Ep 133: The Diversity Within & Psychological Harmony

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Truth and Transcendence, brought to you by BeingSpace with Catherine Llewellyn.

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Truth and Transcendence, episode 133.

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This week I'm going to talk about sub-personalities and I realise there's a number of different ways that this topic can be viewed.

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The first time I came across this notion of almost different people inside me was when I watched one of those 1950s movies about split personality disorder or multiple personality disorder, and in this particular story it was very, very dark the story.

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There was a young woman going to see a therapist and this young woman had all sorts of mental and emotional problems and it turned out under investigation that she had several different personalities living in her and she wasn't aware of them.

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She was only aware of one of them at a time and there was the usual dramatic thing where the therapist is saying so who am I talking to now?

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My name is Maisie, I'm three, we've all seen these movies and in fact now I actually looked up before starting to record.

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See how many movies.

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There's an innumerable number of movies, countless numbers of movies now about split personality.

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So there's that whole stigma of, if we think about sub-personalities within us, the notion that there are a variety of different personalities within us, we can immediately go to that 1950s very dark, gloomy, terrifying notion of almost being taken over by these different people who aren't even us and not knowing they're there and not knowing where we're going to wake up in the morning and why we were there, and so forth.

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These horrible stories which, for some reason, are incredibly compelling.

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I remember watching this particular movie which I can't remember the name of I can't find it anywhere and in the story I was absolutely fascinated by this idea and in fact, in the story the therapist takes this young girl off into a woodland setting and she has her imagine that each of the different personalities is hiding behind a tree and one by one, they come out from behind their trees and one by one, they are welcomed and integrated and healing can take place.

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And I remember watching that and thinking God, that's so wonderful.

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I must have been about 11.

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I don't know why my parents allowed me to watch this completely horrifying story.

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So we all know about these stories.

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We all know about this idea of someone being pathologically afflicted with the fundamental split occurring in their psyche and in their psychology, whereby there are different parts of them that are not integrated, that are not at conscious level, and some of which operate in a really bizarre way.

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That really doesn't work.

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So, having said that, I think nowadays pretty much anybody, if somebody says I was really angry about such such thing, if someone turned to that person and said which part of you was angry, most people would be able to answer the question.

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They'd be able to say well, the part of me that's jealous, or the part of me that gets easily offended by this or that, or the part of me that was hoping this thing was going to happen.

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So this idea of which part of me is not a new one for most of us.

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We're aware of it and for most of us that pretty much where it ends.

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One end of the scale is yeah, I've got different parts of me that seem to sort of come into play at different times, and the other end of the scale is some people are severely damaged and have got these different personalities existing within them and it's a problem and they are in serious need of help.

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But actually there's some very interesting and useful work that can be done using this notion of sub personalities as a context, and this has been covered in neuro-linguistic programming, in psychosynthesis.

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Even transactional analysis lends some insight to this topic and draws upon this topic to some extent, and there are all sorts of other modalities as well.

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The other day, I had a beautiful treatment called Ego State Therapy, and this was one of my students undergoing quite a strong process of growth and learning, and one of the things that she's doing in that process is to take on board a number of modalities that she can then use to work with clients, and so she'd put a call out saying I need some volunteers to practice this new Ego State Therapy treatment, and I thought, yeah, why not?

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So I offered.

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She, of course, was delighted, because it's great to have someone who you know and trust come in and be prepared to undergo something like that.

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She did it beautifully, absolutely beautifully, and it just reminded me of the wonderful power and beauty of going into a process of exploring different parts of ourselves and exploring where those came from, why they're there, what their purpose might be, are they happy, are they integrated, are we looking after them properly, are we giving them enough airtime?

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And all of that Because, unfortunately, in our society, one of the things we're often encouraged to do, I think, is to suppress aspects of ourselves, whether that means that we need to behave and fit in, whether it means that we need to try to be interesting and entertaining, whether it's that we are trying to be nice so that people like us, whether it's we are, whether it's we're trying to always be in control so that we feel safe, whatever drivers there might be that might contribute to us actually attempting to in some way modify who we are and the aspects of ourselves that we allow to be.

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I think most of us would probably acknowledge that there's some degree of pressure to do that in our lives.

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I don't think many people would say that in their lives they experience 100% support, permission and encouragement from everyone around them to be exactly who they are and to allow all of their different aspects and parts and sub-personalities to come out and play at will.

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And, of course, some of us are fortunate enough to feel that's the case in our lives, but for a lot of us it's not really 100% the case.

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So what that means is that anyone who's brought up children will know this.

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If you ignore one of your children, if you try to suppress them whilst encouraging the others or hide them away, it's going to not end well.

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You're going to create a serious problem by doing that, and the same exactly applies with our sub-personalities.

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Some of our sub-personalities are very young, some are much older, but often they're all different ages and the young ones need nurture and care and the older ones need to be listened to and honoured.

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They all need what they would need if they were actually separate people to us, that they need the same sorts of attention as separate people need and require, and we need for them to get that kind of attention which, of course, we are the only people who can give them.

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That which is a very interesting thing, because this is a bit like a form of self-parenting or self-supervision, in that we have these different aspects to ourselves which is perfectly healthy, normal, natural and interesting actually, and very creative for us, and we have to somehow take care of them whilst we are the one being taken care of in that sense.

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So it's quite an interesting challenge.

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There was a character created by Roger Zellaney called Legion, and this character in the story, when he was younger, he was diagnosed as being allowing a mental illness and it turned out through exploration that actually what he had was only manifesting as a mental illness because it hadn't been properly understood.

