28. Why you Don’t Feel Safe
Catherine Roebuck joins me to discuss Chapter 1 of Bruce Tift’s book “Already Free.”
Transcript
James: Let's start with a quote from Already Free by Bruce Tiff. "Most of us are, in a variety of ways, living in the present as if it were the past."
What do you think?
Catherine: Yeah, I love that quote. He's talking about how we go through our lives now as if our capacity were still frozen at, you know, six years old, and that we have to use the same limited strategies we had back then.
James: What strategies are you talking about? What did I do when I was six that I still do as an adult, even though it doesn't make sense?
Catherine: He talks about how by the time kids are about six, they learn to detach or suppress parts of their experience because it's overwhelming. It's too intense, or it's just terrifying and too much. So you might do that in response to pressure from your family or even at school, like trying to fit in with public expectations. You end up pushing down maybe how frightened you feel or how angry you are, or that you're very dependent. If you feel a lot of pressure to instead be capable, independent, and self-sufficient, then even at five or six years old, you might suppress the reality of how dependent you really are. So you end up kind of cutting yourself off from parts of your own experience and then going through life with this set of coping mechanisms that were very intelligent and necessary when you were a young child with a young brain and really limited options for handling your life. But then by the time you're in your thirties or forties, it doesn't make sense anymore. It's not the best way to do it, and it starts to cause you problems.
James: So he mentions three ways of doing this, which is passion, anger, and disconnection. The three ways that I divide myself against myself. When I'm young, the best way for me to handle myself is to turn off or repress parts of myself that get me in trouble in my family or in the broader world, especially in the family. There are certain parts of me that are annoying to my parents, or that my parents discourage or don't like. So I learn to suppress those parts, and that's me turning against myself, dividing against myself in some way. Which of those three do you think you practiced the most when you were young?
Catherine: I could see all three of them coming up at times, but for me, there's definitely a trend toward what he calls positive aggression or the neurotic feminine. That's the passion or attachment one, where you try to relate positively to your parents, your family, and the world around you. You end up internalizing all the problems in your life and thinking that you are the problem. There's this fantasy that if I'm the problem, that explains why things aren't going better for me or why people aren't taking better care of me. It's because I'm the problem. All I have to do is fix that, and then I'll get the love that I really need. The fantasy is that this is in your control and that you could do something about it. For me, I really internalized a lot, and I had a very aggressive position toward myself. All of my anger was pointed inward as depression, and it was not directed very much outside of me at other people.
James: Mm-hmm.
Catherine: But that was pretty destructive to my relationship with myself.
James: Yeah, so you can direct your anger inward, you can direct your anger outward toward others, or you can just disconnect from everything. Most of us use some combination of those three tools. What you were talking about reminded me of a pattern I often see in parenting where parents pretend that they're more innocent than their children. If my child is misbehaving in some way and I'm also misbehaving as a parent, I will often pretend that I'm quite innocent. I'm just trying to help you. I'm just trying to be a good parent here. Look at you, you're being such a bad kid. And so the child in that instance is going to usually internalize this idea that I'm a bad kid, I'm a bad person. This is my fault, because it's pretty hard for them to see through to the actual reality, which is, you know, children are by nature innocent and parents by nature are not innocent. We just have so much responsibility as parents and so much more capacity to do things better than what a child has.
Catherine: Yeah, and one way I see that happen a lot is parents who will demand that their children apologize to them, but they won't apologize to their children. They're setting it up as if you can do bad things and have to make repair for that, but everything I do is right and justified.
James: So only children make mistakes, and parents don't make mistakes. And only children need to be responsible. Parents don't need to be responsible.
Catherine: Yeah. I mean, the irony is that the reason you'd be doing that as a parent is that you're not very mature yourself and you're not handling yourself well. A mature parent that's functioning well wouldn't reach for those strategies.
James: Yeah, of course not. So what do I do as an adult if I've adopted this kind of self-aggression as a child?
Catherine: One of the things that Tiff talks about is just committing to the truth of your experience. He calls these three styles we were talking about fundamental aggression. I think of them as ways that we argue with reality or fight with reality. So he encourages people to basically back into their embodied sensory experience in real time and find out what's there. Become curious about that and don't buy in too much to your ideas about what's going on, but to track it more closely.
