Already Free

by Bruce Tift

  Making Requests

  Understanding that it’s not our partners’ responsibility to be who we want them to be, we ask them to make a specific behavior change. Instead of expressing our frustration in always picking up after our partner, for example, we might simply ask if they would be willing to take five minutes each evening before dinner to put their things away. They’ll say yes or no, and we may need to continue negotiating for awhile. But not using this conflict as one more instance of long-term emotional complaint may force us to examine the choices we ourselves are making—and, in turn, perhaps take better care of ourselves—rather than waiting for our partner to do so. In truth, we are asking for our partner’s help with our issue. They are not doing anything wrong; they’re just being themselves. They’ll probably continue to be themselves for as long as we know them. They’re never going to be who we want them to be. But we can ask for their help in the moment.

  If we want our partner’s cooperation, it’s just intelligent to not talk to them in a way that’s going to trigger their defensiveness or their emotional reactivity. It’s better to talk in a neutral or even friendly way. That’s hard to do when there’s a conflict, but that’s the practice. And of course, if they’re kind enough to give the help we’re requesting, it’s appropriate to thank them for doing so. It’s also appropriate to be prepared to consider any requests our partner makes of us, understanding that equity of effort is an important part of an adult intimate relationship. A simple but sometimes useful technique to keep in mind is that when our partner seems to be speaking to us from an emotionally reactive state, we can ask them: “Do you have a request? Are you asking me if I will do something?”

  At this stage of working with a couple, I will often invite them to redo a recent conflict from the viewpoint of negotiating behavioral change. Earlier I described my client Bradley’s work in learning to ask his partner Craig to change his behavior when he felt frustrated—to not yell and talk about Bradley’s shortcomings, but instead to talk quietly in “I” statements. Bradley found that this worked much better than his ineffectively talking about how hurt he felt when this happened.

  However, Craig reported that he continued to feel that he was doing all the work and that his impulse was still to withdraw from Bradley. Working at the behavioral level, we explored what action Craig might ask of his partner that could help him feel that the relationship was more equitable. Money seemed at the heart of Craig’s complaint, so we worked on his putting his feelings into the form of a specific request. He was able to ask Bradley to commit to contributing a certain amount of money to the relationship every month. After some negotiating, they both agreed on what seemed like a workable amount. This behavioral work did not, of course, resolve the deeper codependent dynamics at play. But by each learning to advocate for what they wanted without destructive emotional escalation, they were then able to begin looking at their personal emotional issues as emotional issues, without confusing them with current relationship conflicts about practical realities. By negotiating workable behavioral agreements, it becomes harder to maintain the fantasy that one’s partner is the location of the problem. In disciplining how he spoke, Craig had an opportunity to investigate his life-long anger about giving more than he received. By committing to help financially, Bradley could look at his childhood fantasy of finally being taken care of.

  In working with the prepersonal stage, a strong intervention is usually required. When one is not yet capable of spontaneous inner discipline, the next best thing seems to be external structure. And so, as discussed, in challenging codependent dynamics, there seems to be the need for a lot of simple, even formulaic, interventions and practices, such as agreements to take a break, remove emotional language from conflicts, make requests, and so on. And in my style, there’s usually a lot of education as well. The more one learns about codependent dynamics, the harder it seems to be to continue any drama of mutual blame.

  THE PERSONAL: PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND DISCIPLINE

  A significant shift begins as one or both partners become willing to be the location of structure, discipline, and choice themselves, rather than waiting to have this supplied from the outside. As one or both partners experiment with this work, I find there’s an increasing interest in and willingness to practice personal responsibility. At this point, the individual or couple is entering the personal stage. Here, I continue to use a lot of education, a lot of reframing, a lot of discussion of view. Education continues to be helpful because, as I mentioned earlier, many of the practices I invite people to take on at this stage are counterinstinctual—we don’t want to do them. These practices involve staying embodied with the very feelings we’ve spent our lives trying to not feel. So I talk with people a fair amount about why it might be to their own selfish benefit to take responsibility for working with their own difficult experiences.

  Because a person at the personal stage is more willing to look inward, it can make sense that another person or event is not causing their disturbance, but instead is triggering an already-existing emotional sensitivity. Our emotional reactivity is not really about what our partner has said or done, but about our not wanting to feel the feelings that have been triggered in us. Our reactivity is actually the expression of our refusal to stay present and embodied with some deeper core vulnerability. We’re experiencing anger or collapse or anxiety because we’re having to feel some emotion we really don’t want to feel. The accurate location of the issue is our relationship with our own feelings, not our relationship with our partner. As we gain more clarity that focusing on our partner is a distraction and really a waste of our time and energy, we find that it’s to our own benefit to leave our partner out of any explanation about our emotional reactivity. Upon investigation, we’re almost always going to find that we’ve been living with these feelings all of our lives. We had these difficult feelings before we met our partner, and if we ended the relationship tomorrow, we’d still have these difficult feelings. Our partner is not the cause and so will never be the solution.

