by Bruce Tift
That’s the deal in codependency; we don’t set the kind of boundaries that would interrupt the cycle of blame. We don’t say, “I’m sorry, but this isn’t really working for me. So I’m going to take some time to cool off, and I’ll come back when I feel like I can relate to you as the adult I am.” Because of this, codependency works, just like neurosis works, and it continues because it creates a sense of illusory safety and security. But as I’ve mentioned, there’s a high price tag attached. Just as neurotic organization leaves us feeling divided from ourselves, codependent dynamics leave a couple feeling divided from each other. Just as personal neurosis can have incredibly damaging effects on one’s sense of self and confidence in the world, so codependency can slowly kill the love between two people. The more each of us blames and feels blamed, without taking care of ourselves, the more damage is caused. It’s like we keep putting tiny knives into each other; over time, it’s going to have a cumulative effect. So while codependency appears to get us what we want in the short run, it actually leads to deterioration in the quality of the relationship over time.
Bradley and Craig had just this kind of deterioration going on. Having met in grad school, they’d experienced an initial year and a half of wonder and even bliss together. But around the two-year mark, they’d started experiencing increasing conflict. They weren’t sure whether the relationship was viable. Craig seemed to be considering ending the relationship; Bradley was dissatisfied, but had more confidence that they could save the relationship. He thought they should hang in there and had initiated the idea of therapy.
As we got into the couple’s specific complaints, I learned that Bradley felt he was doing most of the work to keep the relationship going. If they had a fight, he was the one who ended up apologizing and trying to get them talking again. If they felt distant, he was the one who initiated talking about their feelings. In the meantime, he felt Craig was becoming increasingly private and disengaged. While he appreciated the fact that Craig had the more successful job and contributed more money to the relationship, he wanted more emotional involvement.
Craig, on the other hand, felt that Bradley was becoming increasingly dependent on him for all of his emotional needs. He complained that Bradley hadn’t maintained his network of friends from school and that he wasn’t bringing in much money. He appreciated the fact that Bradley liked to cook and keep the house clean, but overall it seemed he just wanted Craig to take care of him.
ON NONTRADITIONAL PARTNERSHIPS
Craig and Bradley had a story that is very typical of what I hear in my office every day. The same neurotic, codependent dynamics seem to occur whether a couple is heterosexual, gay, or lesbian. Usually, the more relative the level of experiencing, the more we will deal with our differences—with how we are unique. As we investigate deeper levels of experiencing, I find that we’re all dealing with the same basic human issues and vulnerabilities. In general, one partner is the voice of separateness in the relationship—in this case, Craig—and one partner is the voice of connection, which here would be Bradley.
I started with Bradley and Craig like I start with most couples: by talking about personal responsibility. I introduced the possibility that the reason each had a complaint about the other was actually because neither seemed to be doing a very good job of taking care of himself. When we’re taking good care of ourselves—paying attention to our own needs and not expecting our partners to do it for us—we are still affected by our mates, but their behavior doesn’t occur as a survival-level threat.
I asked Bradley and Craig to try on the view that each of them could do such a good job taking care of himself that he would have no complaint, blame, or resentment toward the other. This is a practice, of course, not a sudden achievement. In the process, they might even start to recover the sense of their hearts being open to their partners. At the moment, both of them were in the process of starting to close their hearts. To me, this seemed to be serving a boundary function: they needed boundaries in the relationship, but neither was very skillful in setting those boundaries. So instead, they were starting to close their hearts as an unconscious way of expressing the fact that they were emotionally separate, as well as connected, persons.
Taking care of ourselves includes setting boundaries and communicating them to our partner. To illustrate this, I asked Bradley for one of his favorite complaints. “I really, really hate it when Craig blows up and yells at me,” he said.
I asked if he’d ever requested that Craig not blow up at him—had he set that boundary? The answer was no, that he hadn’t specifically made that request. I suggested he try doing it right at that moment, there in my office. This was a first step toward taking good care of himself: naming a boundary, and then asking his partner for that behavior. Making the request is no guarantee it will happen, of course. But the outcome is not the most important point. The point is to begin asserting personal responsibility in the relationship, which in turn leads to feeling less victimized by one’s partner.
I coached Bradley through making the request, which went something like, “Craig, I have a request. Would you be willing to not yell at me or raise your voice? Would you be willing to use ‘I’ statements rather than ‘you’ statements?”
Of course, Craig may agree to the request or he may not. He may remember not to raise his voice or he may forget. But it doesn’t really matter: It’s not his responsibility to deal with Bradley’s disturbance. It’s Bradley’s responsibility to deal with his own disturbance, and he was not yet doing a very good job of this. But he was on his way.
