closed and agitated. Reducing struggle at this point requires taking ownership of the full range of my feelings, like them or not, and learning that feelings have no necessary connection to behavior. I am able, at first as a practice, to relate as a dignified and considerate person, regardless of how I’m feeling. As an adult with repressed anger, my practice at this level might include returning over and over to my immediate experience of anger, slowly discovering that what was once, in fact, unworkable is now quite workable. But recovering disowned anger is not the real point. Rather, the point is to stay present with all of my experiencing—pleasant and scary—with no agenda of understanding, healing, or resolving; just participating in whatever arises. Buddhist practices at this level are basically generic, not issue-specific. I relate to whatever arises with awareness, embodied immediacy, and unconditional kindness, cultivating a resilient relationship with all experiencing. My efforts are to improve the quality of engagement, regardless of content. The patterns of relating that I work with are the familiar ways in which I escape from open immediacy into the attachment, anger, and ignoring expressions of fundamental aggression. I wouldn’t be doing these practices, though, if I already experienced myself as whole, complete, not problematic. I am still splitting off from these parts of myself as if they were somehow not me. While it’s much improved, a sense of split remains.
In both views—Western and Buddhist—there’s an increasing sense of confidence at this level. But there still remains an identification with our conscious experiencing as “I” and with other persons and certain aspects of ourselves experienced as “not I.” This generates an ongoing sense of tension and anxiety, which we continue to avoid with dramas of struggle about relationship. We continue a subtle investment in the project of improvement. We continue to be in a struggle to feel more fully alive, more embodied, more present, and more wakeful. All of those things are wonderful. But beneath the display, there’s still some sense of being a project—as if who we are in this moment is somehow deficient or not quite okay yet. We still are claiming that we can’t yet show up fully and engage in our lives just as we are.
Struggle at the Basic Level
The basic level of struggle concerns the way in which we’re unconsciously using the unending display of our experience as a distraction from the nature of open mind. While we may have given up the fantasy of an only-positive life and relaxed our project of only-positive ways of relating to our experiencing, we still find a tendency to escape from the non-personal nature of open awareness into our fascination with our personal relative experiencing. To return to the metaphor of the movie, when we’re captured by a movie, we lose any sense of awareness of the environment within which the movie is being shown. The more fascinating the movie, the more completely we are captured. And what seems most magnetizing about a movie is the sense of a problem, or struggle, with some very significant resolution to be decided. The same goes for our daily lives. We seem to be fascinated by the endless stream of thoughts, feeling, hopes, fears, and perceptions that make up the display of our minds. This fascination is unconsciously used as a distraction from awareness—or whatever we want to call that larger context of open intelligence and perception. Again, we avoid that open experience, because it has no qualities that can ever be grasped and provides absolutely no support for personal identity—which makes it very disturbing to our project of continuing our sense of being a significant self.
This basic level of struggle is usually not addressed by mainstream Western therapies, because within that view, the belief in an objectively
existing self remains largely unquestioned. Developmental psychotherapy is organized around the effort to improve one’s experience of the self; it’s pretty straightforward. Not so from the Buddhist view. It’s at this basic level where the fruitional view really begins, focusing on the question of how the relative experience of form and limitation is related to the absolute experience of open mind and freedom. Buddhist practices are really an invitation to drop our fascination with what we are experiencing and attend to the already existing awareness of our experience. Awareness is already always present. In fact, awareness is inseparable from the content of our experiencing. So there’s no future goal, no project, no struggle for achievement. There’s just a shift of attention or perspective, over and over.
THE THREE LEVELS OF STRUGGLE IN CLINICAL PRACTICE
Having described these three levels of struggle—content, process, and basic—perhaps it would be helpful to give some examples of how this may actually show up in my office. It’s very common at the beginning of therapeutic work for someone to be looking outside of themselves either for the cause of their problems or for their solution. Because we have very little control over others, even over our own feelings, this strategy guarantees struggle at the content level. This happens for everyone, but in my experience, it’s most vivid in relationship work.
When a couple first comes in, often each is blaming the other for their experience. “If only he would be more sensitive and emotionally available, I could be happy.” “If only she would stop telling me what to do, we would have peace.” Unconsciously—or, in some cases, quite consciously—the solution they have in mind is for their partner to change so that they don’t have to feel disturbed. This conclusion is often accompanied by a helpful list of what’s wrong with the other person. In most cases, each is hoping that I will validate their position about their partner and that their partner will “get the message” that they need to change.
What most couples don’t understand is that by placing the cause of their disturbance outside of themselves, they’re assuming a powerless child/victim position. This position itself is the main source of their distress. In the meantime, they’re missing an opportunity to learn how to deal with their own disturbance. They’re basically saying, “My life would be so much better if only you would be who I want you to be and not who you are.” That is, of course, a formula for chronic conflict—and for some very destructive experience in relationship. At this content level of struggle, the basic therapeutic intervention is to introduce the practice of personal responsibility. When working with a couple in conflict, I will continually interrupt, reframe, ask questions, tell jokes—all with the intention to make it increasingly difficult for the couple to maintain their drama of blame and struggle. When struggle with one’s partner is not so believable, we are forced to recognize our struggles with ourselves. Realizing that we are having feelings we don’t want to feel is already a first step in relating to these difficult feelings as possibly workable. By practicing personal responsibility, we can become curious about the fact that our disturbance seems to be something we’ve lived with our whole life. Perhaps we can remember feeling unloved as a child or like we had to be the junior parent. We start to realize that the issue we’ve been blaming our partner for causing is actually something we have within ourselves; it just happens that it’s being triggered very intensely in this relationship—which is what relationships do. But the other person is no longer seen as the cause and thus will never be the solution.
