| As I look at that drawing (above) I suspect when I made it I was struggling a fair bit - feeling invaded/violated. I was probably feeling victimized (maybe by an external dominator) but there was certainly an internal, tyrant aspect of self at work as well: you can see it in the picture. These are like the layers of the Autopilot self. There's a base level conflict (between tyrannizing/dominating/Pushing and feeling victimized/Negating) that is covered over by a next level attempt at reconciliation: the inner attempt to balance layer of the Autopilot through Dreaming/Bridging. There you end up with two further Yin/Yang choices: a range of how we feel ourselves to be Normal: Dreaming is our Playing and Bridging is how we Work. There's a full range of sub-personalities in all of these Autopilot areas of self. So these four: Pushing and Negating, then Bridging and Dreaming elements of self (the Autopilot self, that is...) lie festering in their fearful, enraged, addicted, grandiose or at least routinized process within us, leaving us feeling half alive. Sometimes only later do we realize we have been respectively Controlling or Depressed, Anxious or Addicted within those four areas of Automated Identification for moments or years... The way the Bridging/Dreaming Personas work is a range: teaching, indulging, rescuing, placating and mediating for example. Dreaming sub-personalities or Personas may become mistaken in practise as loving yourself. Real love for self includes taking initiative - an active principle possibly disliked as being too much like a Pushy tyrant... So these working yet indulging set of aspects may tell us to "just take one more cookie", have one more addictive sexual fantasy, accept one more instance of giving up constructive initiative etc., etc. In this set of definitions, a rescuer Persona can be another Autopilot self aspect - as the 'rescuing' is done from a position of Reactiveness to those other two primary (Pushing/Negating) sub-personalities. So there is quite often a merry (!) go round between these four autopilot aspects within and between self and other: Bully and Negated Victim, Hard Working Rescuer and Avoidant Playful Dreamer. Of course you can see this happening when someone tries to force themselves or another to change 'for their own good'. Interpersonally, the Rescuer actually perpetuates conflict as, in my experience, it is always biased in favor of the victim so the bully will feel misunderstood, as they have a victim inside as well. If bias is actually transcended, then you are no longer rescuing, you're gaining more access to the Fair witness or Balanced Observer position - what I also call your Middle. Many, many family battles are enacted in this way. The Abusive parent victimizes a child and the other parent becomes a rescuer who passively/aggressively beats up on the abuser, becoming themselves abusive which then triggers a reaction in the first parent. The child or children react and learn the patterns and the 'merry-go-round' (!) is off and running. These conflicts continue, feeding on unawareness. The pattern of Blame becomes big here... It's only finally as we find some perspective and commit ourselves to aiming for balance rather than a further polarizing of situations that we can change the pain and unhappiness. There are many of these out of balance Autopilot aspects that can be there within us: the judge, the cynic, the manipulator, the airy idealist, the aloof disengaged hermit etc. These are Enormously powerful scripts, roles and styles which may dominate our whole life - or significant elements at least. Please see the diagram and comments lower on this page for some further ideas on how these work within us and for some ideas on how to work with them, see the sub-personalities page. One's whole marriage, for instance, can be focused around such rescuing or being addicted, absent from a partner (or, of course, around the being abused or doing the abusing...) These Personas as habitual enactments explain why any two people can go from love to hate to pity and then around again: their sub-personality positions have shifted. How person X will relate to person Y will change as who they are Identifying (as such an Autopilot self is) Shifts... Consequently we go back and forth, back and forth. (Follow links from this google on 'borderline personality disorder' - you'll see depictions of this taken to extreme.) A person may live their whole life under the cloud of their sense of rage or victimhood from one of these - from an internal tyrant, victim, judge or cynic just as unhappily as from an actual external abusive or deeply neglectful parent, partner or boss. Indeed, we can certainly also project that aspect of ourself on another and you can imagine how the drama goes from there. Each of us can have a whole range of these tendencies. We then react to ourselves or a partner or a stranger, our family or a whole ethnic or definable category of people on the basis of one of these Autopilot scripts. How many bigoted name-callings are based in this? Think of the scorn, the dismissal - the Unawareness eventually - in how people try to Right Wrongs because Those Other People are angry, are wimps or are seen as stupidly rescuing others. Gays, the poor, the disadvantaged, the sick etc. are pigeonholed... like people of That religion or That ethnic group over there who are ____ (insert assumption made in that unawareness). This is why we are not a peaceful planet, folks. We feel controlled by our need to rescue reactively, to abuse - reactively, to submit, victim-wise, again reactively. Feeling abused or wanting to abuse, we feel pain. I found myself depicting that as below \/ ... We want to move away from that, deny it, rationalize or numb ourselves to it. We don't Want to Identify with that pain - so we can't work it through... We end up depressed, anxious, confused or having any other of a myriad of other unhappy responses - all because we're caught in the Autopilot and it's automation of awareness... |
