Already Free

by Bruce Tift

  Every once in a while I get really surprised by a client’s trauma. If it becomes clear that the traumatic organization is significant, I generally refer the client to a therapist who specializes in trauma work. The fruitional work is, after all, very intense. It invites people to go immediately into their deepest disturbances. If somebody has enough resilience, that’s fine. But if not, it can trigger very intense reactivity. I offer this as a word of caution. No style of therapeutic work is a good fit for everybody, and the work I’m discussing is really best suited to those with at least neurotic levels of organization. It’s not particularly appropriate for people with preneurotic organization, those who would be called borderline or psychotic, or those with pervasive traumatic organization.

  When we feel traumatized, threatened, or overwhelmed, it’s like getting an injury. When we were children, our young systems often could not process or metabolize the intensity of emotional threats to our survival. Just like a hurt knee will get stiff and frozen as a form of protection, our emotional system seems to protect us from having to be too aware of what we can’t handle by compartmentalizing these experiences until they are immobilized and encapsulated as traumatic organization. Even when the injury to our knee has healed, the immobility that has protected it will tend to continue. Similarly, on an emotional level, many years later, after the trauma itself has long passed, the structures we created to protect ourselves will tend to persist.

  Thirty some years ago when I started this work, most therapists talked about trauma as if it were still present in one’s system. But since that time, what I believe to be a more accurate understanding has been growing. This new understanding says that it’s actually the traumatic organization—our protective strategies—that persist over time, even after the event or disturbance has passed. But just like a healed knee will hurt as it regains its full range of motion, so is it painful to unwind traumatic organization from our bodies. Our bodies have been stiff for quite a while; they’re tight. As we loosen up, there will be pain and associated panic, which might seem like a step backward. But it’s just like watching a movie with our legs crossed and discovering one of them has fallen asleep. Before we notice it, it’s numb, and there’s no pain. But if we want to recover use of it and walk out of the theater, we have to allow circulation to come back in. Often that means an uncomfortable pins-and-needles experience for a period of time. In the same way, reembodying—especially around traumatic organization, but even in more manageable levels of overwhelm—is often a very disturbing experience.

  The trauma work that I think is most congruent with the fruitional approach has the therapist helping clients very, very slowly reenter their body. It’s important to do this at a slow pace to avoid retraumatizing the client. So while the same principles apply to working with traumatic organization as with more basic neurotic organization, I do think it’s very helpful to find a practitioner who specializes in trauma when there are these intense issues to be explored.

  THE RELEASE OF STORED ENERGY

  An analogy that seems helpful in understanding reembodiment is to imagine that, as children, we actually learned to anesthetize ourselves. Let’s say as a child, I was in a tough situation that I couldn’t get out of. I couldn’t go find new parents or move away from home, for example. That situation would be like having my hand on a burning stove and not being able to move it. What, then, would be the next best thing? To numb up my hand. It’s still going to be injured, of course, but at least I won’t feel so much pain.

  At some point, I become an adult and am now able to make my own decisions and take care of myself. Unless I put attention back on my hand, it will remain numb, and I might leave it on the stove. I’m not even aware of the hurt, pain, and damage that are taking place. For this reason, as adults, it’s very important that we dissolve the anesthesia almost all of us had to learn to apply as children. If I were going into surgery, I would want anesthesia. I don’t want to stay embodied and present while someone cuts open my stomach. I would much rather be numb. But when the surgery is over, it’s very important to come out of the anesthesia. If you’ve ever been through an operation, you know it’s not exactly pleasant as the anesthesia wears off. But we have to go through the pain, or we’ll never be able to feel again.

  The work we’re doing is the work of coming out of our historic anesthesia—out of our sense of split, dissociation, and repression. This is the work of the fruitional approach. It goes right to the mechanism of neurosis, skipping right over the content. The work of focusing on sensations is also something like that of meditation. In fact, in Buddhist meditation, the mindfulness of the body is the first of the four mindfulness practices. It’s a practice common to almost every form of Buddhism, though there are a lot of variations. When we attend to sensations, we’re taking our attention away from our drama. Just as we return to the breath in meditation, when we put our attention on sensation, we’re removing it from our discursive thinking. We’re interrupting our identification with our story by attending to something that’s very difficult to make a story out of.

  With some types of body-centered therapy, the invitation is to stay embodied and then listen to the message that our body is trying to give us. Such therapies are valuable work. But the fruitional practice of immediacy is different. We don’t listen for any sort of message. Maybe there is no message. Maybe it’s just immediate experience. We don’t necessarily need to be making meaning about it.

  As we stay embodied—without interpretations—and attend to sensations, it’s my experience that suppressed and constricted energy begins to release. It’s almost as if our attention, our kindness toward ourselves, experientially validates that energy’s right to manifest. As a result, it can arise into consciousness. If a child who was habitually ignored or repressed was then attended to with curiosity and kindness, it’s likely that he may act out unpredictably for a while. When stored energy is released, it’s often disturbing. Sometimes the energy might be expressed psychologically, as emotion or a painful memory. Other times it might be expressed somatically, through physical symptoms. But as this energy is validated by our attention, it develops a life of its own. It’s as if more movement becomes available.