  I sometimes suggest that each partner commit to the practice of never again claiming that the disturbance is caused by, or is even about, their partner. This usually gets a laugh, but it’s a real practice. This doesn’t mean that we stop negotiating about behaviors; we just practice dropping our fascination with the claim that our partner is responsible for our disturbance, even while we recognize that they will continue to trigger our disturbance. And, surprisingly, we begin to find that committing to the initial disappointment of not blaming others gives rise to an increased sense of personal power and dignity.

  PERSONAL WORK AND RELATIONAL WORK

  At this stage, there’s an increased capacity to discriminate between personal work and relational work. “What issues are about me? What issues are about the relationship?” Our personal work has to do with investigating why we’re claiming that certain feelings are a big deal. Why are we relating to certain emotions as if our survival were being threatened? We are developing enough confidence in ourselves at this point that we commit to the continuing investigation of deeper and deeper levels of vulnerability. This is the stage at which the practice of embodied immediacy, as explored in chapter 5, is especially valuable. When we’re willing to stay at the sensation level of our experience—without interpretation—we discover for ourselves whether feeling abandoned, smothered, controlled, or hurt is actually harmful. If we jump into our interpretations, we’ll always be able to find evidence of some problem. But in our immediate embodied experience, we’re never going to find any evidence of harm being done. We’re not going to discover any evidence about our worth as a person, or find shame or guilt, or any basic flaw. Those aren’t sensations; they’re already strongly interpretive experiences. They are part of our conditioned history. If we want to begin to step out of our history, the practice of embodied immediacy can be a powerful tool.

  When relating with our partner, our personal work invites us to take all disturbance as an op
portunity to look within our own experience. Any emotional reactivity—any response obviously out of proportion to the immediate circumstance—is a signal of some unresolved issue we still carry. We understand that it’s to our benefit to bring this deeper vulnerability into awareness, so that we can work with it using our adult capacities. We also understand that this work is counterinstinctual, that it will provoke anxiety, and that we can’t wait until we’re comfortable to do it.

  Our relational work is about slowly developing a wide range of skillful means with which to relate to our partner. As discussed, what is skillful will depend on many factors, including our understanding and capacities, our partner’s capacities, the immediate situation, timing, our history together, familiarity with our own and our partner’s vulnerabilities, and so on. I’ve found it most helpful to relate with a variety of connection skills when things feel friendly and cooperative, and with a variety of separation skills when things feel conflictual. As we progress through the relational stages, there is a basic shift from an emphasis on how to be skillfully separate, to an increasing interest in how to be skillfully connected, to an ability to hold both simultaneously.

  FEELINGS AND BEHAVIOR: NO NECESSARY CONNECTION

  Another practice I often introduce is the discrimination between feelings and behavior. In the realm of intimacy, many people believe that if we feel a certain way, then we’re entitled to, and even should, behave in that way. For instance, if we feel like we’ve been treated rudely, then we should be able to attack or to withhold relating as punishment. Or if setting a boundary involves the other person having hurt feelings, then our feelings of guilt mean that we’ve made a mistake and should collapse that boundary. If we really examine our lives, though, we’re going to see that’s not how the world really works. If we want to keep our job, we get up in the morning and go to work, even if we’d rather stay in bed. If we don’t want to go to jail, we pay our taxes, even if we’d rather use that money to take a vacation. If we want a committed, long-term relationship, we’re probably not going to be sexual with everyone we feel attracted to. We don’t just punch anybody we’re angry at. If we want to get good at a skill—at a craft or a musical instrument, for example—we have to discipline ourselves to hang in there, even when we feel frustrated. When we look at what fosters competence and skill in the world, we see it’s, in part, the capacity to consciously choose our behavior, rather than letting our behavior be determined by our feelings. In fact, the ability to discriminate between feelings and behavior, to experience a feeling without having to do anything about it, is one of the qualities of emotional adulthood.

  DISCIPLINE

  For many of us, intimacy is its own private dissociative realm. Even though we’re acting as adults in the world, with our partners, we’re suddenly acting like young children in our families of origin, behaving in ways that are driven by emotions. We often display primitive, impulsive behavior, which we then rationalize in a variety of ways. At the personal stage, however, we begin experimenting with an attitude of discipline. Discipline is actually necessary for healthy intimacy, but for many of us, this is an alien idea. We think of intimacy as spontaneous and feelings-based—which it was for us as children; so it seems a little strange to practice an attitude of discipline in relating to our partners. But the work of committing to and feeling our emotional disturbance is so counterinstinctual that we aren’t just going to stumble into it. We must be willing to experiment with a sense of discipline in order to train ourselves out of codependent dynamics and into personal responsibility. In the personal stage, we discover that discipline is not optional; it’s necessary. And to sustain the effort required of these counterinstinctual practices, we must discover that it’s to our own benefit to do so.

