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by Bruce Tift


  Sometimes when I’m teaching, I’ll do a little enactment in the classroom to illustrate how our internal dramas operate. I invite the students to relax their awareness, let their sense of attention fill the whole room, and see if they can maintain this experience. As everyone is practicing this expansive awareness, I’ll have a student engage me in a prearranged conflict of some sort. Perhaps they’ll claim they don’t like the way I’m talking or complain about the content of the exercise. The more heated this apparent conflict becomes, the more everyone’s attention contracts and focuses on the conflict. I’ve done this exercise a number of times, and I don’t think I’ve yet had anyone report that their attention remained expansive during the argument. What this illustrates is how engaging conflict is for us. Any sense of a problem is so fascinating—and perhaps feels so threatening—that it magnetizes our attention on a very basic, biological level. Even when there’s no actual harm happening, any sense of conflict attracts our attention away from the open, expansive awareness that’s already there. This operates at both individual and relationship levels. At the prepersonal level, we are still trying to take care of ourselves using young, out-of-date survival strategies. Our refusal to experience disowned energies results in the chronic conflict of trying to feel whole while trying to not participate in all of our experiencing, which tends to perpetuate our sense of being a powerless child in an overwhelming world and distracts us from the open awareness that would free us from taking these dramas seriously.

  THE PERSONAL

  Over the course of our lives, many of us eventually cultivate a strong enough sense of ourselves that we can stand alone—we don’t need to involve other people in our unresolved difficult emotions. I call this the personal stage of relationship. Whether through a gradual maturation process or through deliberate personal work, at this stage we become willing to at least practice not seeing others as the cause of, or the solution to, our difficult experiences. I think of this practice of personal responsibility as the antidote to codependent dynamics. It’s this stage at which the majority of my work with couples is done. First, we challenge the codependent dynamics. Then we use ongoing daily life experiences to practice strengthening the attitude of personal responsibility.

  Let’s go back to the example of Bradley and Craig from chapter 6. After Bradley was willing to take personal responsibility for his conflicts with Craig—by asserting his boundaries, making requests, and removing himself from situations that didn’t work for him—he was poised to enter the personal stage. He became progressively more willing to feel the disturbing emotions that arose when he stood up for himself, and he stopped holding himself responsible for Craig’s emotional well-being. At this point, like many but not all people doing this work, he became interested in exploring the origins of his style of relating—which for most of us stem from our childhood experiences. In his case, we uncovered the fact that he’d had an angry, rigidly independent mother. He’d been the one responsible for initiating connection with her, all the while living in fear of triggering her. We might speculate that, as part of his neurotic survival strategy, he had found it wise to disconnect from his own energies of anger and independence in order to have the greatest sense of safety and connection possible.

  As part of taking back personal responsibility—we might also call it his personal power—I asked him what it would be like to recover his sense of being an emotionally separate person, even while relating to an important partner. What if he could experience his fundamental aloneness as life giving, and not as some big problem? What would it be like to be ready at any moment to have a satisfying life alone? I suggested asking himself each day when he woke up, “How would I have a satisfying life today if Craig and I weren’t together? If I were on my own, what would I do?”

  This practice is essentially strengthening our commitment to not abandon ourselves. The more we stay grounded in our own embodied experience—the more intimate we are willing to be with ourselves—the safer it is to be intimate with another person. It’s actually very difficult to be more intimate with our partner than we are willing and able to be intimate with ourselves. Our relating with someone who’s important to us is guaranteed to force into the open any unresolved issues we have about relationship. If we are unwilling to experience certain types of disturbing feelings, we will make sure that we maintain an adequate distance from these feelings by maintaining an adequate distance from the person who will trigger these feelings. If we see another as the location of our well-being—whether in a positive or negative way—that person becomes inappropriately important to us. If we give a friend a dollar, we don’t worry too much about what he’ll do with it. If we give a friend our life savings, we’ll probably become hypervigilant about his lifestyle, any vacations he takes, and so forth.

  In relationship, when we’ve projected our disowned vulnerabilities onto our partners, we create the feeling that our well-being is in their hands, and any little thing they say or do can take on exaggerated significance. As we practice taking responsibility for our difficult feelings, however, it becomes emotionally safer for us to be close to another person. We gradually cultivate the confidence that feeling disturbed is not synonymous with being harmed. Feeling unsafe does not mean we are unsafe. Just as feeling safe doesn’t mean we are safe. We discover for ourselves whether our situation is workable. On the other hand, when we’re blaming others—subtly or not so subtly—we have nothing to work with, because we think they’re the ones who need to change. It’s beyond our control. So at some point, we must be willing to swallow that bitter pill of “no more complaints” and actually take ownership of what we have to work with.