  As a therapist, I never know where that movement is going to go. If I’m working with an individual and she starts loosening up her constrictions, I don’t know whether she’s going to have the outcome she is hoping for. If a couple starts to loosen the ritualized dynamics that have kept them in pseudo-security, I don’t know if they’ll stay together. So this work isn’t about knowing what the outcome will be. Instead, it’s about a commitment to our aliveness and openheartedness, as well as a confidence that however we choose to engage with our life from this ground will probably be what’s most accurate and useful for us, most in alignment with our aliveness.

  THE CONFIDENCE OF IMMEDIACY

  The more we stay embodied with our moment-by-moment experience, the more confidence we have that we can work with whatever arises. The more we have dissociated—as a way of gaining security or stability—the less we’re in touch with what’s actually true at the moment. And the less we’re in touch with what’s most fundamentally true, the less confidence we have. It’s a paradox: the more we avoid immediacy and intensity so that our lives feel more stable and workable, the less confidence we have in our ability to work with ourselves and our lives.

  When we stay embodied, on the other hand, we start to develop unconditional confidence. This is the confidence of knowing that, whatever happens, we’ll be willing to work with it. Not as a theory, but because we know from experiential evidence that we’re going to be present with whatever may arise. We’re actually working with our situation, our sensations, and our lives—moment after moment after moment. As a result, we start to develop a continuity of awareness. We can see and feel that we can stay present through all of those experiences, with no gaps. We discover that there is no such thing as a static, permanent experience; our sensations are always
in motion. As such, there’s nothing to hang onto. There’s no interpretation we can make in this moment that is going to necessarily fit in the next. But we find that our awareness of this stream of experiencing is always there. We find continuity in awareness, not in what we are aware of experiencing.

  As we remain embodied, what we discover is that all intense experience seems to have a wavelike life of its own. Intense emotional experience begins, builds slowly or quickly, peaks, and then dissipates. We begin to feel some disturbance—sadness, anger, fear—and as the intensity of our experience increases, we tend to feel panic. On a biological level, this panic feels like a signal of some threat to our survival. On a historic level, these feelings were probably too much to process and stay with as children. Usually, unconsciously, we escape our immediate sense of panic by leaving our bodies and taking refuge in some familiar dissociative strategy. While this action gives some immediate relief, we’re not learning how to work with our difficult experience. As adults, most of us actually have the capacity to stay present with a great deal more disturbance than we had as children. But until we discipline ourselves to do so, we tend to reenact and take as necessary our young survival strategies. And most of these strategies are based on the conviction that we are not capable of tolerating too much emotional intensity.

  To discover just what our current capacity for tolerating experiential intensity might be, we must stay present and embodied, even while our instinct is to escape. Our practice is to learn to ride this wave of intensity, remaining embodied even while our panic is telling us, “Get out, get out, we’re going to die.” The practice is not to manage the intensity, not to heal it, not to understand it; rather, it is to consciously participate in the sensation-level experience of it.

  Without a commitment to remaining embodied, we tend to apply our particular style of fundamental aggression to any experience that feels too intense. We try to fix it, collapse, or pretend it’s not happening. Or in biological terms, we go into fight, flight, or freeze responses. Perhaps in a social situation, someone tells a joke at my expense. A rush of embarrassment arises; I feel hot, exposed. Without discipline, I might respond by attacking the person speaking. I might want to say something self-deprecating. I might reach for a drink or just feel confused. With discipline, however, I might allow myself to feel my intense discomfort, be curious about it, not go into any story about it, and watch while the intensity peaks and then dissolves all by itself. When we can train ourselves to let our intense experience have a life of its own, we discover that there’s no such thing as a permanent feeling. It’s actually when we try to avoid our feelings that we tend to “solidify” them and make them appear significant.

  One view is that it is precisely what we refuse to consciously participate in that gets stuck in our physical and energetic systems. With this understanding, we gradually dissolve our historic conditioning by consciously welcoming as immediate sensation, with no interpretation, any and all of the disturbing experiences we have refused to feel while growing up. Staying at the sensation level supports this process, because it helps us see that there’s actually no real threat. The experience may be scary or overwhelming, but that’s actually not a problem. We begin to have an approximation of what, in Buddhist jargon, is called the experience of self-liberation. We see that our experience is self-liberating—it takes care of itself. We don’t have to do anything with our experience. When we stay embodied, our experience simply arises, dwells, and then falls away.