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And when it was understood, it was realised that he had such creative and extraordinary sub-personalities that in order for him to be able to feel whole in himself, he needed to actually externalise those sub-personalities.

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And in the story this is a story, right.

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So in the story he actually bought a massive mansion and set aside a room for each sub-personality in the mansion, which meant that he could, in his mind, house all the sub-personalities each in their own room, which meant he didn't have to try to encompass them all in his awareness, which was proving impossible for him, which is why it appeared he had a mental illness, because he was in a state of complete overwhelm the whole time and fear and confusion.

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So because of that, he could leave them all there and he could simply operate as the kind of executive subpersonality, the forefront personality, which was his who, as he was known by everybody.

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But when he wanted to consult one of the subpersonalities, he knew exactly where they were and he would go into the particular room, consult them, engage with them, discuss with them and then come back out and leave them there, and that was how he could manage that situation.

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Now, that's an extreme situation.

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Of course, in the story this turned out to be a tremendous advantage for him, because people would show up and ask him to solve mysteries and problems and so forth and pay him an enormous amount of money for that.

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So I think really what was being emphasised in this book is the value of our subpersonalities and the value of giving them room and giving them the attention that they require, but also not trying to be consciously aware of all of them all of the time, which I thought was a beautiful story, fascinating story, and it led me to really look at myself and think are there aspects of me, creative aspects of me, that I'm really not paying attention to?

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And I realised of course there were, and so what that meant was I could kind of make friends with those aspects of myself and allow them to come out when the time is right.

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I've done quite a lot of this kind of work with subpersonalities, both on my own behalf and with clients, and it's always been a really interesting, optimistic, enjoyable, fascinating experience.

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And I think I wanted to emphasise that because these very gloomy, dark stories of disorder can foster in us a sense that if we explore any of this sort of thing, these inner aspects of us, these parts, these subpersonalities, that we're likely to discover some sort of part which was given birth as a result of some awful trauma that we may have even forgotten all about and that by finding out about them we might be stirring the stagnant pond and there might be a horrible stink very unpleasant outcome from that.

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And I will say that that is a very rare occurrence.

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Sometimes we do find that there's a subpersonality or other there who did actually come into being as a result of some sort of traumatic event, but usually the experience of discovering that is very poignant, very touching, very beautiful, very loving, revealing, liberating and so forth.

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It's incredibly rare for people who are high functioning, self managing, working, leading their lives and absolutely fine.

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It's very rare for anyone like that to discover something really unpleasant when they go into an experience and looking at their subpersonalities.

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Far, far from it.

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Usually it's a really positive, wonderful experience, possibly a bit emotional, but what's wrong with that?

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Sometimes being emotional is the pathway to get to where we want to go.

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That very often.

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So how do we?

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I suppose another question is why do we have these different aspects, sub-personalities?

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Surely part of what we're all aiming for is an experience of being completely integrated, being as one with ourselves, at peace with ourselves, as one with everybody else as one with the universe.

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All of that and I'd say absolutely right, yes, and there is no conflict here.

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And we do have different aspects of ourselves and in order to experience oneness, we go into a state of acceptance and welcome with those different aspects of ourselves, just as a family does.

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When everyone in the family is welcome, they don't say well, there's lots of different people in this family, so it can't be one, it can't be united, not true?

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It can be beautifully united with a group of individuals who are also all one together, and that's the same for us, with our sub-personalities.

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So I highly recommend exploring this and, as I often say at the end of these solo episodes, if you notice your response while I was talking about this today, if you notice different voices going off in your head, or if you notice your body maybe shifting in slightly different ways in terms of the internal landscape and how it feels, you may possibly have some sub-personalities that you could perhaps give a bit more attention to.

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Maybe.

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Or there may be some that you already know about that you could just give a nod to and say thank you for being there, because the other thing is, these aspects come into play always, always for the best possible reasons in the first place, and so our first thing that we say to any of them is thank you, and our second thing we say to them is is there anything you'd like to say that you'd like me to hear, or is there anything you need me to say to you?

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So it's just like any relationship.

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The first thing we do is express gratitude for having that person in our life.

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The second thing we do is we ask from what do they need, what do they want?

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How can we give them what they need, what they want?

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So if you have a coach or a therapist they are they probably have at least one modality that works in relationship to sub-personalities or ego states or parts or a whole variety of ways.

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These things are actually named and categorized, so you could talk to them about this and say is this something you think might be useful for me to explore?

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I highly recommend it.

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There's an excellent book by John Rowan called Sub-Personalities.

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Another writer is Roberto Assaggioli, the psychosynthesis guy.

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He's written about sub-personalities as well, and there are all sorts of movies you can watch that will give you a completely false idea about them, which are probably very interesting and enjoyable but not very helpful in reality.

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So I highly encourage that you look into this.

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You'll find all sorts of creative aspects of yourself inventive aspects, artistic aspects, loving aspects, resourceful, resilient, imaginative all sorts of things about yourself that are just in there, ready for you when you need them, and this is a fantastic way to discover them.

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This is part of the answer when people say how do you unlock your potential?

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One of the ways in is through exploring our sub-personalities and exploring what happens when we invite them to have a conversation with one another.

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Sometimes we discover that there's a couple of sub-personalities that don't know about each other and we invite them to get to know one another and that can create an extraordinary sense of integration and wholeness in the self.

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It's wonderful, wonderful work.

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So sub-personalities and the exploration of that is nothing to do with split, personality disorder, schizophrenia and so forth.

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It's a natural and healthy aspect of our design and it's just there waiting to be explored.

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Thanks for listening.

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Have a wonderful week, thank you.

Ep 133: The Diversity Within & Psychological Harmony

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