James: One way that he addresses this is with what he calls the worst fear technique. What is the feeling I'm most worried about feeling, and the feeling or the thought that seems just absolutely undoable to me? For me, it might be, "I can't handle feeling abandoned." So Bruce would say, "Why don't you try saying to yourself, 'I give myself permission to feel abandoned from time to time, or off and on for the rest of my life?'" Just saying that, there's something so powerful about saying that because I really don't want to say that. It does kind of make sense in the framework of like, once upon a time when I was young, I felt abandoned, and I decided it wasn't okay for me. It wasn't safe for me at that time. So I learned to just push that away and that it was really important for me to push that away in some way. Now, as an adult, feeling abandoned for me now is actually not harmful. But I need to kind of reverse that process and reintegrate with myself by saying, "Well, if I feel this way, can it be okay for me to feel this way?" And the way Bruce would say it is, "Can I investigate? How harmful is it really for me to feel abandoned? How much harm is in this?" He takes this nonjudgmental approach, which is, "Every time it happens, I start an investigation and I say, 'I'm going to investigate how harmful this feeling is, and I'm just going to go into the feeling and see what happens.'" It's beautiful because instead of in childhood where I set up a rule that said, "This feeling is harmful, I can't feel it," as in adulthood, he's like, "You don't need a rule. You need to investigate. You need to see what happens." It's a beautiful way of looking at it.
Catherine: Yeah. He also sometimes says, "Could you feel this way for 30 minutes?" I think that one's really powerful because there's stuff that feels so terrible that you can be like, "I can't handle ever feeling this way ever again. I couldn't handle one more minute of this." But then if you kind of look back, you can usually find, "Actually, I've felt this way on and off throughout my entire remembered life, or all the way back to when I was 11 or whatever it may be. This has been going on a long time. I actually am able to tolerate it." I really don't like it and I might never like it. That might never change. But you can drop the sort of desperation and that need to dodge it and just look at it. "I have felt this way on and off throughout my life. If I continue to feel this way on and off throughout my life, all evidence points to I'll be able to continue living my life." That's what I've been doing so far.
James: One reason this is helpful is that the behavioral patterns I have as an adult that I used to get away from my feelings are harmful in my family and they're harmful in my relationship. Even though the feeling itself isn't really harmful, the behaviors I do to get away from the feeling are harmful. So if my pattern is that I get angry at someone else to get away from this feeling, then that's harmful in my marriage. If my pattern is that I just retract from reality or withdraw from reality to get away from this feeling, that's also harmful. So all three of these behavioral patterns we talked about are incompatible with having a happy relationship or being a good parent. So even though the feelings themselves aren't harmful, the ways we get away from them are harmful if we want to have good relationships. There are two things here that are surprising to me. First, how difficult it is for me to say, "I give myself permission to feel this feeling that I don't like off and on for the rest of my life." It sounds silly to say it, but it's actually quite difficult, and it really does have an impact. There's something about saying that out loud, about acknowledging the reality of this thing and talking about it as just a feeling and the idea that, as an adult, feelings are okay. I can handle feeling a lot of things that I couldn't really handle feeling when I was a kid, but as an adult, I can feel them. The other thing is that in childhood, these feelings were often a legitimate warning of a legitimate danger or a legitimate concern. Whereas in adulthood, they are often a symptom of me living in the present as if it were the past.
Catherine: Yeah. I think of it as your brain wires in childhood information about "Here's how big of a problem it is when you feel this way and here's the available paths, the ways you can respond to it." Then when something reminds you of it as an adult, that's the wiring that lights up, and it's decades out of date, but it's what you have until you update it on purpose.
James: Yeah, so the way brain development works is, you know, most of our brain development occurs in the first 20 years of life. After that, brain development by default slows down significantly unless I do something about it. So a lot of the work you and I do is helping people intentionally rewire their brains to enable them to have the kind of relationships they want to have.
Catherine: Yeah. And one of the other things that Tiff says is that as adults, we all think we want to resolve our neuroses. That's the conscious goal when people enter therapy or coaching. And underneath that conscious goal is a very deep unconscious investment in never resolving them.
James: Mm-hmm.
Catherine: I understood that to be about, "You can't resolve this because you've actually organized your whole life around this core belief."
James: Mm-hmm.
Catherine: You'd have to learn a whole new way of functioning.