  PRACTICEARISE, DWELL, FALL AWAY

  The more we discipline our attention to be present with our immediate noninterpretive experiencing, the more clearly we see that all of our relative experience—our thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions—arise in an endless and never-resolvable display. Resisting this reality generates unnecessary confusion and suffering. Bringing our experience into alignment with this reality gives rise to clarity, relaxation, and a more skillful engagement with our lives. So it may be helpful to investigate this view.

  As an exercise, you can experiment with relating to all of your experiencing just as you relate to music. When listening to music, you may participate fully in each note, without hanging on to notes you like or adding commentaries to notes you don’t like. You cooperate with the flow of experience. In a similar way, you could choose to observe the flow of your thoughts, feelings, and sensations, practicing an attitude of nonintervention. As you allow your experiencing to have its own life, you may find that it’s impossible to know where a thought, a feeling, is originating. It appears, it displays itself briefly, and then it dissolves. What becomes of that display is impossible to know. An experience arises, out of who knows where. It dwells, manifests, briefly. Then it falls away, dissolves into who knows where.

  All of your experiencing, without exception, has this quality. Even your experience of the observing “self” has this quality. Even your commentary as you do this exercise has this quality. As you practice this attitude of engaged nonintervention, you may find that all of your experiencing simultaneously has the characteristics of vivid appearance, while lacking any continuing essential nature. Experience “liberates itself” not only through its ever-changing flow; it is inherently free—free of solidity, permanence, and conceptual meaning.

  EMBODIED IMMEDIACY AND SKILLFUL ACTION

  One of the benefits to developing the confidence of embodied immediacy is that it gives rise to a sense of choice. It supports the cultivation of what the Buddhists call skillful means, which refers to how we engage with whatever situation is arising. If we dissociate from intensity out of panic, we usually go into a primitive, conditioned, fight-flight-or-freeze response. In that situation, our choice is limited; we’ll pretty much do the same thing we’ve always done—whatever feels familiar and safe. When we can allow intensity to have its own life, however, we find we can try all sorts of things. For example, say your kids just disturbed you. Instead of yelling at them—which is many a parent’s conditioned response—perhaps you’re practicing staying embodied. You let the wave of intensity rise and fall. Once the impulse to escape from disturbance passes, you could then experiment with a variety of responses. You could talk to them about their behavior, joke with them, apply logic, let the whole thing drop, or implement behavioral consequences—however you choose to respond. At this point, your engagement with your life can actually be informed by the present-moment situation. A familiar summary of this work is to move from reaction to response.

  When we’re coming from a panicky place, trying unconsciously to get out of our immediate embodied intensity, then our responses are basically going to be attempts to get out of our feelings as quickly as possible. We tend to react, biologically, as if our survival were threatened. We react, historically, from our young, out-of-date strategies for taking care of ourselves. On the other hand, the more we can stay embodied without interpretation, the more grounded we feel, the more access we have to our current adult capacities. We learn to expect our panic, to not be captured by it, to not behave as if our survival were at risk. We actually learn to be grounded in our panic. We discover that the more confident we feel in our own experience, the more intimately we are able to engage with another person’s experience. This discovery is especially powerful in intimate relationships. We find that we don’t feel so threatened by our partner’s disturbance. We’re embodied with our own experience, so we can be with our partner in his or hers. We expect to be disturbed by our partner, rather than hoping that we won’t be, and we develop the confidence that this will be workable—perhaps not pleasant, but not something we must avoid or solve.

  If we approach somebody from our own dissociative, avoidant state, that other person’s version of reality can feel very threatening. Because we’re not participating in our own reality, the other’s reality appears to be more valid and powerful. It’s easy to then slip into a black-and-white response, where we cue off of our sense of the other’s feelings and thoughts. The two basic ways we do this are (
1) to go into a state of merger, where we become an extension of that person’s reality, or (2) to go into a state of reaction, with a lot of distance between our reality and his or hers. We’ll talk about these strategies more in the next chapter.

  EMBODIMENT AND WORKING WITH EMOTION

  So far we’ve covered several steps or suggestions for exploring a relationship with our immediate, sensation-level, noninterpretive experiencing. To summarize, first, either as a formal practice or in response to some disturbance, we recognize an impulse to escape from some feeling, thought, or interaction. We then direct our attention out of our usual stories about what’s happening to our immediate, sensation-level, noninterpretive experiencing. Because we often find some degree of anxiety or panic, we investigate our automatic assumption that there is some threat. Is there actually any evidence of harm, damage, or problem in our sensations? Is there any evidence about our worth as a person or the viability of our life? Can we even find such apparently real emotions as shame, abandonment, or guilt? When we find no actual problem in what’s most true in our immediate experience, we gradually develop a trust that it’s safe and workable to stay in relation with this experience. As we cultivate a willingness to be in relationship with ourselves at all times, regardless of what is arising, we then practice being kind to all of our experiencing, regardless of whether we like it or not. We begin to understand that being unconditionally kind to our experience is being unconditionally kind to ourselves, to our own vulnerabilities.