Expanding Self

Sub-personalities or Personas are the range of different sides, aspects, roles
or fixations we all have. I explain them more conceptually at http://www.
OffAutopilot.com. They exist as four types of elements within what I call
the personal Autopilot. They are our individual strengths and weaknesses. A
primary part of psychotherapy is helping you create more harmony between
these part-selves, establishing more coherence for them - by finding their
balancing fulcrum: your Middle. That is the core of who you are, the place
where you can feel a sense of Grace and Flow. It isn't often talked about
that way, but that is the underlying process...

Caveat:
I want to explain that I do not normally talk with someone who comes
to see me in person about these sub-personalities or Personas unless
someone wants to. I offer this here for those of you looking for a
perspective or for this kind of resource on the web,
whether or not you see a therapist.

In order to be able to find out which of these aspects of self are creating
which dilemmas that you'd like to resolve, it can sometimes help to know
more about who all is there in you ;>} - you can work with yourself to
name who's there. On the other hand, for some people, having an explicit
naming of sub-personalities is not helpful, so listen to yourself as you read
as to whether it seems like it may help.

As I address on the Images page here, aspects of self like the dominator/
tyrant or victim self can keep us stuck, unable to grow. There may well be
some of these sub-personalities that you don't even know about...
Unfortunately, it’s often those ones which are the most problematic! One
can find there's been a nasty side to self that you haven't clearly seen. Even
so, a good starting place with all this is to first of all take a conscious
inventory of your various sides or Personas -
the ones that you know about.

You can do that by simply sitting with yourself and making a written list.
You can even diagram them and how they work or don’t work (!) with
each other – who they like in your outside world and who they don't... For
instance, take a look at the depiction I've put half way down here on
another page. You may be able to discern something about which of my
different aspects were at what stage of development
with each other and my world.

For instance, on the Dreaming page as you encounter certain images, you
might find yourself pulled into a daydream or fantasy journey process (as
I've outlined in a script form at the bottom of this page.) You could find (or
maybe did find?) yourself imagining a different you - in different types of
relationships or scenarios. Those are sub-personalities. They can be
extremely vague or have really clear boundaries/edges...

Another way to start is to first categorize who might be there - those that
are more active, those more passive and the neutral ones. Tyrant, Judge,
Critical Parent, Rebellious child and such are more active, dominant aspects
of self. Victimself, Avoider and the Couch Potato are more passive (but still
cause trouble!) Aloof, Cynic, Intellectual Hard Worker/Rescuer and
Dreamer types of Personas or sub-personalities are more into
trying to find a middle, neutral ground...

Think of different relationships you have with a variety of types of people
and feel for what moodiness you have in what type of situation. Give them
descriptive names that help you get a handle on them. Read internet sites on
different personality styles and see who you identify with! (A note: per
psychiatry/psychology - personality disorders are depictions of what’s
wrong and thus are not so helpful if you're looking to find and enhance
what is right with you – i.e. don’t take those descriptions toooo seriously…)

Then, from there, you can figure out, for example: "I seem to have an angry
little girl (boy) part of myself from that lousy incident with my dad when I
was 12, so if I have a dialogue with him (real or imagined and with that part
of you or with your dad) I may be able to move past being stuck there."
Consciously engaging these parts of self with their dilemmas is already half
the battle. When they hear you are going to take them more seriously,
they’ll start to reveal more of what way they can be of help
to you - or what way they have been undermining
your efforts at change...

I remember when I first encountered this way of thinking of oneself as
many sub-personalities it threatened me because I felt, I guess, that I would
fall apart! That hasn't happened and even though I am sometimes frustrated
by realizing "there goes my anxious part or my obsessive aspect" and I wish
I didn't have to acknowledge them - I do know I am better off for having at
least a kind of subconscious warning that there's
something "I" am not looking at...

The "I" in my last sentence there is a good example of the part of oneself
that has at least a bit more access to one's higher self - the more overview
endowed part of you. You start to get to it through the Balanced Observer
part of you - which is focused from a more central, struggling to be
conscious layer of self. From the Balanced Observer/Fair Witness position
in self you can then start to sense the more comprehensive, higher aspect -
the Inner Tao or Middle (which I also humorously call the Detached
Enthusiastically Initiating Observing Self. (See the Resources page for more
on this.) This is because when you feel more of that Middle core of you,
you regain a sense of perspective and energy. In my poetic attempts
I often term it the Expansive Self.

