This document is a simple introduction to aspects of personality dissociation. It is is based on a paper I wrote some years ago about subpersonalities. I am in the process of expanding the document to include aspects of multiple personality, and I hope to make changes to this document monthly. Suggestions, guidance and advice on where and how to strengthen the document will be received with enthusiasm.
For people reading this in Britain, the term multiple personality will be poorly known, whereas for people living in North America, the term may be almost commonplace. I have discovered from correspondence that North American use of the term multiple personality tends to incorporate aspects of what would be more likely to be termed subpersonality in Britain. This serves to illustrate that personality dissociation is not an on-or-off phenomenon, but is instead a continuum. Where lines are drawn between different terminology says something about the person and society using that terminology.
First, what I present here are views which I hold, or, where I state otherwise, views which I do not hold. I am not a medic, do not pretent to be, and should be profoundly unhappy were I to be cast in that role. I cannot and do not diagnose medical conditions, and disclaim all responsibility if anyone uses this document for that purpose.
Second, there are several personal development exercises included in this document. They are tried and tested. I have used them all, both on myself, and with other people, one of them with hundreds of people over many years. In the main, the exercises are found to be helpful, sometimes profoundly so, although occasionally a person is left entirely unmoved: we are all individual. I have never found any of these exercises to be remotely harmful. However, all personal development activities carry with them the risk of discovering something about yourself which you do not like and may cause you distress. If you intend to do anything more than simply read through the exercises, please ensure that you have close-to-hand support of a partner or friend, most likely to share your joy, but also to comfort you if you become upset. Unless you are a trained therapist, please do not try these exercises out on anyone. If you were to do so, you would be meddling in what is not your business: your business is *you*. However, if you think the exercises are good, then print them out and let your friend have a copy to use in their own time.
The purpose of this report is to present a brief exploration of the area of personality dissociation, to comment on some of the techniques in use with subpersonalities, and to offer some personal views from my experience.
I offer the opportunity to work on subpersonalities to counselling clients in order to help them to understand themselves better, and to course participants on counselling skills courses as a means to develop their own personal awareness. As a result of this work, over a number of years, I have developed my own techniques, and to some extent my own perspective. Contrary to some of the received wisdom on the subject, particularly relating to psychosynthesis, I consider the integration of subpersonalities into a notional `true self', except where the client expressly wishes it, to be neither necessary nor even desirable.
The `integrationist' model attempts to unite disparate parts of ourselves which have become manifest, and may have further developed, in response to internal or external environmental circumstances. To attempt to integrate disparate behaviours, values and emotions tied up in one subpersonality with potentially contradictory behaviours, values and emotions associated with a different subpersonality seems to me to be an odd thing to want to do. We live demanding, multi-faceted lives, requiring of ourselves different, and maybe even contradictory, aspects of ourselves. As a counsellor, I cannot take with me into the counselling room the values and attitudes of which I make good use in my business affairs. I use my different strengths to help me in different circumstances. I benefit from my plurality of subpersonalities, and am accordingly willing to accept the plurality in others. There is a sense in which the contrast between the two approaches (integrationist and pluralist) is echoed both in national politics: the `integrationist' approach desiring strong national boundaries and fearing subsidiarity, i.e. the devolution of political power at levels other than the national state level; and the `pluralist' approach wanting a dispersion of power to competent authorities at appropriate levels.
In this report, I present and explore both sets of ideas, including ways of working with them, and explain why I believe the `pluralistic' approach to be more suited to my goals as a counsellor and personal development trainer.
A common belief is that having a cohesive and coherent physical body means having a cohesive and coherent personality. This belief goes further, and suggests that anyone whose personality is not cohesive and coherent must be in need of psychiatric help. Anyone who behaves as though they are sometimes personable Dr. Jekyll, and sometimes brutish Mr. Hyde, is traditionally considered to have a `split personality'. Sibyl is an account (and a film) written by Flora Rheta Schreiber
*(1)* about Sibyl who had sixteen personalities. Jekyll and Hyde knew of each other's existence. Some of Sibyl's personalities knew nothing of each other, and Sibyl was amnesiac between episodes in one personality and episodes in another. These are within the realm of multiple personality.The realm of subpersonalities is less frightening, although there can be times when it is troubling or troublesome. Conceptualising subpersonalities is not difficult, and different models are useful for different purposes. To begin with, staying much with the common conception of personality, it may be helpful to picture one's own personality as a crystal, maybe a diamond. A crystal is a cohesive and coherent whole, yet has different facets. Each facet is a unique feature of the crystal. When each facet of the crystal is examined carefully, the crystal appears different. From inside the crystal, looking out of the facets as though they were windows, the view of the world through each facet would be different. These points illustrate two features of subpersonalities: the way other people experience us depends in part on which subpersonality they are encountering; the way we experience the world depends on which subpersonality we are using.
