A Conversation with Bruce Tift

Bruce Tift is the author of my favorite book, Already Free.

James Christensen: In reading your book, there are two splits you talk about. You talk about the internal split from the developmental view. There's an internal split where I'm divided against myself, a neurotic organization.

Bruce Tift: Yeah, it's not really a real thing, but it's an experience that we generate.

James Christensen: The way you explained it is that there were certain things that were not advisable for me to feel as a child because the feelings would turn into actions. And so, as a way of controlling my behavior, I end up trying to control my feelings, more or less.

Bruce Tift: Yeah, that's a very simplistic speculation. It makes sense to me, but I'm sure it's more complex than that.

James Christensen: And so, these certain feelings feel really dangerous to me, because maybe they were when I was a kid, in certain ways.

Bruce Tift: You had a lot of very bad abuse, right? Well, it probably wouldn't have been smart when you were a little kid, like 4 or 5, to stand up to your mom and say no, and try to have boundaries, and so forth.

James Christensen: So I end up organizing myself against the feelings that would lead to that kind of behavior as a way of protecting myself.

Bruce Tift: That makes sense to me.

James Christensen: Yeah, it's—so I've been reading your book for a long time, and there are certain things in the book that are starting to make more sense that didn't make sense initially. One of these things that didn't make sense was that I was fighting against feeling certain things, and the connection that ended up making sense to me was that I had to fight against those feelings because the feelings would lead to behavior, and the behavior would cause problems.

Bruce Tift: And that shifts more into identity drama as we get older, but I think as a little kid, it's more about survival and safety. If you've spent your life being a kind, accommodating person who isn't hurtful, who isn't going to be a perpetrator, well, after a few decades, that's established, probably, as an identity. And even if you have some confidence you wouldn't behave in a bad way, it's going to trigger some very vulnerable, panicky, anxiety types of experience, because it just doesn't fit with how you see yourself, and how you want to be, and how others relate to you.

James Christensen: Okay, so one thing that is difficult for me to feel, or that I fight against feeling, is feeling like I've made a mistake, or being perceived as having made a mistake. I mean, to a pretty extreme extent. When my therapist challenges me or criticizes me in some way, that feels intensely terrifying to me. And I will start to make moves to try to get around her or manipulate the situation.

Bruce Tift: Which might be some mild reenactment from when you were a little kid. From what I remember you talking about, very chronic, ongoing, toxic abuse. You probably would be hypervigilant at all times not to make any mistakes.

James Christensen: Yeah, not to be perceived, especially, as being mistaken.

Bruce Tift: Perceived as making mistakes, whether you made them or not, because that could lead to even worse behavior. And so you'd probably be very hypervigilant and always try to figure out how to not be in that position. It would be very vulnerable, probably.

My bias, once you're an adult, once you've done some personal work, is if you're ready, take a risk and see if feeling that you've made a mistake, being perceived as having made a mistake, is actually going to kill you. As immediate, embodied, non-interpretive experiencing. And then see if that panic is an accurate signal now that somebody is actually going to harm you.

These are very deeply embedded patterns, and I find that we have to keep voluntarily doing the counter-instinctual work of taking ourself into exactly what we've organized our life trying to not feel. Over and over and over, maybe thousands of times. It's a long-term practice, but if we practice something, we'd probably get better at it. And better in this case means you don't get rid of those feelings, you just stop being so captured by them.

James Christensen: So that relates to this other question. One of the things that initially didn't make sense in your book, but it's just barely starting to make sense to me, is the other split you talk about. This false duality, a dualistic idea that there's a very real division between me as a person and someone else, or the world. And so, the idea that the self isn't necessarily a useful or a solid basis to build on.

Bruce Tift: Right. I'd say it's inevitable. It's not a choice. Hardly anybody says, "Oh, I've heard about this Buddhist stuff of no self, so I think I'll just dissolve my sense of self." No, that would probably end up with bypassing of some sort. What makes sense to me is, again, we start to experience a transparency of this vivid appearance of self. We don't try to get rid of it, we don't trivialize it, we don't talk ourself out of it. We say, yeah, I really feel like I am a significant, objectively existing self. If I feel it, I feel it.

But then, upon investigation, it's possible we never find that objectively existing, continual, significant self. So then we start to hold contradictory experiences as a practice, more and more intimately, more simultaneously, slowly giving up our fantasy of resolution. I'm not gonna figure out there's no self and be free.