  This is the stage at which we are willing to have a relationship with the “other” as an equal, because we’re willing to commit to valuing and protecting our relationship with our “self.” We’re willing to experience connection, because we’re willing to experience separateness. That “other” may be our partner, our friends, or our coworkers; it’s also the “other” of our disowned unconscious experiencing. As we develop a more and more conscious relationship with our fears, we find that pretty much everything we experience is workable. It doesn’t mean we’ll do a perfect job, but we do become confident that we will stay present and engaged and give it our best shot. This increasing confidence gradually dissolves the dissociative split we’ve been living with for so long. We no longer need to defend against those emotions and energies that we had to defend against as children, because we know we’ll work with them when they arise. As our awareness relaxes and expands, we actually dissolve our subtle but chronic anxiety and paranoia. We start to be less guarded. As we relax our attention, we begin to have more and more moments of being aware of an already-existing context, or environment, of freedom.

  THE INTERPERSONAL

  The next stage could be called the interpersonal stage. Our confidence and our capacity to take care of ourselves has increased to the point at which we can risk revealing our authentic experience—even to somebody who’s incredibly important to us, like our partner. Our self-absorption has decreased to the point at which we actually become more interested in others and in the world than we are in our own identity dramas. We take such good care of ourselves that we no longer live driven by a sense of need; instead, we become interested in what others need. We are now willing and able to not only relate to others but also to be kind to what is perceived as that other outside of ourselves or our own internal “other.” As we are able to have a more embodied, kind, conscious relationship with our vulnerability, we organically and spontaneously become more empathic to others’ vulnerability. So even though we may never really understand our partner, we increasingly have the sense that we’re in the same boat. We all have difficult, vulnerable experience. It’s not a problem, actually. It’s not easy, but it’s not a problem. As our sense of greater expansiveness, empathy, and kindness grows, we have an increasing sense of immediacy, openheartedness, and curiosity. Not knowing who we are
or how to have an intimate relationship actually becomes pleasurable. Uncertainty becomes a source of creativity and not a problem to be solved. This is the stage of mutuality. We experience relationship as both separate and connected, but without an unconscious effort to cover over or get rid of the never-resolvable energy or tension of there always being both self and other. We have more frequent moments of what Martin Buber described as an “I and Thou” experience—a direct appreciation of relationship without agenda.

  THE NONPERSONAL

  The last stage could be called the nonpersonal stage. Here, our experience consistently arises in the environment of open awareness or freedom. Not knowing who we are has become much more interesting than maintaining a familiar personal identity. Not knowing who our partner is becomes much more interesting than our familiar stories about him or her. We show up fully in each moment, because that’s the only moment in which we will ever be living. We stop pretending not to be present. We could describe our experience as that of engaged spontaneity. We deal with our life, with our relationship, not knowing what will happen next but confident that we will work with whatever comes up. We have that confidence about the future because we’re already working with the present moment, without withholding ourselves. We know that when the future comes, it will be only experienced as the present, and we find over and over that we are able and willing to be fully engaged with whatever our immediate experiencing may be. Increasingly, there’s a sense that there’s not really even a “self” relating to a partner or to the world. Actually, it’s just life relating to life.

  AN EVOLVING PATH

  You may have noticed that, as we progress through these four stages, I have less and less to say about each one. That reflects our actual experience. The more we pretend not to be present, the more we refuse to acknowledge the truth of our experience, the more complicated is our state of mind. It’s this complication that serves to fascinate and distract us—to contract our attention away from our already-present environment of freedom. The more complicated our sense of self and the more complicated our relationships, the more fascinated we become. This complication is not particularly pleasurable, but as drama, it captures our attention. As we move through these four stages, however, there’s less and less of an experience of there being a problem. There will still be life difficulties to work with; they don’t go away. But we’re not looking at them from a complicated state of mind anymore.

  I think it’s important to note that these stages are just tools, just ways of thinking. They’re not actually a description of reality, so I hope you won’t take them too seriously. In fact, all of these stages are present all the time. But our emotional and psychic center of gravity—what we return to over and over, our home base—tends to progress and evolve in a particular direction: from the prepersonal, to the personal, to the interpersonal, to the nonpersonal.

  For example, couples who are very invested in the drama of codependency are both living in the prepersonal fantasy and are having moments of openness all the time—moments of genuine curiosity and compassion for their partners, their children, and the world. Those of us who have done a lot of personal work—whose emotional centers of gravity are progressing through the stages described above—of course still have codependent dynamics to work with. But to whatever degree we’ve become willing to give up our fantasy that we, or our partners, are a problem, our awareness relaxes. And in terms of our energetic center of gravity, we more and more frequently experience our lives and our relationships as increasingly alive, interesting, and spontaneous.

