Bipolar and Internal Family Sytems therapy
Check out Peter Gerlach’s video on how to treat bipolar disorder with psychotherapy based on internal family systems.
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freeing the mind itself
The mind, or the natural you cannot actually be split. As a zen poem says:
Like a sword that cuts, but cannot cut itself;
Like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself.
The illusion of the split comes from the mind’s attempt to be both itself and its idea of itself, from a fatal confusion of the map with the territory. To make an end of the illusion, the mind must stop trying to act upon itself, upon its stream of experiences, from the standpoint of the idea of itself which we call the ego. This is expressed in another Zen poem:
Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
What I do is help you see the ideas you have mistaken yourself for – as you see them rather than be them, you can make a relationship with them. If you’re not a Zen master they have a life of their own.
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Zen and the Art of Psychotherapy
Sitting – recognising bare attention. It lights up. (Samadhi is prajna).
Asking, who – not so much to get an answer, but to cut off the possibility of getting lost in identity with passing thoughts.
Tung- Shan says
“Just avoid seeking from others,
Or you will be estranged from yourself.
I now go on alone; I meet Him everywhere –
I am not it, but it is all of me.
One must understand this way
In order to unite with thusness”
The freedom of not taking thoughts – or any of the machinery of consciousness – not to be self – is the doorway to being at large.
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Healing …
To the degree that struggle and tension exist in a personality, the various aspects of
consciousness will be at odds with one another. You who are unaware of the meaning of the
struggle are trying to identify with one or several of these aspects of consciousness without knowing
what the true self is, where it is located, or how it can be found in this maze of discord. You
wonder if you are your best qualities, or if you are your over-severe conscience which annihilates you
for your negative traits. Or are you perhaps the destructive demon within you? Which is your best
self? Is it your rage at the demon in you or your total negation of its existence? Whether individuals
know it or not, this inner struggle and search is ongoing, and the more conscious the struggle is, the
better. Any path of self-development must sooner or later come to terms with these questions —
with the deep problem of self-identity.
It is a human distortion to identify with any of the above-mentioned aspects. You are neither
your negative traits nor your self-punishing superimposed conscience, nor even your positive traits.
Even though you have managed to integrate the latter into the fullness of your being, this is not the
same as identifying with them. It is more accurate to say that you are that part of you which
managed this integration by determining, deciding, acting, thinking, and willing, so that you could
absorb into your self what was previously an appendage. Each aspect of consciousness possesses a
will of its own, as those of you who do the pathwork know. As long as you are blindly involved in
the struggle and therefore submerged in it, each of these various aspects will control you in turn
because the real self that could determine your identification differently has not yet found its power.
Your blind involvement enslaves you and inactivates your creative energy. This missing sense of self
leads to despair.
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IFS in the news..
Internal family systems (IFS) (The Sunday Times 7/8/2011)
This fast-growing therapy sees the human psyche as organized into a collection of sub personalities or “parts”, like an internalized family. IFS groups these parts into types: managers, exiles and firefighters. Managers are protective and try to keep us functional and safe. Exiles are the vulnerable parts that have been “exiled” by managers. When a person has been hurt or shamed in the past, they will have parts that still carry these emotions. Managers want to keep these feelings out of consciousness, so they lock up exiles in “inner closets”. When managers fail and one of the exiles is upset to the point that it may flood the person its extreme feelings, firefighters jump into action. Highly impulsive, they seek stimulation that will override the exile’s feelings – commonly bingeing on drugs or alcohol.
IFS also believes that everyone has a core self with leadership qualities such as perspective, confidence, compassion and acceptance. The therapists’ job is to help clients access this sense of self and to gain control over the reactions of their impulsive parts.
“Addiction represents a battle between firefighters and exiles”, says the psychologist Stephanie Moorsom. “IFS draws a clients attention to the purpose their addiction is serving for their internal systems. Rather than being judged as bad, these ‘dangerous’ parts are conceptualized as attempting, however misguidedly, to protect a person. If they are treated with respect and compassion, these extreme aspects of our personalities can drop their destructive masks and become life-affirming instead.”
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IFS takes off..
IFS seems to be expanding now, lots of practitioners and trainings and a certain “hey this works” buzz gathering around it. I can’t remember how I heard about it, but I’m very glad I did. I’ve always been interested in therapies which employ the concept of “parts”, “subpersonalities”,
“ego states”, but have never felt I got beyond a certain point with the concept. IFS has, so far, proven to be the missing key I needed. It takes parts therapy past anything else I’ve tried for dynamic psychological self discovery and healing.
Jay Earley’s book is for the beginner who wants to practice IFS, including completely alone, which is highly feasible. As such it goes slowly, explains carefully, and contains a lot of encouragement for the initially unsure. It is however far from lacking in experienced wisdom, and I will testify you can do wonderful stuff with it and nothing else.
The system is incredibly user-friendly but it’s also extremely deep. It gets you right inside the issues and, unlike so many of the more cognitively-based therapies that are popular now, it really does surprise. You know you are dealing with the real stuff of the psyche — the sudden shifts, the realizations, the sheer off-the-cuff creativity, the insights given by each part painting a truly personal and dynamic picture, yet fully in control. I soon realized that I had been attempting to do similar things to this many times before, and that when I had succeeded in healing trauma in myself, the method had been similar to this, but lacking the overall concept. Yes, I really would say IFS has managed to come up with the right systems-based, loose-but-accurate formula to induce such experiences deliberately, yet organically, without any hint of being mechanical or stiff. Something I particularly appreciate is the complete lack of any *combat*. You never *overcome* resistance — you *honour* it. (None of this ‘breaking down the ego’ crap.)
The main thing about IFS is that it works, and works by honouring systemic processes and knowing just what to do with them, after having plainly worked very hard to arrive at this ingenious and soulful understanding. I really do recommend it to anyone who wants to work on themselves in a deep yet safe manner, because I think you’ll find it effective, and fascinating. This excellent book will form a great gateway. I have never been more impressed with any therapy system. – Jason Wingate
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How IFS developed…by Dr Richard Schwartz..
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We all know about those luminous moments of clarity and balance, in our own lives and in those of our clients, which come briefly now and again. However we get there, we suddenly encounter a feeling of inner plenitude and open heartedness to the world that wasn’t there the moment before. The incessant nasty chatter inside our heads ceases, we have a sense of calm spaciousness, as if our minds and hearts and souls had expanded and brightened. Sometimes, these evanescent experiences come in a bright glow of peaceful certainty that everything in the universe is truly okay, and that includes us – you and me individually – in all our poor struggling, imperfect humanity. At other times, we may experience a wave of joyful connection with others that washes away irritation, distrust, and boredom. We feel that, for once, we truly are ourselves, our real selves, free of the inner cacophony that usually assaults us.
For much of my life, the closest I’d come to actually experiencing this kind of blissful oneness was on the basketball court. Over the years I’d become addicted to basketball because of the fleeting moments when I entered into a state in which my inner critics disappeared and my body seemed to know just what to do. I had total confidence in my abilities and experienced a sense of joy and awe at being spontaneously in the moment.