The first stage in any exploration of subpersonalities is to identify them. It might be reasonable to think in terms of a total of about half a dozen principal subpersonalities, half a dozen secondary subpersonalities, and any number of bits and pieces.
Subpersonalities per se are poorly recognised in the literature. There are, to my knowledge, only two books written exclusively about subpersonalities, both by John Rowan
*(2)*. There is at present no systematic book devoted to an explanation of how to use subpersonalities with clients and with people intent on developing their personal awareness. The term does not appear in any text on personality theory. It is not in the dictionaries of psychology nor in the dictionaries of psychotherapy. Yet the thing itself is used by virtually every clinician who has ever written about working with people, and by more and more psychologists paying attention to what is there, as distinct from what is theoretically supposed to be there.John Rowan
*(2)* catalogues the therapies and therapists who have made use of the general idea.*(5)*Clinically, the phenomenon of subpersonality is a form of dissociation (formerly termed disassociation), a word used generally to characterise the process whereby a co-ordinated set of activities, thoughts, attitudes and emotions become differentiated from other parts of the person's personality and function independently.
John Rowan is a founder member of the Association of Humanistic Psychology Practitioners and a Vice-President of the European Association for Humanistic Psychology. His workshop interests are creativity, men's groups, sexuality and sex roles and subpersonalities which he began researching in 1974. He practises primal integration and teaches at the Institute of Psychotherapy and Social Studies. He has written a good book on the humanistic approach to counselling (Rowan, 1983) *(2)*, and amongst numerous other publications, co-edited with Windy Dryden Innovative Therapy in Britain *(3)*, *(4)*.
Rowan defines a subpersonality as a "semi-permanent and semi-autonomous region of the personality capable of acting as a person". *(5)*
He refers to a discussion of dissociation by Beahrs (1982) *(6)* that dissociation is not an either/or phenomenon, but exists along a dissociative continuum. At one end of this continuum are fluctuations of mood, which come and go and are basically quite transient. Further along the continuum, but still well within the range of normal experience, are the roles and ego states and subpersonalities within which individuals perform state specific and life activities. At the further end of the dissociative continuum are the alter-personalities and more completely dissociated parts we find in multiple personality, fugue states and amnesia which are not characteristic of subpersonality.
Each of us has our own unique complement of unique subpersonalities. How we come to have the various subpersonalities we have is more easily categorisable. Rowan identifies six different areas of personal experience giving rise to subpersonalities:
Rowan's book *(5)* contains a developmental theory of how subpersonalities are evolved and he also reviews research from academic psychology which seems to support the concept of subpersonalities. However the book is not a manual and is not very specific in guiding the use of subpersonalities in counselling and psychotherapy.
Piero Ferrucci is a former student and collaborator of Roberto Assagioli. He is a staff member of the Psychosynthesis Institute of Florence and a member of the board of the Italian Society for Therapeutic Psychosynthesis. In his book, Ferrucci (1982) *(11)* sets out the techniques of psychosynthesis. He has a chapter on subpersonalities entitled `A Multitude of Lives'.
If an individual client, or a group, wants to work with subpersonalities, the first stage is encourage identification *of* (not *with*) a major subpersonality. Only by becoming acquainted with our major subpersonalities can we turn them from being in control of us to being utilised by us. I believe it important to work with only a few subpersonalities at a time to begin with, to avoid a client or group participant unfamiliar with the concept from becoming confused.
There are several routes into recognising subpersonalities. Most, drawing on psychosynthesis, make use of imagery. My own experience of these techniques, which are explained below, is very pleasant. However, my experience of presenting the concept of subpersonalities to hesitant, vulnerable clients as well as to suspicious, down-to-earth group members, from within an imagery framework is that it is encouraging them to accept the validity of a new and unfamiliar idea as a result of, at best playing childish games, and at worst, engaging in an activity of which they consider themselves incapable. Many people seem to find it hard to trust their imagination. In response, over a period of years, I have developed two techniques to avoid the overt use of imagery.
When counselling individual clients I employ a technique similar to the Empty Chair Technique used by gestalt practitioners. In this, having encouraged some loose identification of "a particular bit of" the client, I talk increasing to the subpersonality with which we are working. Using fairly intense rapport-building skills, I encourage the client to speak to me from that subpersonality, and also periodically reflect on what we are discovering. I do not attempt to explain what is happening because reception of such an explanation would be likely to precipitate a further subpersonality shift in the client, which would defeat the object.
When working with groups of people, I do not know what subpersonality is being explored. I use a structured set of questions, to which group participants respond individually (usually on paper). The questions are structured to lead inwards, the more challenging ones towards the end. A feature of the questions is their ordinariness. This is because I am keen for participants to expose for themselves, and to work with, parts of themselves that are real and everyday for them, as distinct from those parts which are hidden from view. Subpersonalities play a major role in the ordinary life of most people, and there is no need to sideline interest in subpersonalities by making them too distant.