The direction that makes sense to me, when we have that sense of split either internally or as an alienated significant self in the rest of the world, is not to resolve it, but to gradually experiment, train ourself to tolerate holding a contradictory experience simultaneously with no fantasy of resolution ever. And then we start to become more familiar with what's in the middle between those two, which is just disturbing, open awareness, curiosity, intelligence, whatever we want to call it. But there's no ground to stand on there. So, of course, we avoid it.

James Christensen: So I've had a new experience for me over the past month. I often do this practice of trying to engage with the distress I feel and trying to offer kindness and sweet love to that distress. And usually, the distress doesn't go away. It might soften a bit, it just stays. But there's been an experience I've had a couple of times recently where there's been a sudden change, and the experience of kindness and sweet love replaces the distress.

Bruce Tift: That's nice.

James Christensen: It is really nice. It surprised me. I didn't expect it.

Bruce Tift: You can't engineer it, though.

James Christensen: No, it just happens sometimes. I don't know that it's reproducible.

Bruce Tift: Well, if you practice something, it's more likely that whatever arises from that practice will happen more frequently. Likely. So, if that's meaningful, if it resonates, that seems helpful, accurate, heart-opening, helping with confidence, helping to dissolve identification with conditioned history, then that's probably a reason to keep doing that practice.

James Christensen: Yeah, absolutely. So, coming back to this idea of expanding past the idea of a solid self, I'm trying to imagine what exists beyond that. To me, it feels like relaxing into kindness and love, or just whatever there is, I guess.

Bruce Tift: Fair enough. Relaxing into kindness and love is a practice. Relaxing into immediate openness is a much lighter touch type of practice. We're not looking for a certain experience, like kindness. We're not applying an energy, like kindness. We're experimenting with returning to experiential openness as a reference point.

It's common that we're going to think of something beyond our sense of solid self, but my understanding is it's not beyond, it's just seeing through what's there.

James Christensen: With no demand that anything change.

Bruce Tift: Except how we relate to what's there. So it's not maybe beyond, actually. You're a therapist, right?

James Christensen: Yes.

Bruce Tift: So, if you're in a session and things are going well, there's a certain sort of flow or spontaneity, and you feel like you're being helpful and all that. My guess is that you're not having much commentary arise about, "Oh, I'm a good therapist," or "Oh, no, I shouldn't have used that tone of voice," or "What are they thinking about me?" My guess is you're just sort of participating. But you're probably participating within an intelligent, complex range of choices where you're acting like a therapist. You're acting as if you're a therapist, but you're probably not reinforcing an identity of being a therapist in those moments.

James Christensen: Not really been thinking about it. Yeah, it becomes more natural.

Bruce Tift: Yes, so it's possible that that might be analogous to what we're talking about in general, just in our daily life. We're not trying to become a different self. We're just working at relaxing our sort of death grip on pretending that we are a knowable self, and starting to experiment with being a mystery at every second of our life, but a mystery that arises in familiar form. It doesn't have to look esoteric.

James Christensen: No, no, it's good. This is fine.

Bruce Tift: We have to check it out for ourselves, because it's our life. We don't want to waste our life on somebody else's opinions. But when we're starting, almost inevitably we have to try on a teacher's or a tradition's views, because we don't know where to start otherwise. At some point, we start to drop our fantasy that "I'm supposed to do it this way, and it's supposed to look this way." Instead, we ask, "Well, what's my experience?"

James Christensen: My default approach in therapy is to be too combative, which is the opposite of most therapists, who are too collusive. I don't have that problem. My approach is to be too combative. But as I've gotten more experience, I've become softer and softer and softer. I still tend to tell people what I really think, but I try to really check my tendency to be judgmental, which is kind of a default for me.

Bruce Tift: Good. Well, if you want, just keep going beneath what you call combative or judgmental and be curious about what the vulnerability is that's organizing your engagement around trying not to feel.

James Christensen: Yeah, I think it's that same vulnerability we were talking about earlier, where when someone tries to make it seem like I'm wrong, that feels untenable to me. It feels like I cannot be wrong.

Bruce Tift: What does untenable feel like? Because those are words, not sensations.