When I became a family therapist, I longed to experience something similar in sessions with my clients. Instead my work seemed hard, frustrating, and draining. I believed that it was up to me to restructure families – to use the force of my personality to pry apart enmeshed relationships and open up blocked communication patterns. I thought I needed to change clients by pure force of intellect and will. I had to come up with reframes for their symptoms, solutions to their problems, and new perspectives on their dilemmas. And then I had to find a way to motivate them to do the homework I gave them, and to not feel totally frustrated when they didn’t. All this responsibility for creating change, and doing it quickly, not only precluded any peak experiences in my work, it was burning me out.
Then in the early 1980’s, I began noticing that several clients with eating disorders described extensive internal conversations with what they called different parts of themselves when I asked bout what happened inside them to make them binge and purge. I was intrigued. I had one client, Diane; ask the pessimistic voice she was describing why it always told her she was hopeless. The voice responded that it said she was hopeless so that she wouldn’t take any risks and get hurt; it was trying to protect her. This seemed like a promising interaction. If this pessimist really had benign intent, then Diane might be able to negotiate a different role for it. But Diane wasn’t interested in
negotiating. She was angry at this voice and kept telling it to just leave her alone. I asked
her why she was so rude to the pessimist and she went on a long diatribe, describing how that voice had made every step she took in life a major hurdle.
It then occurred to me that I wasn’t talking to Diane, but to another part of her that constantly fought with the pessimist. In an earlier conversation, Diane had told me about an ongoing war inside her between one voice that pushed her to achieve and the pessimist who told her it was hopeless. Could it be that the pushing part had jumped in while she was talking to the pessimist?
I asked Diane to focus on the voice that was so angry at the pessimist and ask it to stop interfering in her negotiations with the pessimist. To my amazement, it agreed to “step back,” and Diane immediately shifted out of the anger she’d felt so strongly seconds before. When I asked Diane how she felt toward the pessimist now, it seemed like a different person answered. In a calm, caring voice, she said she was grateful to it for trying to protect her, and felt sorry that it had to work so hard. Her face and posture had also changed, reflecting the soft compassion in her voice. From that point on, negotiations with the inner pessimist were easy.
I tried this “step back” procedure with several other clients. Sometimes we had to ask two or three voices to not interfere before the client shifted into a state similar to “Diane’s, but we got there nonetheless. When they were in that calm, compassionate state, I’d ask these clients what voice or part was present. They each gave a variation of the following reply: “that’s not a part like those other voices are. That’s more of who I really am. That’s my Self.
I’ve devoted the ensuing two decades refining methods for helping clients to release this state and to get in this state myself, for I’ve found that the most important variable in how quickly clients can access their Selves is the degree to which I’m Self-led. When I can be deeply present to my clients from the core of my being, free from anxiety about how I’m doing, or who’s in control of the therapy, or whether the client is following the correct therapeutic agenda, clients respond as if the resonance of my Self were a tuning fork that awakens their own. It’s this deep, true, and faithful presence of the therapist – without portfolio or baggage – that every client yearns to connect with.
The Self in the Consulting Room
I’m meeting for the first time with an anorexic client, Margie, in a residential treatment center where I’m a consultant. She’s fought with her anorexia for 19 years, and has found that whenever she starts feeling better about herself, she stops eating. Before the session, I focus on my internal world – to center myself. I hear a familiar voice of fear saying that she’s obviously very fragile and I shouldn’t do anything to upset her. I tell that part of me that I’ll be sensitive to her condition, and ask that it trust me and let my heart open again. I focus on my heart and sense the protective crust that had enveloped it as I approached the time of the session melt away. I can feel more sensation now in my chest and abdomen, with a vibrating energy running through my limbs. I feel calm and confident as Margie enters the office and sits down.
She looks like a cadaver and has a feeding tube in her nose. Her movements are controlled and rigid. She eyes me warily. At once, I feel great compassion for her and respect for the parts of her that don’t trust me. And may not want to work with me. I’m not invested in a certain outcome for this session. I’d like to help her, but I’ll be fine if she chooses not to let me in. I’m curious about what her anorexia has been up to all these years, yet I am certain that it has good reasons for doing this to her. I feel the energy in my body extending nonverbally through my heart toward her, and trust that at some level she can sense it. I’m confident that, if I can remain in this state, whatever is supposed to happen will – I don’t have to make anything happen.
I introduce myself and tell her that I’m good at helping people with the parts of them that make them not eat. I ask Margie where she finds that voice of anorexia in her body and how she feels toward it. She closes her eyes and says it’s in her stomach, and she’s angry at it. She says that it tells her that it’s going to kill her and that there’s nothing she can do about it. I feel a jolt of fear clenching my gut and hear a familiar inner voice saying, “it’s determined to kill her and is succeeding. What if you say something that makes it even more determined!” Again, I quickly reassure the fear with words like, “Trust me. Remember that if I stay present something good always happens.” My abdomen immediately relaxes and the soft, flowing energy returns to my body.
In a calm, confident voice I tell Margie, “It makes sense that you’re angry with the eating disorder part, because its avowed purpose is to screw up your life or even kill you. But right now, we just want to get to know it a little better, and it’s hard to do that when you’re so angry with it. We’re not going to give it more power by doing that- just get to know more about why it wants to kill you. So see if the part of you that’s so angry with it is willing to trust you and me for a few minutes. See if it’s willing to relax to maybe watch as we try to get to know the eating disorder part.” She says okay and when I ask how she feels toward the eating disorder now, she says she’s tired of battling with it. I have her ask that part to relax and step back too, and then another part that was very confused by the disorder. Remarkably for someone in her condition, each time she asks a part to step back, it does. Finally, in response to my question of “how do you feel toward the eating disorder now?” she says in a compassionate voice, “Like, I want to help it”.
The moment in a session when a client suddenly has access to some degree of Self always gives me goose bumps. Up until then I’d had to repeatedly reassure my fear and my own inner pessimist, who, as each new part of Margie’s took over, were sure I could never get access to the Self of someone who was so emaciated and symptomatic. At the point that her own compassionate Self emerged, all my parts could relax and step back because they knew from experience that the rest of the session would go smoothly.
How did I go from often dreading doing therapy, hoping clients would cancel, and feeling chronically depleted, to enjoying therapy as a spiritual practice filled with experiences of connection and awe-inspiring beauty? How did I come to be as refreshed after an intense therapy session as if I’d been meditation for and hour? How did doing therapy come to replace playing basketball as my greatest source of that flow feeling?
The short answer is that over the years, I’ve come to trust the healing power of what I’ll call the Self in clients and in myself. When there’s a critical mass of Self in a therapy office, healing just happens. When I’m able to embody a lot of Self, as was the case with Margie, clients can sense in my voice, eyes, movements, and overall presence that I care
a great deal about them, know what I’m doing, won’t be judging them, and love working with them. Consequently, their inner protectors relax, which releases more of their Self. They then begin to relate to themselves with far more curiosity, confidence, and compassion.
As clients embody more Self, their inner dialogues change spontaneously. They stop berating themselves and instead, get to know, rather than try to eliminate, the extreme inner voices or emotions that have plagued them. At those times they tell me, they feel “lighter,” their minds feel somehow more “open” and “free.” Even clients who’ve shown little insight into their problems are suddenly able to trace the trajectory of their own feelings and emotional histories with startling clarity and understanding.
