Everyone develops defence structures in their psyche to deal with early traumas, fear, anger and pain. These characters or “stances” are like sub-personalities and they require a certain amount of the available energy in our system to function. They can drain us and keep us stuck in a non-productive experience of life. 

We see our sub-personalities emerge when we are under stress. For instance, someone will experience feelings of inadequacy in their childhood and then when they are required to do things as an adult  they feel unable to cope and regress back to a dependent sub-personality structure. An example would be undergoing a transition like getting married or starting a new job. The dependent stance the person believe they have to get someone to help them or they can’t succeed in the task. 

The best way to resolve our sub-personalities is to take a good look at them, become familiar with the circumstances in which they emerge and then having seen them, allow them to drop away.  So a witnessing position towards them is what helps to dissolve their impact on our lives. 

 

Practice

Sit down with a pen and paper and write down a list of the sub-personalities that come to mind.

You may want to name them as characters such as the Dragon Lady or Peter Pan for example. The important thing is to identify the constellation of tendencies that make up that particular sub-personality. You can try thinking of 3 or 4 adjectives to describe the particular stance. For example, with our dependent child sub-personality, the person may come up with the following adjectives:

Anxious, helpless, manipulative, complaining, hurt.

So they simply allow the qualities of the character to emerge and witness the sorts of thoughts they have as they become more  immersed in the role. For instance, 

“Why does no-one ever support me”,

“When is someone going to look after me”?

“I can’t do it myself, I am not strong enough”.

All sorts of statements about helplessness will emerge. Once one has got  a feeling for the mood and attitude of this stance, then one resolves to let it go and become more self reliant, by not resorting to the self defeating comments that have been habitual. One also tries to find the power to act and to initiate new approaches to replace the old conditioned ones. 

There’s no doubt it is easier to achieve this with a counsellor who can help to objectify the sub-personalities with you and work through them. However, progress can be made by yourself, if you can only resolve to do it.  Every time you see one of these characters emerge, every time you catch one at work, it will lose some more power, a power derived from the fact that you haven’t been consciously aware of it and its impact on your life. 

Now these identity structures don’t just consist of beliefs and key statements, they also carry a certain amount of emotional energy that has been frozen into the identity structure at the time of the formation of the sub-personality. For instance, where there have been numerous humiliations and a parent or sibling has told the child its is weak or inadequate, the absorbent mind of the child takes on these defining statements as an identity and accepts that is who they really are. So then, as well as the negative self-talk, the heart absorbs the negative feeling tone of the experience, i.e. the sadness, guilt, or fear that the interaction aroused in them. These thoughts and feelings then emerge when circumstances trigger them.

So, there are cognitive and emotional elements to any sub-personality structure and the emotional charge that was embedded in the heart acts as a glue to hold the structure together. Therefore, when we get in touch with the structure through the type of example exercise mentioned above we can release some of the held-in pain, the frozen feeling starts to melt away and the sub-personality releases the very energy that was binding it together.  

It is necessary to allow the feelings related to the original trauma or events that led to the creation of the sub-personality to be  ventilated. This may seem like a frightening thing, but normally as the emotion is being released we start to feel deeply alive, sad or angry or whatever, but wonderfully alive. We feel the core energy of our life force spring into action again. This is why people in therapy often find it so rewarding. The mild depression or anxiety they have lived with all their lives is released and there is more joy or contentment in their lives after the energy has been released.

The reality is that we are a Spirit living in a body, and so as we continue with our meditation to build the link between the personality and soul and do self-study exercises like this one to release the sub-personality identifications, we gradually come to have glimpses of who we truly are. We are Pure Consciousness, the One Life, not a conditioned consciousness, acting out a drama of being an inadequate child. Our nature is truly immense and can’t be confined forever within the boundaries of a limited personality complex. 

 

        © John Waters, 2005