Catherine Roebuck joins me to discuss Chapter 1 of Bruce Tift’s book “Already Free.” Roseville Couples Counseling 300 Harding Blvd Suite 108, Roseville CA 916-292-8920 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. Cathe