What’s particularly impressed me in those moments isn’t only that my clients, once they’ve discovered the Self at the core of their being, show characteristics of insight, self-understanding and acceptance, stability and personal growth, but that even disturbed clients, who’d seem to be unlikely candidates for such shifts so often are able to experience the same qualities. The accepted wisdom in the field during my training was that clients with truly terrible childhoods – relentless abuse and neglect- resulting in flagrant symptoms needed a therapist to construct functioning egos for them, virtually from scratch; they simply didn’t have the psychological wherewithal to do the job themselves. But even those clients, once they experienced a sense of their own core, began to take over and acquire what looked like real ego strength on their own, without my having to shovel it into them. And yet, almost no Western psychological theories could explain where this newfound and quite amazing ability to contain and understand their inner turmoil had come from.
The more this happened, the more I felt confronted by what were in essence spiritual questions that simply couldn’t be addressed in the terms of problem solving, symptom-focused, results-orientated, clinical technique. I began my own novice’s exploration into the literature of spirituality and religion and discovered a mother lode of esoteric writings by sages, holy seekers, wise men and women, who emphasized meditative and contemplative techniques as a means of coming to know their Self. (“Esoteric” here means not exotic or far out, but derives from the Greek esotero, which means “further in.”) Though they used different words, all the esoteric traditions within the major religions – Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam- emphasized their same core belief: we are sparks of the eternal flame, manifestations of the absolute ground of being. It turns out that the divine within – what the Christians call the soul or Christ Consciousness, Buddhists call Buddha Nature, the Hindus Atman, the Taoists Tao, the Sufis the Beloved, the Quakers the Inner Light – often doesn’t take years of
meditative practice to access because it exists in all of us, just below the surface of our extreme parts. Once they agree to separate from us, we suddenly have access to who we really are.
I have also found, however that the most important variable in how quickly clients can access their Self is the degree to which I am fully present and Self-led. It’s this presence that constitutes the healing element in psychotherapy regardless of the method or philosophy of the practitioner.
Obstacles to Self-Leadership
Yet being Self-led with clients isn’t easy. There are so many ideas we’re taught about clients and about doing therapy that fuel our fears and keep us distant. The DSM-IV keeps our focus on our client’s scariest and most pathological aspects. Our training encourages us to constantly monitor ourselves to avoid doing anything unprofessional, such as letting clients know how we feel about them or what our life is like. We stay on guard to ensure that clients don’t violate our clinical boundaries or peek behind our professional masks.
In addition to the way we learn to view and relate to clients, we also bring lots of personal baggage into our offices that’s easily triggered by their stories or behavior and is another source of disconnection. We have to deal with these in order to work from our Self. For example, in the early years of my work with sexual-abuse survivors, I’d encourage them to embrace the terrified, young parts of them that were stuck in the time during the abuse. As my clients emotionally described the horrific scenes they were witnessing, I’d listen for a while, but then find myself distracted by daydreams or thoughts about what I needed to do that evening. Since they were so absorbed in their inner worlds, I assumed that it didn’t matter much if I checked in and out during that work, despite the occasional complaint from one of them that I didn’t seem to be totally present.
Only when a compelling personal crisis drove me into therapy and I spent a year and a half in my therapist’s office, crying much of the time, did I finally get to know the sad, humiliated, and terrified young parts of me that I’d spent my life trying to keep buried. As I helped those vulnerable boys, the voices that protected them also quieted down. The arrogant intellectual, the angry rebel, the driven careerist, even the contemptuous and harping self critics telling me how inadequate I was, all of them found new roles.
After that, I found that I can stay with my clients even when they’re in intense pain, because I’m no longer afraid of my own. If I notice myself beginning to drift off, I can remind the distracter that I no longer need it to help me that way, and I’ll immediately snap back. These days, my clients take more risks, entering the inner caves and abysses they used to circle around, because they sense that I’ll be with them through the whole journey. And staying with them provides continued opportunities to visit and embrace again the vulnerability they stir in me, affording me a full appreciation of their
courage, along with their terror and shame. Increasingly, I find tears of compassion and then joy flooding my eyes in the middle of sessions, and I’m less afraid to let clients see those tears and know how much I care.
Of course, none of this is as simple as I’m making it sound. It’s an open secret, known to any halfway honest therapist, that our clients stir up in us as many unruly feelings, thoughts, prejudices, negative associations, and untoward impulses as we stir up in them. Not only are we as susceptible to the crosscurrents of contagious emotions typical of almost any human interaction as anybody else of our species, but we have certain vulnerabilities unique to our field. For one thing, we’re supposed to be perfect – in session at least – mature, selfless, perceptive, calm, lucid, kind, hopeful, and wise no matter how nasty, hostile, self-centered unreasonable, childish, despairing, and uncooperative our clients are.
I’m sitting with a client, who’s complaining (as she frequently does) in a high-pitched, whiny voice about how hard her life is. I feel a sharp stab of annoyance. She’s very rich has numerous servants, and spends much of her time shopping and attending to her elaborate social life. Today, she’s unhappy with the antique vase in her living room that she just spent $20,000 on. I, on the other hand, am a poor, hard-working therapist, who has to put in killer weeks to make sure my kids have their college tuition. Somewhere inside I know that she was neglected and ignored as a child, and that part of her is still that lonely little girl crying for someone to pay attention. But right now, I have the urge to scream at her to shut up and quit whining. How do I reclaim my inner balance when this mean, little voice of righteous indignation so powerfully insinuates itself into my consciousness?
On another day, I’m seeing a couple – both highly successful, perfectionist, ambitious. The man, particularly, comes across as very sure of himself, overbearing, argumentative. He’s that way in his family, which is one reason the couple isn’t getting along. I sense a part of him that can’t stand being “one down” with anyone, me included, so the tone of the conversation tends to become rivalrous. I feel myself taking the bait, beginning to get caught in a slightly competitive footing with him as I counter his arguments with my own. What can I do right now to keep this from turning into a power struggle that will make us both losers?
A beautiful, young woman comes in for her first session. I find myself looking at her more than I would other clients, and a romantic, sexualized fantasy pops into my skull. Because I see a population that includes many survivors of sexual abuse, I’ve become sensitized to the damage to her trust in me this kind of energy can do. I know from experience that berating myself for these fugitive incursions doesn’t much help – I end up expending more energy trying not to feel what I feel than paying attention to the client. So how do I stop objectifying her enough to reconnect?
With all the intense provocations to which we’re subjected day in and day out, we need to find a way to keep ourselves firmly grounded and openhearted. Without being tossed about by our own reactive emotions. We have to be able to tap into something at the very core of our being that provides a deep keel for our sailboat in the storm, so we can ride the roiling waves without being submerged by them. We can’t become centered
in what I call the Self – the deep ground of our being – by trying to flatten, suppress, deny, or destroy the feelings we don’t like in ourselves or others.