After making the boundary request, I introduced another very basic practice. If Craig did at some point raise his voice, I suggested Bradley might simply remove himself from the situation. “I couldn’t do that!” he said. When I asked why, he said, “I don’t want to hurt Craig’s feelings.” At this point I find it’s helpful to name the priority that’s being held in the situation. We all want to have everything—Bradley didn’t want to be yelled at, but he didn’t want Craig to feel abandoned, either. Yet of course our human existence is characterized by loss and limitation. So I will frequently invite people to put into words what they are actually prioritizing—to say it out loud—so they are aware of the choices they’re making.
“How would it be,” I asked Bradley, “to say out loud, ‘Apparently, not hurting Craig’s feelings is a higher priority than my own integrity.’” Bradley found it uncomfortable, but he managed to say it. I went on to ask him to consider what it might be like to treat Craig like an adult, allowing him to take responsibility for his own experience. I tend to invite my clients to consider behaving in a new way and to welcome any feelings that get triggered at the thought. I do this not to try to convince them to behave differently but to increase their willingness to feel their own disturbing emotions—since it’s a new relationship with our disturbance that offers the potential for transformative change.
Like Bradley and Craig, most of us have not yet decided to take responsibility for our vulnerabilities, our disturbances, and our uncertainty in how to live. For this reason, many couples allow their codependency to progress to the point where it has caused significant damage to the relationship. That’s the point at which most couples come into therapy. Sometimes it is, for practical reasons, too late. The couple has let it get to the point where the love between them has basically been killed. Fortunately, many couples get there while there’s still a ground of appreciation. They have the sense that they’re torturing each other unnecessarily, and they’re ready to change. They just can’t figure out what to do about it—which, as it turns out, is the subject of the next chapter. We’ll continue the discussion about relationships, beginning with a short discussion about four basic stages in our personal and relationship evolution. Then we’ll talk about some specific views and practices that I introduce to the couples I work with that can help increase the understanding and skill that’s so important in working with the inherently provocative and never-resolvab
le experience of intimate relationships.
LOOSENING OUR IDENTIFICATION WITH OUR RELATIONSHIP STYLE
Does it make sense that you probably come into adult relationships consciously preferring to feel like either a connecting person or a separate person? If so, then it may be helpful to explore your experience of the style you’re not so comfortable with. Increasing your capacity to participate in the full range of your feelings challenges the central driver of codependent dynamics. Here are two practices to get you started.
PRACTICEPERSONAL PRACTICE
Clarify your preferred style. If it’s not obvious, look at the roles you’ve played in your history of relationships, ask friends for their feedback, see which style provokes more anxiety. Then, for a week or two, practice inviting the felt sense of being the other style. If you like to connect, invite feeling fundamentally alone, look for evidence of your aloneness in your life, imagine never being in relationship again. As we’ve discussed, stay embodied, with no interpretations or story; see if there’s actually any problem. As another step, look for opportunities to behave (in small ways) as a separate person. If someone asks you to do something, decline. Express your differences with friends.
If you like to feel separate, look for all of the ways in which you are, in fact, dependent on others. Imagine dedicating your life to the service of others and always putting their needs first. Stay embodied. If you care to, actually behave (in small ways) as if you’re so grateful to be here that you look for ways to express your appreciation to others. When the clerk at the grocery store asks if you’d like help with your bags, accept.
The point isn’t to change your style but to learn to tolerate more emotional complexity. Just see what it’s like.
PRACTICEINTERPERSONAL PRACTICE
If you’re in relationship and there’s enough playfulness available, clarify your usual styles and then alternate the roles every day for a week or two. On odd days, one of you connects, and the other separates. On even days, you switch. Stay embodied; no interpretations. Just see how it feels to not always do it in your familiar way.
7
RELATIONSHIP AS AN EVOLVING PATH
WHEN WE HAVE THE INSPIRATION to improve our lives, to grow, and to wake up—and if you’re reading this book, it’s likely you have that inspiration—I find it’s helpful to clarify our intentions. Our efforts, to be most effective, should be in alignment with our highest priorities. Walking a progressive path is an expression of such an intention, and I find it helpful to talk about the sequential stages we are likely to encounter as we set out on this path. This idea of a sequence of stages is central to Western psychotherapy, to evolutionary theory, certainly to Buddhism, and, I think, to most spiritual paths. In both my own Buddhist practice and my clinical work with relationships, I find that the work we do at one stage lays the foundation for the work we do at the next stage. If we try to jump ahead of our actual current capacities and prematurely work at a later or “higher” stage—because it may be more emotionally or spiritually attractive—we will probably find that our progress is not sustainable and may even appear to stop. Part of bringing our efforts into alignment with our intentions is to be very honest with ourselves about what we’re actually willing and able to do at any moment.
There are, of course, a lot of different theoretical frameworks one could take on the journey of personal evolution. There are theories with three stages and nine stages and twelve stages and seven stages. Here, I’m going to present a simple, four-stage path of working with ourselves through relationship. Over the course of time, I have found this particular theory to be consistent with my clients’ experiences. In fact, I developed it directly out of my clinical work with couples. I have also found this view to be resonant with the Buddhist understanding of path as progressing through three yanas, or vehicles.