James: Yeah. And it feels uncomfortable. If my marriage has been operating a certain way for a couple of decades, it feels pretty uncomfortable for me to step into a new way of operating, even if it's better. A new pattern between me and my wife, even if it's significantly better than the old pattern, will drive some anxiety just because it's new.
Catherine: Yes. Change is always difficult, even really good change, even things you really want.
James: Mm-hmm. And even though the way we used to treat each other wasn't that great, at least I knew how to handle myself in that situation. I knew what to expect. So when my wife changes her pattern and starts treating me better, I love that, and it is just a little bit disconcerting to have her change. You know, I've seen her change quite a bit over the past year, and she treats me a lot better than she used to. And that's a beautiful thing. It also feels fresh and raw in a way that kind of keeps me on my toes.
Catherine: Right? I think about the neurotic organization as like, there's something you don't want to feel. And I always visualize it as like a hand for whatever reason. It's like anytime I come up against this thing, I don't want to feel I back off, and I keep doing this throughout my life until I've formed, right in the center of my life, a perfect imprint of the very thing I'm trying to avoid and never think about and never feel. We tend to actually form a sort of a comfortable relationship with having our life organized around this avoidance, and it is unsettling. It's disconcerting to drop it.
James: Mm-hmm. Well, and this is what people call getting triggered. "Oh, I got triggered." And what Tiff is saying is it's okay to feel the feelings associated with being triggered. It's actually good to lean into that and feel that completely. But if I let those feelings drive my behavior, then my behavior is going to cause problems in my relationships.
Catherine: Right? And then you'll blame those problems on your partner.
James: Yeah. Because if I blame my partner for my feelings, then I say my feelings are my partner's fault, and my behavior is therefore my partner's fault. The way I think of it is, "Partner does something, I feel something, and then I do something." This is an unbreakable chain. At no point in that chain do I really have the option of stepping in and doing something different. What Tiff is saying is, "Feel more." If I can lean into feeling the feelings and really participating in the experience of what it's like for me to be me right now, then that gives me more choice about what I actually do, because I don't have to take action as a way to get away from this intensity.
Catherine: Yeah. So he talks about if in early life you have a parent or two parents that are pretty avoidant, don't want a lot of closeness and contact with you, you're going to develop a style of doing most of the work of connecting in an important relationship. You learn this so young and you practice it so much, it becomes core to who you are, or it feels that way anyway, that this is how you know to be you in the world. So then you get into a relationship, and you have this style that you've practiced so much of doing 90% of the work of connecting, always being the one to approach and repair. He offers the example of a child giving their parent a hug so that then they get a hug, but always being the one to initiate that hug.
James: To initiate. Yeah.
Catherine: Yeah. And so then the best move for you on a subconscious level, so that you can continue to operate in the way that has always kept you safe, basically, and that your brain thinks is the safe option, is going to be to partner with someone that has a style of doing 10% of the work. Then you can keep doing 90%, and you can be angry at them because it's really their fault that you're over here doing so much, or that's how it feels.
James: Well, and I would be comfortable being with a person who isn't used to putting very much work into connection. Yeah. Because you know that that becomes at least a possible relationship configuration for me because I'm used to doing all this connecting work. So the other person might be more in charge of the disconnection or the independence in the relationship. So they're the one who establishes the separateness by withdrawing or whatever it is they do.
Catherine: Yeah. And so then if you've got an avoidant partner like that and they start to face their avoidance and they start to lean in and do more work, sure, you might like it on some level, but it's inherently destabilizing to you and your relationship and how this all fits together. So yeah, even good change is difficult to handle.
James: Yeah, it is.
Catherine: And then you'd have to also investigate, "Well, what does this mean about reality?" If I had assumed that the way relationships work is I have to work this hard, and then I learned that's not the truth, but I've been doing it for 20 years. Or however many years. There's actually a lot of grief in that and in realizing, "I had to work this hard not because that's just the reality of all relationships, but because that was the reality of my particular relationship when I was a child."