To experience the Self, there’s no shortcut around our inner barbarians – those unwelcome parts of ourselves, such as hatred, rage, suicidal despair, fear, addictive need (for drugs, food, sex), racism and other prejudice, greed, as well as the somewhat less heinous feelings of ennui, guilt, depression, anxiety, self-righteousness, and self-loathing. The lesson I’ve repeatedly learned over the years of practice is that we must learn to listen to and ultimately embrace these unwelcome parts. If we can do that, rather than trying to exile them, they transform. And, though it seems counterintuitive, there’s great relief for therapists in the process of helping clients befriend rather than berate their inner tormentors. I’ve discovered, after painful trial and much error at my clients’ expense, that treating their symptoms and difficulties like varieties of emotional garbage to be eliminated from their systems simply doesn’t work well. Often, the more I’ve joined clients in trying to get rid of their destructive rage and suicidal impulses, the more powerful and resistant these feelings have grown – though they’ve sometimes gone underground to surface at another time, in another way.
In contrast, these same destructive or shameful parts responded far more positively and became less troublesome, when I began treating them as if they had a life of their own, as if they were in effect, real personalities in themselves, with a point of view and a reason for acting as they did. Only when I could approach them in a spirit of humility and a friendly desire to understand them could I begin to understand why they were causing my clients so much trouble. I discovered that if I can help people approach their own worst, most hated feelings and desires with open minds and hearts, these retrograde emotions will be found not only to make sense and have a legitimate purpose in the person’s psychological economy, but also, quite spontaneously, to become more benign.
I’ve seen this happen over and over again. As I help clients begin inner dialogues with the parts of themselves holding horrible, antisocial feelings and get to know why these internal selves express such fury or self-defeating violence, these parts calm down, grow softer, and even show that they also contain something of value. I’ve found, during this work, that there are no purely “bad” aspects of any person. Even the worst impulses and feelings – the urge to drink, the compulsion to cut oneself, the paranoid suspicions, the murderous fantasies – spring from parts of a person that themselves have a story to tell and the capacity to become something positive and helpful to the client’s life. The point of therapy isn’t to get rid of anything, but to help it transform.
As I discovered the nature of the extreme parts of my clients and increasingly was able to trust their healing Self, I became liberated. I no longer had to come up with the answers for people or wrestle with their impulses. It was like I’d been the engine of a powerboat straining to push therapy through dark storms and over big waves and then, suddenly, I could climb inside, put up a sail, and let a wise and gentle wind carry my clients and me to destinations I couldn’t have predicted. At first, it was hard to give up the sense of control over what would happen and what goals would be achieved in
sessions. But now I love the adventure of it all. It’s easy to go with the flow when you really trust the flow.
Once that boulder of responsibility was lifted off my shoulders, I found that I could breathe again. Being able to drop my guard, as well as my inner diagnoses, strategies, pushers, and motivators, I could enjoy being the person I am. Ironically, clients enjoy me more, and resist me less when I’m in this way, too – sensing my authenticity and lack of agenda. Clients come to love the Self-to-Self connection they feel when I’m really present.
But it’s hard to maintain that kind of presence. In addition to the parts that your clients trigger, your outside life has a way of doing that, too. The painstaking work of developmental researcher Daniel Stern and couples researcher John Gottman has shown that it’s the capacity to repair the inevitable ruptures with those we love that constitutes successful intimacy and relationship. The same is true in our relationship with our clients. Therapy is virtually never a lovely, unbroken pas de deux between therapist and client. More often it’s a series of minor fender benders and close calls, punctuated by the occasional bad wreck. Clinical work progresses via ruptures – misunderstandings, confusion, subtle conflicts, power plays, and disappointments within and between client and therapist – which are then repaired. And it’s through this process of rupture and repair that therapeutic advances are made.
But therapists sometimes forget that it isn’t only the client who misunderstands and reacts. Those of us who use this therapeutic approach have an axiom: whenever there’s a problem in the therapy a part is interfering, but you don’t know whose it is. Sometimes it’s a wayward angry, scared, or deluded aspect of the client that’s been triggered. But it’s equally likely that a protector of the therapist has taken over without his or her awareness, and that the client is reacting to the breach in their connection.
The Healing Self in Action
How can we, with all the intense provocations to which we’re subjected day in and day out, keep ourselves firmly grounded and openhearted? To do this, we have to be able to tap into something at the core of our being.
I meet Marina, a sexual-abuse survivor, at the door for her regular session, and I know instantly that she’s really furious with me. “You were completely spaced out with me during the last session – not present at all,”she hurls at me, before going into a tirade about how cruel I was to lure her into a vulnerable emotional state and then abandon her. “You’re one heartless bastard!” she spits out in summation.
Being faced with an enraged woman, particularly one who’s angry with me has always aroused a cacophony of alarm bells in my head and sent electric shocks through my body. At the moment, I nod sagely, trying to look calm and stalling for time, until I can breathe again and marshal a response. One inner voice instantly bursts forth with, “Well, abuse survivors always blame their therapists sooner or later. This is all just projection – you’ve finally become her perpetrator!” Another irate member of my internal family chimes in, “What an ingrate she is! You’ve cut your fee for her and see her at odd hours, and look how she treats you!” An inner hysteric begins shouting, “Oh, my God,
she’s a borderline who’ll ruin your career! Danger! Danger!” Then my various inner critics weigh in with their take on the subject: “Well, she’s probably right. You probably did zone out on her. Why can’t you really be there for your clients? What kind of therapist are you, anyway? Maybe you should go into some other line of work.”
Years ago, one of those parts would have taken over and I would have gone into heavy-duty defensive mode – minimizing her feelings, taking a condescending tone of clinical wisdom to subtly let her know that she must be mistaken. Or I might have apologized but not in a heartfelt way, which would just have fueled her rage. Or I might have become one of my inner critics and begun overzealous mea culpa, apologizing effusively, letting her know that what I did was unforgivable.
But now, I quickly quiet these inner parts, asking them to step back and just let me listen to what she’s saying. Whereas before I’d feel spacey, out of control, as if various aspects of Dick Schwartz were being catapulted from one side of the room to the other, now I remain deeply and solidly in my body – literally, embodied. I suddenly feel myself spontaneously shifting out or that frozen place, relaxing, and opening myself up to her. And now I can sense the pain behind her words, so I don’t have to meet the attack itself head on, or mollify it.
Instead, because I can see the little hurt child in there, I can talk to that child from my heart, convey my sincere regret for the pain she feels. “I can see something happened in the way I was with you last time that made you feel bad,” I say. “I don’t remember what happened, but I can see it felt very hurtful and I’m sorry. I know I do have a tendency to drift off occasionally, but I’ll keep closer eye on it and take it more seriously.” She calms down immediately because she knows I’m not trying to correct her, placate her, change her mind, or get her to see things my way. The entire conversation shifts to another level, because she feels truly heard and seen. A repair is made and we have the opportunity to work with the parts that felt so angry and hurt by me.
I’m usually able to quickly calm those protectors of mine not just because this technique of asking them to step back is so effective, but also because I’ve done other work to get my inner parts to respond to my requests. I’ve become less affected by the rage of others because I’ve spent time holding and healing some of the young, vulnerable, childlike parts of myself that used to become so terrorized by people’s angry eruptions. Since I’m less easily hurt, my inner defenders and critics have less to protect. I’ve also had lots of practice demonstrating to those protective parts how much better things go when they let me – mySelf – lead.