The four stages I want to discuss could be called the prepersonal, the personal, the interpersonal and the non-personal. Each stage can be understood as representing a different attitude toward our already-existing basic nature of open awareness and freedom. Each stage is a description of our capacity and our willingness to be fully present and fully embodied, to integrate open awareness into our daily lives. Or, to say it in a different way, each stage is a description of how we defend against open mind—how we generate chronic states of self-absorption to avoid the experience of groundlessness, of no objectively existing reality to stand on. From this point of view, each stage is not really about some past wound or historic conditioning. Nor is it about some future ability that we want to have. It’s really about our choice, in each moment, to at least practice being fully present and open—or not—and the variety of ways in which we pretend we don’t have a choice at all.
A BUDDHIST PARADOX
From the Vajrayana Buddhist viewpoint, progressive, evolutionary work feels paradoxical. This view is that we are already free, so none of this work is actually necessary. In the same way, we can say that we are already fully intimate with ourselves, our partners, and life. As Dōgen, the Zen patriarch, said: “The awakened mind is that mind intimate with all things.” This means that it is possible to consciously participate in what’s already true; we are always fully and inescapably in relationship with life. It’s not an option to not be fully engaged. But relationship is the disturbing simultaneity of other and self, of connection and separation. Fully intimate means feeling fully connected and feeling fully separate. This experience of “not two, not one” invites a direct sense of reality as nondivided.
But because we are invested in the dramas of life—the certainty that there is some problem—it’s very helpful, for practical reasons, to progress through these stages. Over time, we can gradually increase our tolerance for open awareness, embodied immediacy, and always-present intimacy in our daily life and in our relationships, in our moment-by-moment experiencing. As this occurs, we develop the ability to hold a complex experiential state in which we see that, in a more absolute way, none of this work is or was necessary and, in a more relative way, it is and was completely necessary. We learn to hold both views simultaneously, with no need to take sides, no need to resolve these apparent contradictions.
THE PREPERSONAL
The prepersonal stage is the arena of codependent dynamics, which we discussed at some length in chapter 6. It’s characterized by a claim that we are unable to change the familiar, historically conditioned ways in which we engage with ourselves and with life. Either we can’t do it because there’s too much fear or we don’t know how or we can’t change because our partner is not being who we want her to be. Whatever the circumstances, we take the position that there’s some obstacle blocking our ability to make evolutionary change.
This position is like that of a child—we relate to intense experience as if we were incapable of handling it. This was true when we were young. As adults, it’s no longer true, but most of us have not yet given up our historic survival strategies. Within this stage, there is still a strong dissociative split; there’s a tendency to leave our immediate, embodied experiencing out of a sense that it’s just too much to tolerate. As with neurotic organization, our unconscious investment is in not solving our apparent problems. The drama that we are a problematic person—or that our relationship is problematic—is serving a protective function. As children, our self-aggression was very healthy, necessary, and intelligent. It was how we prevented ourselves from being aware of feeling overwhelmed and flooded by intense experience over which we had no control. But now, as adequately functional adults, this organization is no longer necessary. Most of us can, in fact, train ourselves to have a conscious relationship with very intense experience. We simply choose not to do so.
To be clear, the choice isn’t to have a sudden ability to stay fully present and embodied with intensity. The choice is to practice staying present, to increase our capacity. But instead, at this prepersonal stage of relationship, we rely on our partners to support our sense of being stuck or unable to be present. We
use them as a decoy, avoiding the truth that we’re unwilling to stay present, with the claim that they are making it impossible for us to do so. When working with couples at this stage, I hear endless versions of the claim, “I would show up more in my vulnerability if only my partner would be who I want him to be first.” But of course, our partners are always going to be who they are and never who we want them to be. So we can always find justification to keep some distance, keep our guard up, collapse in self-absorption—basically, to not be fully engaged and present. If it’s a good fit, our partner is using us in a similar way. In that way, we both are maintaining an unconscious agreement to provide each other with justification for not being more present, openhearted, and intimate. As discussed earlier, this cooperation arises from the reality that we all learn how to have relationships from the position of being a dependent, powerless child relating to all-powerful adults. It is impossible as a young child to learn how to relate with personal power and mutuality, however kind our parents may have been. We all begin our experiments with adult intimacy as if we were one child relating to another child.
The basic story at the prepersonal stage is that our partner could give us what we need and want but is not willing to do so. We manufacture an endless series of complaints and frustrations about our partners and the relationship, and they do the same. This atmosphere of conflict and hurt generates experiential evidence, over and over again, justifying why we cannot be open. Who wants to be open in a war zone? It’s just not smart. So the prepersonal stage guarantees chronic self-absorption—an intermittent but continuing focus on our self-created dramas—which of course takes our attention away from our always already-present environment of open awareness and choice.