  As we evolve through these stages of relationship, our basic intention remains the same. We are challenging our central fantasy of being a separate, objectively existing, significant “self” that is living in a world of separate, objectively existing, significant “others.” These others include persons, objects, natural processes, and our own inner experiences with which we don’t identify. As long as we take both self and other to have independent existence, there will always be a basic biological tension about “who eats whom.” And because our “self” is almost infinitely small in relation to a seemingly infinitely large “other,” we all tend to experience a subtle but powerful sense of chronic anxiety and even paranoia. We all know that sooner or later, but inevitably, we will die. The self we identify with will apparently end, and the other will apparently continue. Our fear-based response to this sense of ongoing threat seems to be a continuing effort to generate an ongoing experience of self-absorption. The greater our chronic anxiety, the greater our unconscious investment in self-absorption as an attempt to distract our awareness from the reality of our experiencing.

  From a spiritual path point of view, the vivid appearance of a separate self who is relating to separate others is only that—an appearance, empty of essential nature. The experience of self and other are found to be cocreated, each dependent on the other and on many complex conditions. No independently existing self. No independently existing other. Both experiences can be seen as expressions of the larger nature of reality. The disturbing tension between self and other does not go away, but because self and other are not in fundamental conflict, this tension does not need to go away.

  These stages of relationship, then, can be understood as a progressive challenge to our chronic but inaccurate anxiety and to the various strategies of self-absorption we bring to our relationships and to our lives. Each stage arises from a different attitude we take between self and other. In the prepersonal, we relate to other as both threat and savior, as parent. In the personal, we relate to other as adult partner; as equal. In the interpersonal, we relate to other as never-fully-understood friend and as an opportunity to practice compassion. And in the nonpersonal, other becomes another manifestation of life and mystery, just as we are ourselves.

  In the rest of this chapter, I describe some of the specific interventions and practices that I have found most useful for each specific stage. As a reminder, practices make sense as expressions of particular views. Our intentions and our ways of understanding imply the relevant practices. Because there are many ways of understanding relationships, there are many ways of working—there is no one correct way.

  PREPERSONAL: CHALLENGING CODEPENDENT DYNAMICS

  Most couples come to therapy with a sense of dilemma. They’ve gone through what is often called the “honeymoon stage,” where most of us have the wonderful conviction that we’ve found a partner with whom we will be happy the rest of our lives. There’s no evidence of any deep problems; we enjoy each other. Conflicts are handled very smoothly and quickly. A lot of times, there’s sexual passion, and we want to spend as much time as possible with the other person.

  But generally speaking, at some point—perhaps it’s six months, or a year, or two years down the road—the honeymoon ends. We discover that this stage of only positive experience has, strangely enough, been supported by a lack of deep intimacy. We didn’t even know this person yet. Our need for separateness was being met by not yet sharing a full, complex life over time—not living together, not having kids, not sharing a mortgage, and so forth. In the early months, for a year or two, it’s very easy to continue wanting to be closer and more connected, because our needs for separateness have been taken care of by our life circumstances.

  However, after some period, a couple almost inevitably will become intimate enough that any unresolved relationship issues will start to be triggered. Usually this is experienced as a type of deep disappointment, and it’s when many couples end the relationship. When I take a history of relationships from my clients, it’s common for them to report ending a number of relationships around the two- to three-year mark. Conflicts and hurt feelings have become more frequent. Sex has become less frequent. And so on. However, if there’s enough appreciation, interest, and perhaps maturity, the couple may decide to continue their relationship despite the disturbance they’re experiencing. There’s often a sense of dilemma—the feeling of being torn in two directions. On the one
hand, there is genuine love, care, and compassion between them; they really do feel connected. At the same time, there’s a lot of pain resulting from the dynamics of prepersonal ways of relating. In my experience, this situation brings the majority of couples into therapy. They really care about each other, but they find their current situation so painful that they feel like it’s destroying their love. They don’t know what to do about it, so they decide to get help.

  As I hope I’ve made clear, I see codependency as a type of intense aggression toward fundamental reality—the reality of our already-existing open nature within which arises the never resolvable disturbance of relative experiencing. For this reason, I have found that the response to codependency has to be aggressive in return. When a therapist is only supportive, kind, and empathic with a couple trying to deal with strong codependent energy, it often doesn’t go anywhere. I’ve worked with a number of couples who have reported that their previous therapist was an insightful and kind person but that nothing changed as a result of their work together. It seems that many therapists don’t consider the possibility that sometimes kindness involves healthy aggressive energy, just as being a kind parent involves discipline and conflict with one’s children. Healthy aggressive energy does not mean anger. It means engaging from the basic energy of separateness while keeping one’s heart open. It’s a willingness to manifest as an existentially separate person, with different experiences, views, feelings, and boundaries. As a therapist, it means that I actively challenge what I see as dysfunctional, often take the lead rather than listen and follow, interrupt what doesn’t seem helpful, express my opinions, and remain in control of the therapy session. When therapists are willing to relate as emotionally separate persons, express differences, not avoid conflict, they are demonstrating—in the moment—what it might feel like to challenge emotional fusion.

 

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