In training programs, we’ve devised an exercise in which one person role plays a client who provokes the therapist until a part takes over. Then the therapist finds and works with the part and asks it to let his or her Self stay present even in the face of the provocation. The more my inner family members have witnessed the power of my Self- leadership, in practice sessions and in everyday life, the more they’ve become willing to step back and trust me to deal with situations that they used to automatically take over.
In this process, I’ve tried to let my most disturbing clients become my best teachers. They’re my tormentors – by tormenting they mentor me because they trigger key wounds
and defenses that I need to heal. Also, they present ample opportunities for me to see what happens when I don’t take the bait and, instead, remain Self-led. In this age of highly technical therapies, manualized methodologies, pharmaceutical propaganda, and, of course, the managed-care-generated atmosphere of therapy-lite, it’s hard to remember the healing potential of your openhearted presence. And yet, patiently being with clients from the deepest core of ourselves is the most important resource we have to offer. I’ve learned that if I fully trust the power of my Self, I can also trust the power of my client’s Self. If I can show up with confidence, and compassion, and curiosity, my client, eventually, will show up, too, and we can spend much of our time together with a river of energy flowing between us. When that happens, we both heal.
Once you’ve attuned with your client, the session begins to flow, and there’s an almost effortless quality to the work, as if something magical were unfolding almost by itself. I don’t even think about what I’m going to say – the right words just come out, as if something were speaking through me. Afterward, I’m full of energy, as if I’d been meditating for an hour rather than doing hard, demanding, clinical work. In a sense, of course, I’ve been in a state of meditation – a state of deep mindfulness, full-bodied attention, centered awareness, and inner calm. And even after all these years, I still have the sense of being witness to something awe inspiring, as if the client and I both were connected to something beyond us, much bigger than we are.
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Felicia’s story – coming home!
Felicia came to see me feeling that she did not know what to do with herself when she went home. She was outwardly very successful – and earned a lot of money. She felt as if she was always running towards a goal somewhere in the future, but did not really know what that goal was.
Sometimes she felt panicked on aircraft – as if she felt trapped and afraid that other people might see her panicky feelings.
Gradually as we explored her parts (Jung calls them autonomous complexes, analysts may call them self-states – its all the same phenomena) we came to realise how much Felicia was run by a part that was bent on proving how good she was. It was frightened of being frightened, not sure what this might mean about her – and could not cut her any slack in having to look right for others.
As time went on we understood how hard this part had had to work to look good at school, earn top marks, and reassure her parents who she secretly felt she had to look after. In turn as the part felt understood and even appreciated, it was willing to soften its grip, and step back so that Felicia could see what it had covered up.
Felicia was in my experience unusual in that she could fairly easily identify a part, and then felt able to see it rather than be it. It was rather like recognising she had been looking through a pair of dark glasses which she thought was her, only to see she could take them off and restore the natural viewpoint..
Identifying and articulating parts of the mind means we are no longer identified with them.
Of course this lead to some anxiety – if she was not this perfect mask, who was she ? If she stopped running, how did she fit in with her peers ? Who also seemed to be running headlong into an imaginary future, which never quite arrived.
As she hung in, she began to feel in her heart an old denied self that had got used to being squashed and apologised for. She began to express her feelings more to her partner, and not just go along with his ideas of what to do.
Staying with and settling down into her experience, she began to feel at large, free and solid in a way that was quite new for her. Her friends seemingly had to jet off somewhere every weekend, but she could be content with just cooking, or just working in the garden – not needing to fill a sense of lack up.
The door to real freedom in life is recognising you do not have to do anything to be yourself, and that you then do not have to enslave what you thought was yourself in the name of artificial goals.
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IFS & Mindfulness.
As therapists increasingly incorporate mindfulness into their work, they’re discovering what Buddhists have known for centuries: everyone (even those with severe inner turmoil) can access a state of spacious well-being by beginning to notice their more turbulent thoughts and feelings, rather than becoming swallowed up by them. As people relate to their disturbing inner experiences from this calm, mindful place, not only are they less overwhelmed, but they can become more accepting of the aspects of themselves with which they’ve been struggling. Still the question remains of how best to incorporate mindfulness into psychotherapy.
A perennial quandary in psychotherapy, as well as spirituality, is whether the goal is to help people come to accept the inevitable pain of the human condition with more equanimity or to actually transform and heal the pain, shame, or terror, so that it’s no longer a problem. Are we seeking acceptance or transformation, passive observation or engaged action, a stronger connection to the here-and-now or an understanding of the past?
Many therapeutic attempts to integrate mindfulness have adopted what I’ll call the passive-observer form of mindfulness—a client is helped to notice thoughts and emotions from a place of separation and extend acceptance toward them. The emphasis isn’t on trying to change or replace irrational cognitions, but on noticing them and then acting in ways that the observing self considers more adaptive or functional. As an illustration, let’s consider how more traditional therapeutic approaches contrast with more mindfulness-based methods in helping a client dealing with the mundane challenge of feeling nervous about going to a party. A Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) intervention might begin by identifying the self-statements that are generating anxiety—a part of the person that says, in effect, “Don’t go because no one likes you and you’ll be rejected.” The client might then be instructed to dispute these thoughts by saying, “It’s not true that no one likes me” and naming some people who do. A clinician trained in a mindfulness-based approach like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) might have the client notice the extreme thoughts about rejection without trying to change them, and then go to the party anyway, despite the continued presence of the irrational beliefs. As this example shows, mindfulness allows you to no longer be fused or blended with the irrational beliefs, releasing your observing self, who has the perspective and courage to act in positive ways.
This shift from struggling to correct or override cognitive distortions to noticing and accepting them is revolutionary in a field that’s been so dominated by CBT. There’s a large body of research on ACT, from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, and from the ground-breaking work of Marcia Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) with borderline personality disorder, suggesting that the shift is a powerful one. Clearly, learning to mindfully witness experiences helps clients a great deal, even those with diagnoses previously considered intractable.
A vivid cinematic example of this witnessing process can be found in the Academy Award–winning film A Beautiful Mind, in which we’re given a sense of what it’s like to be awash in an irrational thought system. In the beginning of the movie, the disturbed math genius John Nash (played by Russell Crowe) is so identified with the paranoid part of him (a black-suited FBI agent played by Ed Harris) that we, the viewers, are drawn into his scary world with him. Gradually Nash is able to separate from his paranoia—to observe his inner FBI agent with some distance and objectivity, rather than believing his conspiratorial rantings. With this mindful separation comes greater peace of mind and ability to function in his life. But while diminished in their intensity and their power to control his behavior, at the end of the film we see that Nash’s voices continue to reside in him. He’s simply learned to live with his extreme beliefs and emotions without being enslaved by them. But what if it were possible to transform this inner drama, rather than just keep it at arm’s length by taking mindfulness one step further?
The Second Step
As a therapist, I’ve worked with clients who’ve come to me after having seen therapists who’d helped them to be more mindful of their impulses to cut themselves, binge on food or drugs, or commit suicide. While those impulses remained in their lives, these clients were no longer losing their battles with them, nor were they ashamed or afraid of them any longer. The clients’ functioning had improved remarkably. The goal of the therapeutic approach that I use, Internal Family Systems (IFS), was to build on this important first step of separating from and accepting these impulses, and then take a second step of helping clients transform them.
