In 2016, I entered Bruce Tift’s therapy office for the first time.
I left with my brain some combination of fried, scrambled, and abuzz with an alternating procession of possibility and panic.
Over the years, I went back to Bruce repeatedly. Sometimes once a week, sometimes once a month.
Early on, I began recording and transcribing my sessions with Bruce. When I revisit them, I find words of wisdom that I’ve forgotten, or that I’ve heard dozens of times but have only just gotten through to me, or that still confound me.
In this series, I aim to unpack some of the more piercing phrases that Bruce has nonchalantly delivered over the course of my time spent working with him. I will explore what they mean for me (if they mean anything at all).
Which brings me to Bruce-ism #1.
We can only be as intimate with our partner as we are with ourselves.
Let me start with two premises. One, in intimacy our experience of life is condensed, magnified, and heightened. Everything about life is made more intense in intimacy. That’s one reason we’re so drawn to it. Two, life is sometimes triggering.
Taken together, this means that the arena of intimacy is where some of our most intense triggers get activated.
What does it mean to get triggered?
It means that a sensitive spot of mine - one that I have tried long and hard to forget about - has been activated.
This sensitive spot had been lying dormant a moment before the triggering event. And then the triggering thing happened, rudely shocking it out of its slumber.
We can say that this sensitive spot wakes up with a fright. Frazzled, frantic, startled.
Naturally, we want nothing to do with this frightened, frazzled, frantic, startled part of ourselves.
And so we set about getting away from it as quick as possible.
The first step in our urgent escape is to focus on something else entirely. Instead of keeping our attention at the level of our sensitivity, we redirect it towards the event, or person, in this case, that triggered it.
The sensitive spot inside of us continues to reverberate, but we distract ourselves from it by zeroing in on "that thing out there."
At this point (and this happens in a flash), we're not in conscious relationship with our sensitivity, which means that we're not intimate with ourselves (the second part of Bruce's sentence). We've abandoned ourselves.
Single-mindedly focused on that “thing out there,” we proceed to engage in an adversarial relationship with the triggering event/person. We rebel against whatever it was - our partner, in this example - that startled our sensitivity into abrupt, agitated wakefulness.
We blame our partner for the way we feel. And then we convince ourselves that if only our partner would be different, we wouldn't have to feel the way that we do.
The ways we attempt to deal with our partner - to get them to be different - are varied. To name just a few: we get angry with them, or we try to take care of them, or we withdraw from them in punitive silence, or we cajole them. The aim in each of these is that they stop doing what we don't like (what triggers us), and start doing what we do like (what doesn't trigger us).
The behaviors that we try on can be called many things: control, retaliation, withdrawal, to name a few.
There is one thing they definitively are not: intimacy.
That is the meaning of Bruce's quote. When we aren't willing to be intimate with our own activation, with our own selves, we end up in a struggle with our partner (who triggered our activation).
That is, when there is no intimacy "in here," there can be no intimacy "out there."
Let's look the alternative.
What does it look like to be intimate with myself?
It means that, when my sensitive spot gets rudely awakened, I stay with that activation. I participate with the frantic feeling inside.
And all that really means is that I don't try to get away from my sensitivity. I don't distract myself (by focusing on my partner's wrongdoings, for example).
Instead, I turn towards the sensitive spot inside of me and let myself burn up with it. I stay with myself in my moment of pain and panic. I allow myself to become aware of precisely what I wish I didn't have to.
Because I am willing to be with my sensitivity, I don't need to change the person - my partner - who activated it. I can be with them, as they are, because I am willing to be with myself, as I am.
So, my capacity to be intimate with my partner, is contingent upon my willingness to be intimate with myself.
My partner is going to trigger just about everything I've dedicated my life to avoiding. When I say "no" to those triggers, then I necessarily say "no" to the version of my partner who set them off.
When I say "yes" to those triggers, then I have the opportunity to say "yes" to my partner.
In the end, we might say that intimacy is the attitude of "yes,” first to myself, and then to my partner.