James: So instead of feeling like I have to behave the way I'm behaving in my relationship, which is more or less the case when we're children—we don't have a lot of agency or choice in how we show up in our families. We're a child with a very low power in the family system, and so my best choice is just to kind of comply with the rules of the family or fit myself into the family system in the best way I can. But that's more like me adjusting myself as opposed to, as an adult, I can say, "Well, what kind of a person do I want to be? What kind of relationship do I want to have?" And now I can take steps to behave myself in a way that is compatible with that kind of relationship. So I start having influence on the relationship system instead of just it being a one-way trip where the relationship system is having influence on me.
Catherine: Yes. One of the things that is really fun for me to see when I work with couples that have children is that as they start to address these patterns between them and individually just in how they show up, then their relationships with their children will shift. If you've got a style of doing 90% of the work, you're going to have not just an avoidant partner, but you're going to end up with a relationship with your children where they avoid you as well, a lot of the time, because that's just how you achieve balance. When there's someone who's doing 90% of the work, you do 10. And so, you know, you shift one. If one person starts to really take this on and change, the whole system responds, which is amazing to see. You watch children become less anxious and become more talkative and engage in family activities willingly. It's because of work the parents are doing, and the kids aren't even having to consciously do it. And it also sets them up for something so much better down the line that they could maybe feel at home in a more balanced relationship.
James: The power of an adult being an adult in a family system is immense. It's so huge. But we all learned about taking our place in a family system when we were children. So every person has a brain that was organized around the idea that "I have a role in this family system and I don't really get a choice about that." And that's how it was. Making this shift to where I have a role in my family system as an adult and I get to choose my role, so now I'm the one writing the script, I'm the one directing the play, I'm the one choosing the cast, and I get to choose my role, and I can choose a role of, "I'm going to assert myself. I'm going to take up space. I'm going to be really kind and compassionate, and I'm also going to be hard to get around." That's the role that is going to change the entire family system, not because I'm controlling people, but because I'm controlling myself, and the family system adapts to people who can control themselves.
Catherine: Yeah, I actually think this is part of what you were bringing up about the parents seeing themselves as more innocent than their children. I think it's a reaction to those parents, when they were innocent children, being treated like they weren't. So they grow up, they still experience themselves as a child whose innocence was never honored. And that's what they're trying to do. Now that they're in charge, they're going to take a stand for this thing that they weren't able to take a stand for when they were kids. But it's like the ship has sailed. You aren't a child anymore. And it's really easy to engage even as a full adult with your own children, to keep engaging in your relationships and your life as if you are a frightened, overwhelmed, put-upon child. And it's just not the truth.
James: It is so hard to change though.
Catherine: Yeah. But that's the only way anyone ever gets to have that innocent childhood experience is that someone along the way grows up, becomes a protective adult, takes seriously their responsibility, and stops putting it on the next generation.
James: Yeah. It really does require immense change on the part of the parents.
Catherine: Yeah. And it usually means that you have to, someone's gotta go first. Somebody has to be willing to step up and say, "I'm going to try to give what I didn't get." It takes a lot of courage. That's one of the things that Tiff talks about is just the amount of courage it takes to experience the reality of our lives directly, to have a direct relationship with it. He talks about how it can be hard to get people on board with wanting to do something as stupid as having an intentional, direct relationship with their own pain or to walk right into terrible feelings. Of course, who wants to do that? You need a good reason. So the reason comes typically from either your strategies are so out of date that it's very painful to keep using them, or your relationships are breaking down because you're acting out childhood dramas. Or you have a lot of capacity and courage and curiosity, and you're willing to step in and try something new.
James: Yeah. So this was chapter one. What we were talking about today was chapter one of this book, which talks about the developmental view, which is kind of the view that's traditional to Western therapy. A lot of the work that you and I do really is centered in this developmental view of "Once upon a time I was a relatively powerless child in a family system, and I learned to adapt to that role. And now I'm a relatively powerful adult in the family system, and it's critical for me to adapt to that new role, which is that I am the one now who gets to make things better for me and my family." That is all the things that you were just saying. So I think next time we will talk about chapter two, which is the fruitional or Buddhist view, which is quite different from everything we've been saying so far.
Catherine: Yeah. And one of the things that's so fun about this book is that he doesn't try to reconcile the two into one cohesive theory or anything. He talks about the value of going back and forth between the two and holding the dissonance, so it's very fun.
James: Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm excited to tackle that with you next time, and I think we should leave it there. What do you say?
Catherine: Sounds good. Thanks, James.
James: Thank you, Catherine.