For example, Molly had been in and out of hospital treatment centers until, through her DBT treatment, she was able to separate from and be accepting of the part of her that had repeatedly directed her to try to kill herself. As a result of that successful treatment, she’d stayed out of the hospital for more than two years, was holding down a job, and was connected to people in her support group. From my clinical viewpoint, she was now ready for the next step in her therapeutic growth. My goal was to help her get to know her suicidality—not just as an impulse to be accepted, but as a “part” of her that was trying to help her in some way.
In an early session, after determining she was ready to take this step, I asked her to focus on that suicidal impulse and how she felt toward it. She said she no longer feared it and had come to feel sorry for it, because she sensed that it was scared. Like many clients, she also began to spontaneously see an inner image, in her case a tattered, homeless woman who rejected her compassion. I invited her to ask this woman what she was afraid would happen if Molly continued to live. The woman replied that Molly would continue to suffer excruciating emotional pain. With some help in that session, Molly was able to embrace the woman, show her appreciation for trying to protect her from extreme suffering, and learn about the hurting part of her that the woman protected her from. In subsequent sessions, Molly, in her mind’s eye, entered the original abuse scene, took the little girl she saw there out of it to a safe place, and released the terror and shame she’d carried throughout her life. Once the old woman could see that the girl was safe, she began to support Molly’s steps into a fuller life and stopped encouraging her to try to escape the prospect of lifelong suffering through suicide. In this way, the “enemy” became an ally.
The Paradox of Acceptance
Years ago, Carl Rogers observed, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” In other words, carefully observing and accepting our emotions and beliefs, rather than fighting or fearing them, is a precursor for using that same mindful state to help them transform. Once people come to compassionately engage with troubling elements of their psyches, they’re often able to release difficult emotions and outmoded beliefs they’ve carried for years. For me, this process of compassionately engaging with the elements of our psyches is a natural second step of mindfulness. If you feel compassion for something, why just observe it? Why not engage with it and try to help it?
Actually, some prominent Buddhist leaders advocate taking this next step. Thich Nhat Hahn, Pema Chodron, Tara Brach, and Jack Kornfield all encourage their students not just to witness their emotions, but to actively embrace them. Consider this quote from Thich Nhat Hahn about handling emotions: “You calm your feeling just by being with it, like a mother tenderly holding her crying baby. Feeling the mother’s tenderness, the baby will calm down and stop crying.” So it’s possible to first separate from an upset emotion, but then return to it and form a loving inner relationship it, as one might with a child.
The Buddhist teacher Tsultrim Allione revived an ancient Tibetan tradition called Chod, which has practitioners feeding rather than fighting with their inner “demons.” She finds that once fed with curiosity and compassion, these inner enemies reveal what they really need, feel accepted and heard, and become allies. It’s possible to go beyond simply witnessing our inner world to actually entering it in this mindful state and interacting with the parts of our psyches with the same kind of
loving attunement that creates secure attachments between parents and children, or between therapists and clients.
More than a Monkey Mind
This is harder to do if therapists consider clients’ inner worlds to be populated by an annoying ego or agitated monkey mind. In some Buddhist traditions, the myriad thoughts and feelings, pleasures and pains we have are considered to be the product of an ego, which is conditioned by the materialistic culture to become attached to transitory things and keep you from your higher spiritual path. If that’s your starting assumption, you may notice feelings of happiness and sorrow with acceptance, but you aren’t likely to want to spend much time getting to know them. You’ll fear that the more time you entertain such thoughts and feelings, the more attached you’ll become to the material world.
If, on the other hand, you consider your thoughts, emotions, urges, and impulses to be coming from an inner landscape that’s best understood as a kind of internal family, populated by sub-personalities, many of whom are childlike and are suffering, then it makes more sense to take that next step of comforting and holding these inner selves—as Thich Nhat Hahn advises—rather than just observing and objectifying them. All clients need to do to begin exploring this apparently chaotic and mysterious inner world is to focus inside with genuine curiosity and start asking questions, as Molly did, and these inner family members will begin to emerge. As the process continues, clients will be able to form I-thou relationships with their parts, rather than the more detached, I-it relationships that most psychotherapies and many spiritualities foster.
Once a client, in a mindful state, enters such an inner dialogue, she’ll typically learn from her parts that they’re suffering and/or are trying to protect her. As she does this, she’s shifting from the passive-observer state to an increasingly engaged and relational form of mindfulness that naturally exists within: what I call her “Self.” Having helped clients access this engaged, mindful Self for more than 30 years now, I’ve consistently observed that it’s a state that isn’t just accepting of their parts, but also has an innate wisdom about how to relate to them in an attuned, loving way. I’ve observed over and over clients’ enormous inborn capacity for self-healing, a capacity that most of us aren’t even aware of.
We normally think of the attachment process as happening between caretakers and young children, but the more you explore how the inner world functions, the more you find that it parallels external relationships, and that we have an inner capacity to extend mindful caretaking to ourselves that are frozen in time and excluded from our normal consciousness. This Self state has the ability to open a pathway to the parts of us that we locked away because they were hurt when we were younger and we didn’t want to feel that pain again. As clients approach these inner parts—what I call “exiles”—they often experience them as inner children who fit one of the three categories of troubled attachment: insecure, avoidant, or disorganized. Typically, once one of these inner exiles reveals itself to the client, their Self automatically knows how to relate to that part in such a way that it’ll begin to trust the Self. These inner children respond to the love they sense from the Self in the same way that abandoned or abused children do as they sense the safety and caring of an attuned caretaker. As parts become securely attached to Self, they let go of their terror, pain, or feelings of worthlessness and become transformed—a healing process that opens up access to a bounty of resources that had been locked away. When that happens, there’s a growing trust in the Self’s wisdom, and people increasingly manifest what I call the eight Cs of Self-leadership: curiosity, compassion, calm, courage, clarity, confidence, creativity, and connectedness. In other words, they return to a natural state of groundedness and embodiment.
Attachment Theory assumes that healing occurs only when one person becomes a healthy attachment figure for another—a therapist for a client, one spouse for another, or a parent for a child—exhibiting the kind of engaged, active mindfulness we’ve been discussing. However, Self-leadership opens the possibility of a different kind of attachment-based healing within a person, which can lead to a deep sense of personal empowerment.
The observer type of mindfulness meditation can reinforce the effects of this inner attachment, so that therapy and meditation complement and feed each other. I’ve encouraged many of my clients to practice the observer type of meditation between sessions, and have found that their progress is hugely accelerated. The meditations help people practice separating from and accepting their parts, while accessing and trusting the mindfulness state, which increases clients’ ability for self-healing. The healing done in therapy, in turn, allows for deeper and less interrupted meditations. As clients become increasingly able to notice, rather than blend with, the wounded parts of themselves that are triggered as they go through their daily lives, they become clearer about what needs attention in therapy sessions.