James Christensen: Yeah, it feels... I mean, sometimes I compare it to feeling like I'm falling off a cliff and there's no bottom. It just feels really, really dangerous.

Bruce Tift: Right, and then if you stay with it, then what? Are you harmed if you stay with it?

James Christensen: No. My instinct is to avoid it, and the quickest way to avoid it is to try to manipulate the situation in a way to put the pressure back on the other person, instead of facing the idea that I might have made a mistake.

Bruce Tift: "You're wrong, not me."

James Christensen: Yes, exactly. Yes.

Bruce Tift: Well, that would make sense. And if you want, you could still consider that as an effort for you to take the best care of yourself possible. Don't feed self-aggressive dramas about, "Oh, now I'm a bad person." You don't want to stop there, because that's the best you could do when you were a little kid. It might be helpful—it's an experiment—to welcome feeling wrong every day. Do your personal work more on your own. Welcome feeling perceived as making a mistake. Get really used to it. You're never gonna like it, but it may not harm you.

James Christensen: Yeah, no, that actually makes a lot of sense, and it is something I'm allergic to.

Bruce Tift: When we say, "I'm allergic to it," there's an implication the thing is the problem.

James Christensen: Yeah. No, it's something that I avoid. I hadn't thought about deliberately stepping into that feeling. That makes a lot of sense.

Bruce Tift: That's when we can start accelerating our path work. Otherwise, we just wait for life circumstances to trigger us. Just do it for 30 seconds or a minute. It's not like you're in there for 20 minutes. A certain type of Buddhism suggests frequent, short touch-ins might be more helpful than a big session of white-knuckling it through, because we tend to dissociate if we remain activated too much, and it's hard to learn in a dissociative state. We want to introduce disturbance in a way that stays within this sort of window of embodiment.

James Christensen: So you go to the edge of your zone of embodiment, and then you come back.

Bruce Tift: Yeah, or given your style, you could even not go to the edge. Just move in that direction, because you probably have more of a style of pushing yourself to the edge of things.

Then, if you were to start having some partial confidence that feeling those sensations is okay, you could start introducing little, tiny experiments with relationships, in your work, and start saying, "Well, I often make mistakes, so this may not fit for you," or "Tell me how you see it, because I'm not always right."

James Christensen: That's how you talk. Actually, when you talk that way, it's almost kind of irritating to me.

Bruce Tift: I believe you.

James Christensen: What do you mean, "well, maybe"? Like, give me the black and white. But I can see how that could be useful. It's almost like you're encouraging me to decide for myself.

Bruce Tift: You could say that, that's accurate, but the deeper thing is that I'm actually relating to you, in the client role, as if you're responsible for your life, not me. Why should I be so stupid as to tell you what you should do? If it works, great, but if it doesn't work, then I could get blamed. I'd rather just say, "Hey, it's up to you, it's your life. I can't save you."

James Christensen: Why does that bother me? I map you as being genuine; I don't feel like you're making a move on me. I think you're accurately portraying your thought process, but every time you do that, it's somewhat irritating to me.

Bruce Tift: What feelings are you feeling irritated at having to feel?

James Christensen: I'm not sure. It could be that dealing with uncertainty is unpleasant for me. And there's also this sense where... it's something I haven't encountered before, and you're not behaving in the way I expect you to behave. My mind loves to predict what your next move is going to be, and I'm constantly playing ahead that way. And when you say that, it breaks my prediction. I think that's what bothers me.

Bruce Tift: And what bothers you emotionally about having your prediction broken?

James Christensen: Because then my strategic game plan is useless.

Bruce Tift: And then what feelings come up when your game plan is useless?

James Christensen: That I'm vulnerable because I don't know how to protect myself.

Bruce Tift: Yeah, I would think so. I would think it's a safety issue. If you're with an abusive parent, you'd better figure it out, and probably it's right or wrong. There isn't tolerance for the gray, the uncertainty. You'll take the best care of yourself possible if you can predict and be on top of it, on the winning side.

James Christensen: This is coming very clearly into my mind right now about how important it was to stay two moves ahead of my mom all the time. Whenever she and I were alone together, I was laser-focused on figuring out where she was going and what her next move was. And so, when you do your thing, it's something I've never encountered before, and it breaks my model. It's a little bit nerve-wracking for me because I don't know what to expect.

Bruce Tift: Well, I guess it touches some very intense, primitive panic.

