Authentic Counselling Training
Personality Dissociation:
Subpersonalities and Multiple Personality
[Under construction: 1 July 2005 ]
Potential in subpersonalities
An understanding of our own subpersonalities
offers considerable scope for understanding ourselves, and similarly other
people. For instance, I have come to understand a reason for not coping well
with business lunches: the parts of me that value or enjoy eating do not value
involvement in business, and those parts of me involved in business neither
value nor enjoy eating. Similarly, using the idea of subpersonalities,
I can make sense of group hysteria, and religious conversion, and their
fragility.
By recognising, exploring and taking notice of my subpersonalities,
I can understand why some changes of activity, requiring different subpersonalities, feel seamless, whilst others are so
uncomfortable it can take hours for the shift to occur, and then only with extreme
difficulty. For instance, I can slip smoothly back and forth between being a business person to being a fast-lane motorway cruiser,
despite them having different sets of values. I can ease my way fairly comfortably between being a father and being a house
cleaner. By way of contrast, however, I find the transition from father subpersonality to business person subpersonality uncomfortable, but, surprisingly, eased by
the fast-lane motorway cruiser; and extreme difficulty migrating from being a
counsellor to being a business person, whereas the transition the other way is
easy.
What I stand to gain in the long term from a clear understanding of my subpersonalities is the ability to predict with some
accuracy how I am likely to experience situations and events. If I can do this
for me, then it can also be performed with clients.
More radically, I can learn to recognise triggers for subpersonality
shifts, and use these to my advantage. No doubt along
with many other people, I find I drive more assertively when I play rock music
loudly on my car stereo. Carrying chalk and flip chart markers help into my
role as a trainer. The `integrationist' model is much less accepting of the use
to be made of subpersonalities. It has as its goal
the (re-)unification of all subpersonalities. This is
an ideological, rather than practical, approach, and appears to me to flow from
over-developing the valuable move away from being controlled
by subpersonalities about which we know little,
towards making use of subpersonalities about which we
know much. The following exercise, drawn from Piero Ferrucci (1), underlines the psychosynthesis
dynamic towards integration.
Exercise Four
- Purpose:
To integrate a subpersonality and encourage its
evolution.
- Pick a subpersonality
on which you have already been working and with which you feel familiar.
Then visualise it clearly and in detail.
- Imagine that you are with
this subpersonality in a marvellous garden full
of plants and flowers. Look at the flowers, all of which are arranged in exquisite patterns. Sense their
perfumes. Feel the vivifying freshness of the air. Hear the sounds of the
birds.
- Experience yourself and
your subpersonality, and see how it looks now:
it may have changes, or it may be just as before. In any case, give it
space and time to absorb the atmosphere of the garden and be vivified by it.
- Now you come to the centre
of the garden. In it you find a rose plant with a
closed bud. Both you and your subpersonality
watch this bud as it opens very slowly. First the
sepals start to spread out and the bud itself is revealed. Then the bud
starts to unfold and swell, and you can see the petals
opening until the rose has fully blossomed.
- Both you and your subpersonality sense the fragrance emanating from the
very core of this rose. Let yourselves be pervaded
by it.
- Then look at your subpersonality. How does it appear now? And what is now the relationship between the two of
you?
- You can repeat this
exercise with more than one subpersonality at a
time.
From the integrationist viewpoint of Malcolm Sweeting
(2), working with subpersonalities has several
benefits:
- We learn to recognise our
various and contradictory faces and thus undergo a
miniature psychoanalysis. In this way we
forthrightly own the maternity or paternity of all our parts instead of
exiling them into unconsciousness.
- We learn to be able to free
ourselves from the control of the forces which
usually dominate us, throwing us in this or that direction like a
ping-pong ball.
- We increase our integration
by allowing our subpersonalities to become synergistic
rather than antagonistic with each other
- We can raise each subpersonality to its highest potential and thus
discover that every psychological aspect has in itself the seed of its own
transformation.
- Finally, by peeling off
each mask, one by one, we move ever closer to discovering our underlying
core self: our true self.
Notice the proposition of a ‘core self'’. Logically, by definition, this
true self cannot be our entire self, and must therefore, in some sense or
other, itself constitute a subpersonality. The term
true self implies other parts are less `true', and therefore less acceptable.
One of my goals as a counsellor is to help clients to understand and accept who
they are, and find my pluralistic model of greater help in achieving this goal.
References
- Ferrucci,
P., 1982, What We May Be,
- Sweeting, M., 1991, ‘Subpersonalities’, unpublished document, ‘Imagery in
Counselling and Psychotherapy’ course,
Personality
dissociation pages: Previous page 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Next page
This
document in all parts is copyright ©