Even some first thinking/feeling about this can give you more of a feeling of
connecting with that. Then, as you listen more to your intuition or higher
self you'll hear or feel impulses to try out this or that different tactic,
behaviour, thought or feeling that will seem new and outside of your
Normal Routines (i.e. not within usually accessed sub-personalities!) This is
what often happens at times of such things as marital breakups, decade
changes in age, births, deaths or other rites of passage... Feeling yourself
break new ground, you’ll know these risks are shifting some of your more
rigid identifications – the habituated ways of doing things that
have made personal flexibility less available to you.

When you've done as much (for the moment) as you can with the aspects
of yourself that you already know about, you can move on to working at
unmasking hidden aspects of self. These are the subconscious or deeper
layers of who you are. Conceptually, one could say they are sub-
personalities that have roots in the unconscious that make them appear to be
not part of your conscious life. Of course these layers or aspects can turn
up spontaneously in our lives, say when the forties or fifties individual
suddenly goes after a flashy new sports car or
hot younger man after their divorce.

So as you begin uncovering them, you’ll see how these previously
unrecognized aspects of who you are fill in (like jigsaw pieces) the blanks as
to why you’ve found yourself in this or that pickle. It then becomes a
fascinating multi-layered unfolding of You… Your life can then start to feel
more like a fascinating contemplation on the mixture of happy and not so
happy elements! It's like Dreaming your life through the rough spots,
watching for more of what adds to your Expansive Self.

I should note here that although all this may sound like a work project, as
you feel these expansions to your options for yourself they become a more
inclusive, energetically honest way of daily living. Unfolding your own life
in these ways (rather than following the script you had from your
parent or parents) starts to consistently charge your
personal batteries… i.e. – it feels good.

So. First let’s look at some overall considerations if you’re going to consider
unmasking more of these sides to you that you are not yet aware of having.
Working on this is really just you or I enacting more consciously something
the Universe is going to inevitably do to us anyway! We discover new
layers and parts of life at each new stage. When you look at it carefully, any
moment can surprise us - if we let it. Good movies or stories do this. The
trick – the problem – is how to let that surprise happen. If you were
watching the greatest movie that there could ever be for developing your
understanding of life but you were preoccupied with looking good to your
date or partner, you'd probably miss the Epiphany that Life had in store for
you. The Autopilot self is completely equivalent to that preoccupation…

This conditioned, scripting process of the Autopilot is so ensconced within
our style of modern civilization that we find it hard to uncover something
new about ourselves. Unfortunately a lot of our customs and culture are
thus a Structuring of our personal options in this way. The British Stiff
Upper Lip is an Autopilot self classic! All Cultures have some such scripts –
a lot of which are meant to help - but most of them tend to deaden our
deeper contact with Self (or with what I call Middle) if we Let Them... This
is, I think, a big part of why we Westerners particularly are often obsessed
with Purchasing, Consuming and Possessing. We’re looking desperately for
The New – in ourselves and the world. That New is an unhappy substitute
for living in the now. To live daily in that Now means we discover new
layers of self. We expand our feelings of purpose
and worth through those moments.

So a way to help The Now Moment unmask us a bit more like this is to let
ourselves try something outside our norm – it’s called taking risks...The
Dreaming page is meant to be this kind of challenge to your automated
viewing - a means to help you get Off Autopilot at least a bit... I arrange my
Poetic Pieces (as at the bottom of this page) to help jar the Autopilot self
out of it’s program for automating life. For uncovering new connections
with myself, I take my camera out into a beautiful warm day to wander
around taking pictures and I'm filled with being in that Now. You can
simply drive a different way home or kiss your partner from a slightly
different angle and discover a new part of yourself you hadn’t realized was
there. This is also why new love relationships can be so enticing…

Please let me (!) also mention in passing here that Balance is still KEY.
Some people become so embracing of the NOW that they don’t let
themselves have anything much of a mask or social self at all. In our style
of Civilization, until you can negotiate a new style of living more mindfully,
not having a more practiced mask can create big problems. Imagine telling
your boss comprehensively – in the NOW – how you feel. This is why we
have the Autopilot – to deal with these societal dilemmas. You can also get
caught by having so little continuity from your complete focusing on the
Now that you lose the reliability of your significant relationships. The drug
addict or alcoholic certainly does this. So I’m not saying, in other words,
that we can Do Away with the Autopilot. I’m saying we need to clarify,
change and manage our relationship with that part of ourselves. To do
away with All our Routines we‘d need to be living in a tropical
paradise which, unfortunately, most of us are not…