James Christensen: Yeah, like the model isn't working. I don't feel safe.

Bruce Tift: Yeah. And then, if you want, welcome feeling unsafe. Right now, if you want—you don't have to—but if you want, see if it kills you. You've spent your whole life feeling unsafe already. It's nothing new.

James Christensen: Yeah, I do feel a little unsafe, actually.

Bruce Tift: You don't have to, but you could say out loud, "I give myself permission to feel unsafe off and on until I die."

James Christensen: I give myself permission to feel unsafe off and on until I die.

Bruce Tift: Yeah, then, if you want, you could say it as if you meant it.

James Christensen: [Takes a breath] Well, it's making me shaky. I give myself permission to feel unsafe, off and on, until I die. Yeah, that's a little bit difficult.

Bruce Tift: Well, I guess it's very difficult. And you don't have to do it, so it's just your choice if you find it potentially helpful.

James Christensen: One of the most useful things I found in your book when I first read it was accessing the physical components of my distress. My distress used to be very much tightly centered in this pain in my chest. When I read your book, it gave me this way to say, "Okay, I'm having a pain in my chest." That's the most accurate way to describe what's happening, and that was so useful to me. At the same time, other people would talk about their feelings all the time, and it all seemed like bullshit to me. I don't know if I'm just disconnected from my feelings or what, but that's why I appreciate your book, is you're like, "Well, what is the physical sensation?" And that I could connect with. My therapist is currently challenging me to try to move beyond that and try to access emotions. To her, her emotions are just incredibly real.

Bruce Tift: There are all sorts of levels of experiencing, and potentially we will take the very best care of ourselves if we can develop some fluidity where we can go in and out, up and down, between these levels, without ever trying to make any of them our identity. It might be helpful for you to stay at the sensation level. But what's the big deal about joining somebody else if their level of experiencing is at the emotional level? The reason I find it helpful not to dismiss emotions, but to not stop there, is because from a Buddhist point of view, concepts carry information over time, but people tend to unconsciously take familiar patterns, with their own labels and explanations, as if they are what's most real. And to me, what's most real is immediate experience, which, as you get more and more precise, concepts aren't actually relevant.

James Christensen: I do think it's probably useful for me to try to gain more fluidity in conceiving of my experience in terms of emotions. I think it's useful.

Bruce Tift: It's just a skill. It's like it would be helpful for you to know different outfits to wear for different occasions. But hopefully, you don't take any of the clothes you wear as if it's an identity that you have to defend.

James Christensen: One thing that was hard for me to deal with in your book when I first read it, and it's honestly still somewhat difficult, is the idea of connecting with my anger. One of the things that I turned away from, that I rejected in myself when I was young, was anger. And I became a person who basically never overtly expressed anger. I thought of myself as a person who never got angry, and maybe a more accurate assessment was that I was just always angry.

Bruce Tift: Well, you intelligently figured out, probably very quickly, it wasn't to your benefit to show anger. How could you not feel rage at how you were being treated? That's not going to go away. So you probably intelligently learned to convert your aggressive energy away from the display of anger to being privately, secretly in control, feeling superior to other people, things like that.

James Christensen: Yes, yes, yes. Okay, that makes sense.

Bruce Tift: Well, given your history, that would make sense. If it's helpful, you could start by talking about aggressive energy.

James Christensen: Okay, that... I love that term.

Bruce Tift: Yeah, so just use that for the time being. As you get more tolerance of holding emotional, energetic vulnerability, then you could invite saying, "Hey, I give myself permission to be secretly angry until I die."

James Christensen: [Pause] It's so hard for me to say. I give myself permission to be secretly angry from time to time until I die.

Bruce Tift: And then just stop, right now. Stay embodied, no story, no explanation, not trying to heal it or understand it, and just see for yourself where this is a harm. Where's the threat? Where's the damage? Am I turning into a monster? Is the world coming to kill me? What's the big deal? I'm compartmentalizing large parts of my life just to avoid some sensations in my body. When I was a kid, that was very intelligent, very appropriate, good self-care. But things change, capacities change, and I've outgrown that type of self-care, maybe. But I won't know that until I let myself feel these feelings. That's the only way I'll bring myself up to date, actually, not just intellectually.

James Christensen: Okay, I still kind of believe that if I allow anger to drive my actions, that's usually going to be harmful.