At the end of the exercise, after the feedback, I distribute copies of the questions on paper. During the exercise, however, I deliver the questions orally. This has a number of advantages. First, I can sense the pace of the group, and whilst each group member is working alone, there remains an awareness of the group by the group, offering safety in an unfamiliar task (occasionally I preface the exercise with a brief relaxation sequence in order to reduce anxiety) and reducing the possibility of a participant's over-identification with the subpersonality being explored. Second, I use the sound of my voice and the sequence of words to alter the level of awareness of many of the participants. This gradual process encourages the suspension of disbelief, and helps the participants to become increasingly aware of their interior life.
I do not attempt to start the exercise from a state of altered awareness as this would not only set the exercise apart from normality, but would also encourage the participants to lose touch with their `everyday' (or at least `group') selves. Third, I can tailor the vocabulary I use to the group, so that with health care professionals I tend to use a more formal register than that which I use with Community and Youthwork students. The following sets out the kind of things I say.
The following questions are likely to become helpful only once several subpersonalities have been identified and described.
The following exercise, taken from Malcolm Sweeting, is more typical of those used with people familiar with personal development. It demands quite a high level of self-awareness and mental fluency, and perhaps agility. Part of my reservation about this method is that it apparently fails to connect with `how I am in real life'.
When we recognise a subpersonality we are able to step outside it and observe it. In psychosynthesis this process is called `dis-identification'. Being able to identify a subpersonality and then dis-identify is a therapeutic process. Awareness is not enough. We need gradually to develop a steering ability to keep ourselves from slipping mechanically in this or that subpersonality. We are in trouble when a subpersonality takes over long-term. Integrationists believe that if a subpersonality appears to be inadequate or hostile, whilst it cannot be got rid of, it needs to be transformed. A pluralist response to a seemingly inadequate subpersonality is to find out what value it has for the client, what its strengths are, and its needs. For instance, one client who felt constrained by and very cross with a subpersonality which was involving her in self-destructive behaviour, came to recognise that an important part of herself was locked up in that `inadequate' subpersonality which the more powerful everyday subpersonalities were refusing to acknowledge. The self-destructive behaviour was the only way that the repressed subpersonality could make itself heard. The key to working with this subpersonality was *not* encouraging the client to disidentify with the subpersonality, but to disidentify with the self-destructive behaviour.
According to Ferrucci, subpersonalities are often degraded expressions of the archetypes of higher qualities. Compassion can become self-pity, joy can become mania, peace can become inertia, humour can become sarcasm, intelligence cunning and so on. It can be the other way about and these aspects may be elevated, self-pity can become compassion, and so on. Subpersonalities then need to be recognised, separated out (dis-identified), transformed and re-integrated.
I am not so sure. I prefer to kick around in the same dust that gets on the shoes of ordinary clients and course participants. For me, each person is unique, and to be worked with uniquely. In the context of individuals, `archetypes' and `higher qualities' smell too strongly of chauvinistically fitting people into matrices of ideological artifice.
I work with counselling clients' subpersonalities because counselling clients it helpful. There are three simple ways in which clients find their use of help. An understanding of subpersonalities helps clients:
I have always found that, once clients understand something of the concept of subpersonalities, and recognise some of their own, they are easily able to understand their own contradictory behaviour, thoughts and emotions. No counselling client with whom I have worked in this way has failed to grasp this. Behaviour, thoughts and emotions which are otherwise incomprehensible, pose more of a difficulty. However, working in a client-centred fashion, I attempt to stay in the client's frame of reference, which means that together we can affirm behaviour, thoughts and emotions which are less acceptable when censored by the vehicle of the subpersonalities used most of the time. It feels good when a client spontaneously realises a principal need or strength of a subpersonality which had previously been considered only troublesome.
The third use which clients make of understanding their subpersonalities is becoming more aware of what is involved for them in making decisions. When a client recognises that different subpersonalities are bound to be pulling in different directions, then it becomes obvious that, rather than simply feeling uncomfortably torn, an agenda has been set, and constructive work can be done to address the needs of different subpersonalities.
In addition to these points, some clients, when recognising particular subpersonalities, or "bits of themselves" as I tend to say, feel liberated to go and `be that subpersonality' for a while, in the appropriate environment. This pluralistic approach is empowering, and can allow clients to gain confidence in situations in which a silent voice had formerly carped.
By way of contrast, the following exercise, drawn from Ferrucci, is typical of the `integrationist' position. It starts from a state of altered awareness (walking through countryside), and is therefore communicating that I may be expecting, or be expected, to work with hidden parts of myself. A strength of the exercise is that it will allow the `transformation' or reframing of poor quality features of the subpersonality into high quality features. The weakness of the exercise for me is that the frame of reference remains `I', and is a form of personality totalitarianism.
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 Ferrucci, underlines the psychosynthesis dynamic towards integration.
From the integrationist viewpoint, working with subpersonalities has several benefits:
These benefits are drawn from Malcolm Sweeting. Notice the suggestion 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.
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