| Perhaps you can identify (as explained above) with this figure, with having a sense of Things, the world, your life being out of control? To change these painful internal and external discords we need to allow more harmony into our lives. At times that means more harmony between people, but even more fundamentally it means reconciling you and you (!) - i.e. between your sub-personalities. On the green second half of the introductory page I wrote about finding our 'DEIOS' - our Detached Enthusiastically Initiating & Observing Self or Middle which leads to the Higher Self. It's with the assistance of that place of balance from within us that we are able to move beyond the polarizations of our scripted sub-personalities. The fanciful depiction below is a way of picturing those aspects of self - the range of colours and types of elements is meant to represent the variety of sub-personalities we can have - yet all within the oval field of normal consciousness. (The whole of this picture below would fit, in other words, within the Field of Consciousness - element #4 - shown in the pink egg diagram a third of the way down the Resources page here.) There's a background to this image that I've put in that hopefully conveys a centring - a moving into coherence upward - towards heightened consciousness and the Higher Self. This is to point to the truth that there are important aspects of the whole that will be finally drawn from each of these sub-personality elements: an overly aggressive side will be the eventual backbone of our assertiveness and a too passive part of self will mature into a more balanced, detached, patient aspect of the whole. Some of my poetic attempts - at the end of that other page - may also help convey some of this more clearly. |
L o v e I s S p o n s o r i n g A l l Y o u r S e l v e s B e y o n d A n y O n e A u t o p i l o t S e l f ‘ s V i c t i m h o o d. |
Y o u O n p e Y o u r S e l f t o S p i r i t, Y o u h e a l t h a t A u t o p i l o t, W a t c h i n g f o r M e a n i n g L a y e rs H e r e O n T h e s e P a g e s A n d D a y s. |
Images - Pondering Some Challenges: Identifying/Dis-identifying
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| Like our friend above, there are definitely times for us to stay in one place. However, we all also need to be able to move, to shift. We need both Yin (passive) and Yang (active) sides of ourselves. Given how much we do tend to move (the Daily Rat Race etc...) it's particularly important to be able, at certain times, to Stay Put: to focus or concentrate in awareness. We need to be Identified with what matters to us - like accepting a body's Matter style (thick or thin) and how to keep its Energy! At other times, it's crucial that we also be able to move in consciousness or awareness. We call this movement getting or understanding something. It's also when we feel that relief that our world is making more sense again after we've been overly identified with an aspect of our life. The point however, is that we need both: the Stillness, the Identification, i.e. the Yin side of Life, yet also the Movement, the Detachment i.e. the Yang side of Life... We get off balance when we have too much of either. A lot of our obvious problems are related to staying caught seeing self, another, or a situation from a perspective which really isn't working. We have identified ourselves with that position. Staying stuck like that would be like being forever glued to that one flower above... It would lead nowhere. We need detachment (lift off!) from that position to get a larger perspective. There's a deep, substantial reason that Eastern disciplines of yoga, spirituality and meditation put a decided emphasis on Detachment - in our consumption oriented world it tends to be under-emphasized. Corporate Profit wants us identifying with this next gadget or that new pill or hankering after that vacation resort... Roberto Assagioli, who founded Psychosynthesis, taught that we can be Attached/Identified and/or Detached/Disidentified from each of the innumerable elements of our world or ourselves. Usually there is a flow back and forth between these two. That movement between being focused here/now and scanning for what else we could be focused on facilitates our growth as we realize we are beyond the polarization of being either This or That.. We learn to be more inclusive, more whole: to bridge the split created in us as we have been pulled back and forth from one extreme to the other. We do that Polarizing of the Self in innumerable ways - I identify myself as Bright or Dumb, Down or Manic, Good or Bad, Handsome or Ugly. Of course we can also be stuck in between these polarizations and feel say, Numb, Dispirited, Vacant or like Nothing... That happens as we are attempting to Dis-identify but have not yet really detached. The problem is that while caught in these identifications (either madly in love with that Marvellous Person or feeling like we hate their guts) we are being Controlled by the Script that's describing our relationship with them. These identifications are thus central to our addictions... To move beyond this polarizing tendency one needs to embrace both the steadiness of identifying AND the movement of dis-identifying. You may notice this is once again a form of Yin and Yang again, yes? This is really the essence of the sub-personality exploration/development work depicted on this other page. As we do this we can find more and more of the Balance of seeing the many sides of any situation. But when addicted or habituated - being more Continually Identified with something or Always Dis-identified from some part of our world or our life - we are missing that crucial balance of finding how to both Attach as well as Detach... This is complex, yes? Detachment - being able to detach - is crucial, but it's also a double edged sword. It can allow us to gain perspective - to move, say, from the self effacing style of the Negated Self (Pushily Self Denying and Yin that any of us can feel) to more of a Balanced Observer / Inner Tao / Middle position. It allows us ultimately to put aside (dis-identify from) all the many Things or People we are Not. Yet detachment taken too far can also mean that we do not honor our own or another's pain. Thus aloof or cynical we may switch over from being controlled by such pain to being caught by a Pushy Self (Negatively Self Promoting and Yang): an abusive or disdainful personal stance. Those Victim/Self Negating and Bullying/Pushing scripts or roles are the sub-personalities or Personas in the Base Autopilot self layer depicted more fully at my other website here... These are our most out of balance aspects that are often creating our dilemmas - they love drama! Striving for harmonious daily balance means risking dealing with their ambiguity: not being controlled by our fear of either Identifying with or Dis-identifying from whatever we need to Move to or else Stay with. It means working with those sub-personalities - those Personas, harmonizing and re-integrating their chaotic tendencies. Take a look at my art piece below. Can you Identify with some comparable parts of self struggling within you? Art is helpful in this way. Making drawings of your own sub-personalities can give you interesting insights into what they are about... |
| Freedom Associates Therapy Barry Johnston-Spooner, M. Ed. |