Bruce Tift: I would agree. I don't think you want any of your emotions to drive your actions when things are difficult. When things are friendly, positive, you want there to be a fluidity where your emotions are expressed in action. Like, you're feeling kind toward your wife, Molly, and you give her a hug. You don't want to have to think it through.

But I find that there's always separateness and there's always connection. Unfortunately, people think of intimacy as synonymous with connection. I don't agree. I find that when things are friendly, it's best to lead with connection, but experientially stay in touch with separateness, so we don't give our integrity away. When things are in conflict, which means differences, I think it works best to lead with separateness. That doesn't mean anger. It just means, "Hey, I don't see it that way," or "No, I'm not available for that." But we stay in touch with our connection, which is always there.

James Christensen: So just as it's useful for me to participate more fully in my other feelings, it's also useful for me to participate more fully in my anger?

Bruce Tift: As a feeling.

James Christensen: As a feeling, and not let it drive behavior, but instead of just repressing it and not dealing with it, or pushing it aside.

Bruce Tift: Yeah, because that makes it the most important thing in your life.

James Christensen: Ironically. Yes, absolutely.

Bruce Tift: So, that's a very important principle, at least in Buddhism, to discriminate between feelings and behavior. They're connected, they're related, but there's not a causal relationship.

James Christensen: What do you think about intimacy? You were just saying something about how you don't see intimacy so much in terms of togetherness as of separateness.

Bruce Tift: Yes, right. I think in our culture, unfortunately, if somebody says, "I want to be intimate," they mean, "I want to be close and connected." I think that when we don't own our appropriate, healthy separateness, which is associated with aggressive energy, when we don't own it consciously, we're going to act it out unconsciously. Because we don't have a choice. Half the story is that we're existentially alone, personally responsible. We know our partner's not here on the planet to be who we want them to be, and they're not gonna come and save us. We're on our own. That's half the story. The other half is we want to give and receive love, and be kind and supportive.

But when a couple does not have access to healthy, conscious, constructive conflict and separateness, in my experience, they pretty much have to create problems, which function to create more separateness. Things like miscommunication, loss of sexuality, over-functioning, under-functioning, chronic conflict around stupid stuff—all of which are distancing dynamics. They have an investment in not solving these problems because they're not willing to just say, "Hey, I'm not here on the planet to be who you want me to be." Or, "I'm sorry your feelings are hurt, but that's your responsibility, maybe, not mine."

James Christensen: So you think of moving towards conscious separateness as a way of bringing in those...

Bruce Tift: Yes, just like on an inner level, you moving toward conscious ownership of your aggressive energy so you don't have to have internal problems to perpetuate your fantasy of being divided against unworkable feelings. More generally, I happen to see intimacy as this never-resolvable juggling act. A good analogy is like riding your bike. You stay upright by cooperating with always being out of balance. You never achieve balance. So the point is to cooperate in an intimate relationship between self-care and care for the other, but with no fantasy that it's ever going to be resolved. We'll always feel disturbed.

James Christensen: We'll always feel out of balance.

Bruce Tift: We'll always be a little bit too far in one or the other direction. So to me, the heart of intimacy is this energy in the middle of no resolution, no formula, no position, no sort of knowing that we're getting it right. Because we can't. It's not a resolvable thing. But it's learning to tolerate that "falling off of a cliff" feeling and pay attention. After a while, we realize, "Well, I haven't hit bottom yet."

James Christensen: Would you be comfortable with me turning this into a blog post where it showed my name and your name having a conversation?

Bruce Tift: No, it'd be fine. If I've said anything really stupid, you could take that out.

James Christensen: I will edit carefully. What about publishing the video? It would just go on my YouTube channel. Is that fine with you also?

Bruce Tift: It's fine, yeah. I'm an old guy, I'm not trying to build up my practice or anything like that. So I'm pretty okay with whether it might be of benefit to other people.

James Christensen: Yeah. Well, I really appreciate that. I'll publish it on my blog, and then I'll put it on my YouTube. It's astounding to me how quickly my brain state changes when I talk to you. Within two minutes of starting the conversation, everything feels loose and open, and it's terrifying, but it's also good in a way.

Bruce Tift: Yeah, sort of like intimacy, maybe.

James Christensen: Yeah, exactly like that, actually. Thank you so much, Bruce.