The Therapist’s Role
With all this talk of self-healing, I don’t want to downplay the importance of the client’s relationship with the therapist. What does shift is the focus on the therapist from being the primary attachment figure to serving as an accepting container of awareness who opens space for the client’s own Self to emerge. To do this, therapists must embody their own fullest Self, acting as a tuning fork to awaken the client’s Self to its own resonance. To achieve this kind of embodiment, therapists must learn to be mindful of their own parts as they work with clients, recognizing that transference and countertransference are, at some level, a continuing behind-the-scenes dance as therapists and clients inevitably trigger each other. The inescapable reality of therapy is that, if we do our jobs well, clients will do all kinds of provocative things that repeatedly test us. They’ll resist, get angry and critical, become hugely dependent, talk incessantly, behave dangerously between sessions, show intense vulnerability, idealize us, attack themselves, and display astounding narcissism and self-centeredness.
Some of this is because they have parts forged by relationships with hurtful caretakers that are stuck in the past and, as they sense our open-heartedness, all that gets ignited. The Self-led therapist is basically issuing the client an invitation: “All parts are welcome!” From the darkest corners of their psyches, aspects of clients that others never see emerge in all their crazy glory, and that’s a good thing. When we aren’t overwhelmed by our own parts and can remain Self-led, clients can get to know what’s going on inside them, and healing emerges.
But therapists aren’t Buddhas and regularly get triggered by the intensity of their interplay with their clients, whether they wish to acknowledge it or not. Fortunately, as you become increasingly familiar with the physical experience of embodying this mindful Self, you’ll be better able to notice the shift in your body when a troubled part hijacks you (you have a “part attack”). With that awareness—and lots of experience doing this kind of clinical work—comes the ability to calm the part in the moment and ask it to separate and let your fuller Self return.
If I had a microphone in my head when I was treating certain challenging clients, you’d hear me saying repeatedly to myself things like: “I know you’re upset, but just let me stay and handle this. Remember it always goes better if you let me keep my mind open. Just relax and trust me, and I’ll talk to you after the session.” On my good days, those words produce an immediate shift in my level of Self-embodiment—my heart opens, my shoulder muscles release, or the crowd of negative thoughts in my head disperses. My client suddenly looks different—less menacing or hopeless, and more vulnerable. Between sessions, I’ll follow up by bringing the parts that my client aroused to their own therapy, to give them the attention they need. In this way, our clients become our “tor-mentors” —by tormenting us, they mentor us, making us aware of what needs our loving attention.
Working in this way can be an intense and challenging task, which regularly requires me to step out of my emotional comfort zone and experience “parts” in myself and my clients that I might otherwise wish to avoid. At the same time, on my best days, I feel blessed to be able to accompany clients on inner journeys into both the terror and wonder of what it means to be fully human. At those moments, I can’t imagine a more mindful way to practice the therapist’s craft.
Dick Schwartz
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Humility and the ‘ego’
This passage on the value of humility is very profound and i apologize to anyone dipping into my website, not prepared for this – but I have found it fundamentally very true – Benoit wrote this after a distinguished career as a violinist and a surgeon only to be caught up in the allied bombings of the V1 missile bunkers in Calais – he lost the use of his right hand so he really knew what he was talking about:
On Humility and humiliation
By Hubert Benoit.
I want to end this book by stressing a very important aspect of this theoretical and practical understanding that alone can free us from our suffering. We must understand humility, what it is precisely, and to see that in humility is to be found the key to our freedom and to our greatness.
We are already, here and now, awakened; but this truth is hidden from us our normal habits and reactions are constantly at work and these set up a vicious circle within us: Our rumination and inner monologue prevent us from awakening to our Buddha-nature. We therefore believe that we lack essential reality, and so we are obliged to imagine in order to compensate for this illusory defect.
I believe that I am separated from my own ‘being’ and I seek to be reunited with it. Because I only know myself as a distinct individual I look for the Absolute as an individual and I want to affirm myself in absolute terms as distinct and separate. The attempt to do this creates and maintains in me on the phenomenal level the fiction of my own divinity, my fundamental claim to be omnipotent as an individual,.
I have compensatory psychological habits which come into play by imagining things to myself and by selectively being attentive to my successes and avoiding any situation that suggests my impotence. In situations where the evidence for my powerlessness is inescapable they withdraw my claim to omnipotence. I organize things so that I never recognize the equivalence between the external world and myself. I maintain that I am different from the external world, removed from it, above it whenever possible, but below it if necessary. An indisputable requirement of the fiction that I personally am the First Cause of the Universe is that the world depends on me: as far as lam concerned the external world either depends on me or it does not. There is no question of me admitting that the relationship is one of co‑dependence. Hence the not‑self illusion; if the external world depends on me, it is self; if it does not, it is not‑self; I never want to acknowledge it as Itself’, because I am not aware of the third element, the hypostasis which unites us.
My present inability to experience my own nature, my Buddha nature, as a universal being and not as a distinct and separate individual, compels me to fabricate a continuous and fundamentally deceptive representation of my place in the Universe. Instead of seeing that l am on a level with the external world, I see myself above or below it, ‘up on high’ or ‘down below’. Given this way of looking at things, where above is Being and below is Nothingness, I am always compelled to strive towards Being. By director indirect means, I must struggle to raise myself, whether this be in gross, subtle, or ‘spiritual’ terms.
Before satori all my natural psychological mechanisms are based on my pride, the claims I make for myself as an individual, and my insistence that I should move ‘upwards’ in some way; and it is my insistence that any progress I make should apply to me as an individual which prevents me recognizing my infinite universal dignity.
It is sometimes difficult to recognize it for what it is, this underlying demand for a privileged status which drives all my efforts and all my aspirations. I can see it easily enough when other people are the not‑self that l want to distinguish myself from. In such cases, a little honesty with myself is enough for me to acknowledge what I am doing. It is quite a different matter when inanimate objects are the not‑self from which I wish to maintain my separateness and distinctness, and this is especially true when not‑self is represented by that mysterious and illusory entity known as ‘Destiny’. But it is fundamentally the same thing: Ian’ exalted by good fortune and humiliated by misfortune.
The same applies to what I perceive as positivity and negativity in the Universe: l am exalted by the one and cast down by the other. When the external world is positive and constructive, this is howl want it to be and it then seems to be dependent on me. When it is negative and destructive (even without affecting me directly), this is how I do not want it to be, and it then seems to be refusing to let itself be dependent on me. If we really see how deep the foundations of our pride and self esteem go down, we understand that anything we can imagine enjoying satisfies our pride, while any kind of suffering wounds it. We understand then that our insistence on our separate individuality and the claims we make on that basis dominate all our affective automatisms, in other words our whole life. Only Independent Intelligence escapes its control.
These egotistical pretensions of mine which direct me ‘upwards’ have to find expression in incessant imaginative activity, because they ‘are delusive and fly in the face of reality. If I take an objective look at the whole of my life as an individual, it resembles the fiery trajectory of a rocket: its ascent corresponds to intra‑uterine life where everything is a a state of preparation and as yet unmanifested; the point where the firework explodes is birth; the expanding fountain of light represents life’s ‘ascent’, during which our organism develops its fullest potential; falling back to earth in a shower of short‑lived sparks represents old age and death. At first sight the rocket’s life seems to be growth followed by decline. But in fact its whole span is one of disintegrating energy; it is in a state of decline from start to finish.