  EFFECTIVE SELFISHNESS

  The practice of taking better care of ourselves is something I call effective selfishness. Our culture has a lot of negative connotations about selfishness, so this language can be provocative and confusing for people. Most of us think of being selfish as the opposite of being relational. We assume that taking care of our self is incompatible with taking care of our relationship. As we’ve discussed, this reflects our culture’s unexamined idea that intimacy is synonymous with connection and that feelings of separateness are evidence of problems that need to be fixed. The view explored in this book is that intimate relationships—like all of life—require an irresolvable interplay between these two basic life energies. Our very sense of “self” is this irresolvable interplay. And because relationship does require both energies, we can understand that being effectively selfish must include our relationship needs as well. If we are in a relationship, it’s to our benefit to have a healthy satisfying experience. It’s to our benefit to treat our partner kindly.

  In addition to our cultural bias, we’ve also discussed the training in relationship we experience as children, in which we must learn how to compromise our own sense of self in order to fit with our parents’ and then society’s realities. Regardless of whether our overt, conscious style is that of independence or dependence, underneath, very few of us enter adulthood knowing how to take even adequate care of ourselves in relationship.

  “HOW CAN I BE SELFISH IF THERE’S NO SELF?”

  The concept of effective selfishness can be especially confusing for those exposed to Buddhism or other philosophies that hold the view of “no self.” When I have clients who make this case, I point out all the ways in which they are still acting as if they were a very solid, significant self. If they were actually capable of behaving and experiencing with no self-reference, I would congratulate them, although this hasn’t happened yet. A Buddhist slogan is for practice to be informed by a vast view but in accordance with our current understanding and capacities. We might have been exposed to the theory that there’s no self, but in our actual experience, there seems to be a very real self that we want to protect and improve. With that in mind, at this stage, we work with the appearance of self—not yet really addressing the idea of no self. After all, as long as we’re living with an experience of self, doesn’t it make sense to do a good job of it?

  The real question is how to be effectively selfish. Most of us in relationships are actually being quite ineffectively selfish—meaning that, even as adults, we’re still trying to take care of ourselves as if we were children in our families of origin. Our strategy is several decades out of date. It’s not wrong; it’s just not working very well. Here I start talking with people about how they can take such good care of themselves that they stop accumulating any complaint about their partners. What would they need to do in order to have no resentment, no blame? Or, in more positive language, how can they actually keep their hearts open to their partners—even when things are difficult?

  If we were taking really good care of ourselves, we would not have complaints. We would still be affected by our partners, of course, but it wouldn’t be a big deal. We’d be taking such good care of ourselves that we wouldn’t need our partners to be any different than they already are. At this point, I often suggest that whatever complaint they have about the other person is actually an indication that somehow they have not taken effective responsibility for their own well-being. Perhaps they have compromised when they should not have, avoided conflict and not asserted their needs, or acted like a caretaker and then not felt supported. Perhaps they have put all of their time and energy into work and now face a divorce and don’t know their children.

  The evidence should be pretty clear by now that our partners are not here on the planet to take care of us. So rather than perpetuating any drama of complaint, deficit, problem, or disappointment, we become ready to take such good care of ourselves that we can keep our hearts open. We no longer need to wait for our partners to become who we want them to be in order for us to have a satisfying life. This is the foundation of effective selfishness. We are willing to treat ourselves so well—to have such effective boundaries, to protect our integrity, to advocate for what we want, t
o have conflict when necessary—that, strangely enough, we can keep our hearts open to our partners without requiring them to change.

  Effective selfishness—keeping our hearts open—is not a guarantee that we will stay together. Perhaps the ritualized distance of codependent dynamics is what has allowed us to maintain a dysfunctional relationship. Dissolving complaints and giving up our “if onlys” may clarify what’s really available to us. Maybe we just grow apart over time. However, when a couple is seriously considering ending a relationship, I often suggest that they give themselves some time—maybe six months—during which they practice effective selfishness. Perhaps it’s time to move on. But rather than end out of blame and failure, why not use this rich situation to practice taking such good care of ourselves that there is no complaint about our partner? Why not do our best to have whatever decision we make arise from an open heart, from a sense of well-being and workability?

  In my experience, when we do not take good care of ourselves in relationship, we almost always contract into a state of self-absorption. We try to take care of ourselves in some compensatory way. Maybe we rehearse what we should’ve said; maybe we go off and exercise or meditate instead of relating to our partner. Yet paradoxically, the more we trust that we’ll take good care of ourselves in relationship, the safer it is to be very, very intimate with our partners. We start to challenge our unconscious assumptions that too much vulnerability with our partner is going to work to our disadvantage. We become committed to effective selfishness. At this point, the natural, organic rhythm of intimacy—that is, alternating between feeling close and feeling separate—starts to lose its sense of being a problem at all.