Summary of Already Free by Bruce Tift
Already Free (2015) is Bruce Tift's book on combining Western psychotherapy with Buddhism. Tift, a marriage and family therapist, calls the therapy side the developmental view and the Buddhist side the fruitional view. He doesn't merge them. He alternates between them and lets each cover the other's blind spots.
Chapter 1: The Developmental View
As children we build strategies to get through hard experiences in our families. They are smart at the time, then keep running out of awareness long after we need them.
Tift's example is Darren, a man in his mid-thirties who couldn't follow through on work, relationships or spiritual practice. As a boy, a 98 on a test got the question of why it wasn't 100. Darren tried to be a "good boy," kept his anger out of awareness, and never put himself fully on the line. As an adult he subtly blamed his partners for not supporting him. In therapy he worked on his anger, his boundaries and owning his feelings. He felt more powerful and less anxious, though Tift says it was too soon to know if the pattern had changed.
Tift says therapy isn't really about the past. "It’s actually about the present." He takes Carl Jung's line, "Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering," and widens it: neurosis is a substitute for experiential intensity.
One homework assignment is to drop all complaint for about a month. Whenever a complaint shows up, ask, "What am I feeling right now that I don’t want to feel?" The chapter closes with seven stages for dissolving our inner divisions:
- Recognizing the pattern.
- Tolerating our worst fears.
- Accepting them.
- Being kind to them.
- Welcoming them.
- Committing to live with them for life.
- Loving them.
Chapter 2: The Fruitional View
Ana has been married nearly twenty-five years to a man she loves. She has no money worries and has done meditation retreats and yoga. Still, her life feels routine and almost dead.
Tift doesn't ask about her childhood. He has her say out loud, "I give myself permission to feel dead, off and on, for the rest of my life." She notices a contraction in her gut, nausea and some panic. Is any of it actually harming her? She says no. Within one or two sessions she feels disappointment but also a surprising lightness. She had been fighting something that was already true.
This is the fruitional view. "Nothing needs to change for us to feel complete and at peace except our own perception of reality." Tift borrows the Buddhist framework of ground, path and fruition, where the starting point and the goal turn out to be the same experience, seen with awareness.
He suggests three unconditional practices: immediacy, embodiment and kindness. He warns that people can become addicted to the path.
Chapter 3: A Dialogue Between the Developmental and Fruitional Views
The two views agree that a sense of inner division is at the heart of unnecessary suffering. Therapy works on the split between the conscious and the unconscious. Buddhism says the split isn't real and is kept going, moment by moment, with a lot of effort. He doesn't seek a synthesis. He describes a "rich friction that’s never resolvable" and the experience of standing in the middle with no fantasy of resolution.
Each view needs the other. Working only on the past can become endless self-improvement. Working only in the present can become spiritual bypassing, where real problems get waved off as just a story.
Chapter 4: Experiencing Anxiety and Struggle
Jerome is a lawyer in his late forties who placates people at work and can't disagree with the women he dates. Asked to imagine saying no to a colleague, he finds tightness in his stomach and nausea. The same sensations show up at work, in dating and with his parents. His whole life was arranged to avoid anxiety.
Tift says he feels anxious every day himself. "A life without anxiety is not an option." The choice is how we relate to it. He describes binding anxiety: pinning it to one problem so the rest of life feels safe, and then never quite solving that problem.
Jerome's work didn't make the feeling go away. Tift expects he will feel disturbed by conflict for the rest of his life. What changed was learning that these feelings can be felt without being acted on.
Chapter 5: Embodied Awareness
This chapter moves attention out of interpretation and into sensation. Our stories about a feeling carry our history. The sensation is happening now. Tift cites cross-cultural research suggesting there are only six or seven basic states of arousal, such as anger, fear and surprise. The same fast heartbeat can be read as nervousness while waiting for test results, or excitement before seeing a lover.
Tift calls sanity a counterinstinctual practice. It always takes more effort in the moment than avoidance, so we can't wait until we feel like it.
He adds a caution. This work is intense, and when a client's trauma turns out to be significant, he refers them to a trauma specialist.
Chapter 6: All Relative Experience Is Relational
Tift met his wife in 1977 at Naropa University. He writes, "I have experienced being disturbed in this relationship every day" of their nearly four decades together, and says she reports the same. She doesn't cause his sore spots. Being close, she presses on them. When a daughter stopped speaking to her and she was deeply hurt, Tift felt irritated. The irritation pointed to his own discomfort with dependency.
Our culture expects intimacy to be a refuge. Tift thinks a fortunate relationship is one with "the right amount of suffering": enough to bring things into awareness, not so much that it overwhelms.
Most of us grow up identified with one of two energies, separateness or connection, and cut off from the other. Tift suggests leading with connection when things are friendly and with separateness during conflict. Tamara was doing 90 percent of the work of connection with Allan, who kept retreating to his study. Tift calls this "distancer-pursuer" dynamics. Tift asked her to step back and him to reach out more. With Bradley and Craig, a gay couple, he coached Bradley to ask Craig directly not to yell, and to say out loud, "Apparently, not hurting Craig’s feelings is a higher priority than my own integrity."
Chapter 7: Relationship as an Evolving Path
Tift offers four stages that he developed from his work with couples:
- Prepersonal: codependence, where the partner is treated as both threat and savior.
- Personal: each person takes responsibility for their own feelings. Tift sees this as the antidote to codependence, and it's where most of his couples work happens.
- Interpersonal: kindness becomes a practice, and staying together becomes a daily choice. The partner is a "never-fully-understood friend."
- Nonpersonal: experience rests in open awareness, and the partner is "another manifestation of life and mystery, just as we are ourselves."
He says the stages are tools, not a description of reality, and all four are present all the time.
The practices are concrete. Examine what a favorite complaint lets you avoid. Take a break when conflict turns hurtful, and say when you'll check back in. Make specific requests. Learn that a feeling doesn't require a behavior. Practice effective selfishness, which includes treating your partner well.
Chapter 8: A Good State of Mind, Regardless of Circumstance
One way to a good life is to collect good conditions: health, money, a good relationship. The other is to work on how we relate to any conditions. Tift argues our state of mind matters more than the content. We can be healthy and depressed, or dying and joyful.
He defines a good state of mind as "a mind trained into an attitude of unconditional appreciation." Its qualities include embodied presence, humor, courage and equanimity. Early signs of progress are less complaint and faster recovery from our usual dramas. It is a practice, never an accomplishment.
He closes by quoting his teacher Chögyam Trungpa: "The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground." His parting advice is "Discard nothing, appreciate everything."