Returning to some maps, then, for mindfully adjusting our relationship with
the non-conscious parts of self: there are numerous exercises, fantasy
journeys, biofeedback and technical inventions that are designed now to
assist us with this. One option you can look at is to try using an exercise like
the one that I've included below – or one that you set up for yourself.
These fantasy/imaginal journey exercises (plenty of which are available on
the web) are each a chance to enter into a deeper dialogue with your inner
life through a non-drug way of altering your normal consciousness. I have
some on my other website that focus on unmasking Autopilot Personas that
you can access here. You can vary the process in whatever ways that fit
your issues or situation. The underlying strategy you'll be looking for,
though, is to let yourself be surprised/educated/interested by the emergence
of previously undiscovered aspects - which is exactly why a
daydream like process helps.

A very obvious example of an unknown aspect would be the person who is
an alcoholic and has not yet acknowledged it. That aspect of self (the
alcohol dependent sub-personality) will have been significantly derailing the
person’s life - but until they know about how that is happening, the derailing
will keep on happening. Another example is the individual who's been
abused (or abusive or abusing) but has locked away the awareness of that -
as it would have been too scary or disruptive to deal with that earlier in their
life. We can also have been being insensitive while thinking we're Rescuing
others... More often, for most of us, it would be some more subtle aspect of
self that we haven't understood is there inside and that also pulls us
off balance without our awareness.

A working background hypothesis for Who Might Be There ( :>) ) that can
help is to figure that you probably have the Whole Range of Human
Feelings! So if you don't like Anger or Sadness or Closeness or Conflict (or
whatever...), although you may have aspects that feel that way, somewhere
inside you, you may well have the reverse of any or all of those as well!
(Sorry about that!!!) Personally I've found that there is a life long journey
through uncovering more and more of these sides to oneself... Another little
key is the notion that anger and depression are often two sides of the same
coin - i.e. repressing anger or the need for control leads to
depression and vice versa.

Clarifying these layers of self/Self is really kind of built in – it’s part of our
Life. The way that Nature seems to have most clearly included it in our
lives is through our use of the night time visionary experience which we
commonly call dreams. In dreams we are presented almost always with
aspects of self which are familiar – we identify with – as well as ones we
don’t like and/or don't recognize as ourselves: ones we fear, others we can’t
imagine as self or may even want to obliterate! Yet a starting place for
working with your dreams is to take the hypothesis that you are indeed All
of your dream aspects and/or characters! Consequently, recording and then
processing (i.e. thinking and feeling about) our dreams can be a royal road
to exploring self and/or higher self. Alternatively, imagining and dreaming -
yet while conscious and awake during waking hours (as below or
through those mp3s on that other website page of mine) - is a way of
extending those night time dreaming opportunities.

This is what a self-guided fantasy journey is then:

1. Make sure you're alone and won't be disturbed by a
phone or people in your environment.

2. If it helps you, put on some very quiet, relaxing, somewhat
monotonous music and darken the room.

3. Do some deep, relaxed breathing to begin letting go of your
unconscious (or conscious) focus on your body.

4. Close your eyes and let yourself bring up the most peaceful relaxing
environment that you can - one that you can most clearly visualize.

5. Focus as much of yourself as you can (without any straining!)
into that place - say a sunlit sandy beach.

6. Imagine putting All your distractions or worldly concerns into a large
glass jar - you see them vaguely but they no longer hold you.

7. Explore that environment and as you feel comfortable,
let yourself discover some other visitors there.

8. Dialogue with them and let an interaction (verbal or non-verbal) happen
and take note of it. It may be fleeting or prolonged.

9. Say your good-byes to them and let yourself mindfully return back to
your actual physical environment and write out what you experienced.

10. Now take a look at the vague or explicit characters you encountered
there. Just by the nature of how this works - at least some of them will be
Personas - sub-personalities of yours and they will have had some
information for you. You can return through this exercise to this or other
fantasy places and learn more each time you do this.

Plenty of the commercially available fantasy journey CDs and tapes are
(perhaps more elaborate) versions of this. You can even make your own
recording of suggestions to yourself to go through
your version of this type of journey.

Exploring your Personas or Sub-personalities

Freedom Associates Therapy
Barry Johnston-Spooner, M. Ed.