This is how it is for me as an individual. From the moment of conception my psycho‑somatic organism is the manifestation of a process of disintegration, a continual descent. The moment tam conceived, [begin to die, The energy] start with gets used up in a variety of more or less spectacular manifestations, and decreases all the time. Cosmic reality completely contradicts my inflated claims on what is ‘above’; as an individual being, all my dealings are with ‘below’.
The whole problem of human distress is summed up in the problem of humiliation. To be cured of distress is to be freed from all possibility of humiliation. When I am humiliated, what is the source of my humiliation? Is it recognizing my own impotence? No, that is insufficient on its own. It is derived from the fact that I try in vain to avoid seeing my real impotence. Impotence itself dot’s not cause humiliation; it is caused by the blow to my fantasies of omnipotence when they, collide against the reality of the world. I am not humiliated because the external world repudiates me, but because I fail to annihilate its negation of me. The real cause of my distress is never in the external world: it only lies in the claims I put forward which then smash up against the barrier of reality. I fail to understand this when I complain that I have been injured by the barrier throwing itself at me. But I have hurt myself against the barrier; my suffering is a result of what I did. When I no longer insist on making
misguided claims, nothing will ever injure me again.
I may add that the distress I experience from humiliation expresses the painful tension generated by the inner conflict between my tendency to see myself as omnipotent and my tendency to acknowledge the concrete reality in which my omnipotence is denied. Humiliation and distress occur when I am torn between subjective demand and objective observation, between lie and truth, between biased and impartial ways of representing my situation in the Universe. Only when my objectivity triumphs over my subjectivity, and reality vanquishes dream will I be rescued from the permanent threat of distress.
In our desire to escape from distress we look for doctrines of salvation and
seek out gurus. But the true guru is not far array, our guru is right in front of
our eyes, continuously offering to teach us: it is reality as it is; our guru is our daily life. The evidence we need to save us is right in front of our eyes, in the obvious fact that we are not omnipotent and that our claim is fundamentally absurd and impossible, hence illusory, non‑existent. It lies in the obvious fact that there is nothing to fear for hopes which are without reality, in the fact that my feet have always been planted on the ground, so there is no possibility of falling, nor any reason for vertigo.
If I am humiliated, it is because the automatisms controlling my imagination succeed in neutralizing the vision of reality and keeping the facts at bay. I do not gain anything from the beneficial teaching with which I am constantly provided because I am adept at contriving to avoid the experience of humiliation. Should some humiliating circumstance arise, concealing within itself a marvellous opportunity for my initiation, I perceive it as a threat and my imagination immediately makes strenuous efforts to ward it off. It struggles against the illusory displacement ‘downwards’ and strives hard to restore my usual state of complacent arrogance in which I find temporary relief, accompanied, of course, by the inevitability of new suffering. In short I am constantly defending myself against something which offers me salvation and I fight every inch of the way to protect the very source of my misfortune. All my inner work tends to obstruct satori because it is directed towards a loftier plane, while satori is waiting for me down here. With good reason, Zen maintains that ‘satori comes upon us without warning, when we have exhausted all the resources of our being.’
All this seems to suggest that humility is the ‘way’, and in a certain sense this is true, though not if we mean by this a systematic discipline. As I am at present I cannot make any effort which will not, directly or indirectly, aspire to something higher. All efforts to master humility can only result in a false humility in which I am still engaged in egotistical self‑exaltation by means of the idol I have created for myself. It is absolutely impossible for me to humble myself, in other words to reduce by my own efforts the intensity with which I claim ‘being’ for myself. What I can and must do if I want to put a definitive end to my distress, is reduce my resistance to what concrete reality has to teach: I have to let myself be humbled by the unavoidable facts of the cosmic order.
Even in this there is nothing direct which I can do or stop doing. I will
stop opposing the constructive and harmonizing benefits of humiliation in so far as I have understood that what is truly good for me is paradoxically to be found where I have hitherto thought to find harm. As long as I have not understood, my gaze is directed upwards. When I have understood, my gaze is not directed downwards ‑ for, once again, it is impossible for me to aspire downwards, because any efforts directed downwards would transform ‘down’ into ‘up’ ‑ but what happens is that I aspire ‘upwards’ with less intensity and to that extent benefit from my humiliations. I resist less, so I recognize when I am humiliated more often. I recognize that all my negative states are really humiliations, and that I have managed so far to cal! them by other names.
I am then able to feel humiliated and unhappy with my mind free of all images except the image of the state itself, and lam also able to hold myself unmoving in this state, since my understanding has abolished my reflex attempts to escape. Once I can do this I realize to my surprise that this is ‘the haven of rest’, the only safe harbor, the only place in the world where I can be perfectly safe. My holding on to this state confronts my natural inclination to reject it, and this enables the Conciliating Principle to come into play: opposites neutralizing one another; my suffering vanishes, together with part of my fundamental demand.! feel close to the ground, to ‘below’, to real humility (which is not accepting inferiority, but giving up ‘vertical’ thinking in which I always saw myself as being above or below).
These inner phenomena are accompanied by a feeling of sadness, of ‘night’. This feeling is very different from distress because a great calm prevails within it. It is during these sombre moments of tranquillity and freedom from tension that the processes of what I have called ‘inner alchemy’ take place. The ‘old’ person disintegrates, making way for the ‘new’ one to develop. The individual dies so that the universal may be born.
It is not possible to master humility by direct means; this can only be achieved by making use of humiliation. All suffering changes us by humiliating us. However, there are two fundamentally different ways in which this can happen: if I fight against humiliation this will be destructive and make my inner disharmony worse; if I let it act without resisting it, its effect will be to create inner harmony. Letting it act is simply a matter of acknowledging to oneself that one is humiliated.
From our present viewpoint Being presents as the unconciliated pair, zero and infinity. Our nature drives us to identify primarily with the infinity, which we try to attain by continually moving ever ‘higher’. This is a hopeless enterprise; however high we rise within the realm of the finite, infinity will remain forever unattainable. The way to ‘Being’ is not infinity, but zero, which, being nothing, is not a way.
The idea that humility is not a ‘way’ is so important that I want to take one last look at it. Should I fail to understand this point. lam bound to make the mistake of suppressing some manifestation of my fundamental demand in my everyday life. (might for instance confine myself to some mediocre situation in society, etc. In other words I would be avoiding humiliations instead of making use of them. Simulated acts of humility are never more than just that. The point is not that I should be altering the way my fundamental claim operates, but that I should be using the factual material which comes my way from the humiliating disappointments which are its inevitable consequence. If I use artificial measures to avoid struggling against not‑self, I deprive myself of those indispensable teachings which I would otherwise gain from my defeats.
It does not always say so explicitly, but Zen is centred on the idea of humility. Throughout Zen literature we can see how the masters, with ingenious kindness, subjected their students to intense humiliation when they considered the time to be right. In any case, whether humiliation comes from a master or from the ultimate experience of failure in oneself, satori is always triggered in an instant when humility comes to fruition, confronted at last with the obvious absurdity of all striving in pursuit of misguided and illusory claims. Let us remember that the ‘nature of things’ is our best, fondest, and most humbling of teachers; it surrounds us with its attentive help. The only task incumbent upon us is that we should understand reality and let ourselves be transformed by it.