If all goes well, the client and/or couple begin to think, “Well, seeing how I’m stuck with these difficult feelings, maybe I should investigate them and learn to work with them. Perhaps I will feel more personal power if I stop putting my well-being into somebody else’s hands, since I have no real control over how that person behaves.”
This shift marks the transition into working at the process level of struggle. This is the work that most therapists do: trying to dissolve the stabilized struggle between what we consciously want to feel and what we are unconsciously afraid we will have to feel—the latter of which inevitably gets triggered by our partner, our coworkers, our children, and our lives. When working with a couple that is willing and able to make this shift, I tend to alternate going to depth with each person’s disowned vulnerabilities. This allows each partner to witness what fears and strategies their partner may be experiencing and perhaps to realize that their partner’s issues really have nothing to do with them.
As mentioned, working at the content level—that is, helping clients to have “good” experiences—could be understood as doing “preneurotic” work. This work has to do with giving clients support and calming their anxiety. Working with clients at that preneurotic level requires the therapist to be very supportive, maybe even a bit of a cheerleader. Without confronting them too much, the therapist teaches concrete life skills and takes the role of a soothing parent. But as clients move out of this content level of struggle into the process level, things begin to shift. They start to realize that their unresolved issues—their vulnerabilities—are their own responsibility to work with. At this point, the therapist transitions into what is called “uncovering” work. Here, the intention is to bring up exactly what clients don’t want to feel.
Many people begin therapy with the unexamined agenda that they only want to feel happy—“Why can’t our marriage feel positive and supportive all the time?” But if they progress in their work, most clients, somewhat naturally, shift into a willingness to examine whatever is arising. They begin to realize that if their project is “to feel happy,” then that suggests that they actually have not been feeling happy. So maybe working with what’s true in their experience will be more productive than trying to ignore it. They become willing to look into their own unconscious material and take responsibility for their own experience. This is the point at which clients become ready to practice the attitude of being an adult. They’re saying, “Oh, this sucks! I hate the way I feel when my partner behaves this way. It’s hard, but you know, I get it. It’s really my issue, isn’t it?” At that point, the therapeutic work is to continue bringing up anxiety-provoking issues so that they get the opportunity to investigate for themselves whether the anxiety they’re feeling is actually a problem. As they discover that the panic associated with a disowned feeling is not really a reliable signal that their survival is threatened, their need for the protective function of struggle gradually dissolves.
Some people I work with continue forward, making the transition into investigating the basic level of struggle. While it’s usually those who have some sort of spiritual practice, sometimes I’m surprised. I’ve had many clients who seem naive about therapy and spirituality who become immediately curious. “What is the nature of awareness? What has been aware of all this drama I’ve been going through?” It’s almost like a little lightbulb goes off or there’s a spontaneous shift of perspective. They start saying, “Hey, this is really interesting! If I check into my experience, I can feel that my awareness is undisturbed even when I’m disturbed.” So while it’s not the usual therapeutic territory, some people—and I can never predict who—seem to have an instinctual resonance with the basic level of experiencing and want to investigate that experience further. I may then point out when clients have resolidified their sense of self in some way and are taking their drama seriously, interrupt a narrative and ask what is aware of their experiencing in this moment, invite them into an embodied sense of not-knowing when there appears to be some dilemma, join in the sense of well-being that arises when they drop their fascination with problems and struggle, and present a larger context of seeing their work as really being for the benefit of all.
RELAXING STRUGGLE
Working in either the therapeutic or Buddhist context, all of these levels of work involve the same intention: relaxing struggle. When we relax our struggle, the apparently significant dramas we create begin to dissolve. As we gradually allow our various hopes and fears to coexist, we fin
d there is, in fact, no resolution necessary (or even possible). Experiencing our worst fears doesn’t kill us, and experiencing our greatest hope doesn’t save us. Both are only transient energies. Each arises, dwells, and falls away. Being willing to consciously participate in negative and positive feelings equally, we begin to cultivate an attitude of nonbias. Being open to all experience, we can’t really identify with preferred experience and reject difficult experience. We discover that not knowing who we are does not make us dysfunctional. On the contrary, it gives rise to the experience of freedom, unconditional confidence, and openheartedness.
On an even deeper level, relaxing struggle may give rise to an experience of empty nature. As discussed earlier, the appearance of solidity is actually maintained by struggle, which is based on fundamental aggression toward reality. So as we relax our struggle, the immediacy of our experience becomes more and more vivid. With less chronically contracted attention, more and more moments of open awareness are consciously experienced and integrated into our ongoing experiencing. It doesn’t mean that we lose our capacity to plan for the future or remember the past, and it doesn’t mean that our familiar issues no longer arise. It just means that now there’s an experiential dialogue going on at all times. Our thoughts, plans, and strategies—our hopes and fears—continue to arise. Simultaneously, awareness, which has no quality of problem to it, arises more and more frequently. We find that we can hold deeply contradictory experiences at the same time, which makes it difficult to take any version of reality too seriously.