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Astra Niedra |
Astra Niedra writes about
personal growth, relationships and conscious parenting.
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Me Me Me! Sub-Personality Tug of War (Published in Yen Magazine)
Imagine this
scene...
You are out shopping
with friends and you have a great day trying on clothes. You see a dress you
are really drawn to and you try it on. Both your friends and the sales
assistant say it looks amazing on you and you feel you just have to have it.
The price of the dress is almost one month's rent but you know you can put
it on your credit card - so you do. When you arrive home you are still
excited with your dress and you go to sleep feeling somehow revitalized.The next morning you feel slightly uneasy. You do not know why. As you get ready for work, you remember the dress and you hold it up against you, look in the mirror and think "Oh my goodness, what have I done?" Now the dress looks ridiculous. It is definitely not suitable for work and you would never wear it out. It's just not for you - you don't even have shoes that go with it. Then you remember the price. Ouch! Most of us have had this type of experience and we either beat ourselves up about it or just try to forget it, occasionally taking the dress out of the wardrobe but always putting it back in favour of something else. We put it down to being 'one of those bad decisions' or an impulse buy we had not thought through. But psychological research shows that the reason for inner conflicts and situations like the above shopping example is that our sense of identity is not quite as simple as we have assumed. When you say 'I' or 'me' you are in fact referring to a different part of your personality at different times. Each of us has a number of sub-personalities or selves that together make up our whole personality. Different selves assume our identity throughout the day, each one taking care of particular aspects of our lives. When you are at work your organised self might be dominant; when you are having a coffee or drink with friends a more carefree self emerges; when you are on holidays your lazy self has its turn; and when you are with your partner you probably access your sensual and sexual selves. We all have our 'favourites' which are those selves we use most of the time and by which other people recognise us. These are called 'primary selves' while the parts of our personality we hide or are not aware of are our 'disowned selves.' All the selves within us have their own feelings, thoughts, opinions and needs - and they do not always agree. This is why you might feel conflicted about your job, for instance. The part of you who likes order and predictability probably loves it that you work nine-to-five and do the same thing every day. This feels safe and comfortable for that part of you. In contrast, the part of you who loves adventure, excitement and constant change feels awful in that same job. The experience you get from this is that sometimes you like your job while at other times you hate it - it depends on which self's thoughts and feelings are dominant in you at the time. This way of thinking about the personality was developed by two psychologists from California, Drs Hal and Sidra Stone. Their theory is called the Psychology of Selves and is also known as Voice Dialogue, which is the technique they developed to dialogue with the inner selves. Voice Dialogue is a simple process where one person interviews the selves in another person. When you decide to speak with, for example, your adventurous self, you move to a different position in the room and then the adventurous self is able to communicate its thoughts and feelings without other parts of your psyche getting in the way. The person interviewing the self stays in the same place for the whole time and asks the adventurous self about how it feels, what it likes to do, whether it gets expression in the person's life, and so on. When the conversation is over, the person who has just been expressing their adventurous self moves back to their original position. In this place you would feel different from when you first sat down to do the process. You have a sense of having more 'breathing space' as though you have separated a part of your personality out of the mass of selves who are usually crowded together and there is now more space for 'you' to emerge. The Stones' call this space the 'aware ego'. An aware ego emerges when a person is able to unhook from the selves that they previously identified with AS themselves, now having an awareness of their selves as distinct from them but still a vital part of who they are. An aware ego is not about being in a state of awareness all the time or about letting go of the ego, but more about embracing the totality of who you are. By unhooking from a dominant self who has specific rules and ideas about how you ought to be in the world (and who has been running your life), you are able to listen to and accept opposites and open up a whole new set of possibilities for yourself. For a practical example of how this might work for you, think back to the example of shopping for clothes. Can you see how the different parts of you might like different clothes? Often when you do something that is either exciting or relaxing, such as shopping, you let go a little of the part of your personality who is usually in charge - your primary self. This leaves an opening for other parts of you to emerge, in this case a part who likes extravagant and flamboyant clothes. So if you usually buy clothes you can wear to work - which for many people means fairly low-key items that are easy to mix and match, when this other part of you emerges and sees something it likes and want to have, you feel that you absolutely love this item. However, such feelings are those of the extravagant self in you. The next day when you are getting dressed for work, your primary self would be the one getting dressed. That part of you sees what you have bought and says 'I can't wear this!' By becoming aware of your different selves, and by having an aware ego in relation to them, you can sit in the middle of a pair of opposite selves and make your own decision. So when you are shopping you would feel the excitement of your extravagant self when it sees something it wants to buy, but at the same time you would feel your more conservative self tell you that you need something to wear to work. It then becomes YOUR responsibility to make the decision - what you decide will take into consideration the views of both conflicting selves. There is no right or wrong decision. You might decide to buy one outfit for each part or buy only the extravagant clothes while being aware that you are disappointing the more conservative part of yourself. Buying clothing consciously instead of blindly going along with the wishes of one self stops any self-criticism later from the part of you who missed out on what it wanted to buy. Basically, you now have a real choice rather than having just one part of you making your decisions at any given time. You have access to the opinions and feelings of opposite selves and YOU get to decide. The other major benefit of understanding that there are a number of different parts to your personality is in regard to relationships - both personal and professional. A basic guideline you can use is that if someone irritates you and you feel judgmental about them, then they are expressing a quality you do not accept in yourself. According to this theory, the solution is to find and embrace that quality in yourself. If you take up this challenge, you may find that your relationships become easier as you recognise in other people those qualities you have disowned. You could naturally become more understanding of other people and not be as quick to judge them. Other benefits can be discovering that many different facets of your own personality and being able to have more agency over how you behave and feel. As you can probably imagine, the different selves in each of us relate with other people in their own particular way. This is why sometimes you can feel confused about your relationships. One day you admire a quality in your partner or friend and the next day it annoys you. By learning about how the selves in you think and feel and how they interact with other people, you might begin to understand your relationship patterns and your relationships could take on a whole new dimension.
For help with
understanding how your inner selves affect your relationships, please see my book
The Perfect Relationship.
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