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of
- assess for psychological wounds, and
reduce them |
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Who Really
Runs Your Life? p. 1 of 3
An Introduction to
Personality Subselves
By Peter K.
Gerlach, MSW |
 The Web address of this
3-page article is
http://sfhelp.org/01/innerfam1.htm
Clicking links below will open a full window or an informational popup, so
please turn off your browser's popup
blocker or allow popups from this nonprofit Web site.
This is one of over 150 articles focused on healing psychological
building
family relationships, breaking the [wounds + unawareness]
and preventing divorce.
This introduction describes the Web site's
purpose and the best ways to use its resources. Each article is part
of a mosaic of ideas, so the more you
read, the more sense they'll all make. These articles augment, vs.
replace, other
professional help.
Before continuing, reflect: why are you reading this -
what do you
+ + +
This
is one of a series of
articles on a key
concept in this nonprofit Web site: healing psychological
caused by having a normal
composed of
disorganized, conflicted
Key articles
include...
-
Slide presentations
introducing the [wounds + ignorance] cycle
and normal personality subselves.
-
An overview of co-parent
Project 1: assessing for
and healing "false-self"
-
An overview of how
low-nurturance childhoods often
significant
personality "wounds,"
-
A summary of six common
psychological wounds, and typical relationship
of these wounds;
-
A real stepfamily
example of false selves in action;
-
Historic perspective on
personality subselves or parts
(this 3-page article)
-
Frequently asked questions about personality subselves (three pages)
-
An overview of how to
for false self
wounds; and...
-
An introduction to
false-self
wounds ("wound recovery").
These and related resources are integrated in the
Project-1 guidebook
Who's Really Running Your Life? (Xlibris.com, 2nd ed., 2002). See
this index for all Project-1 pages.
My experience
as a marriage and family therapist since 1981 is that
~80% or more of typical troubled co-parents (including ex
mates) bear significant psychological
wounds caused by disorganized
personalities - groups of reactive, well-meaning subselves or parts.
Most people have no awareness of their subselves and the six common wounds
they can cause. This article provides an historical perspective on
normal "personality splitting," summarizes three functional groups of subselves,
and suggests where to learn more
about this keystone to
Acknowledgment
I gratefully
recognize a source of many of the ideas below: psychologist Dr. Richard Schwartz, Ph.D., and the clinical colleagues with whom I studied the "Inner Family System model"
during 1990-92. Richard had developed the model for over a decade then, as a therapist,
researcher, and teacher. He said "My clients taught me about their inner-family
of 'parts' and how to work with them."
His concepts closely match my own experience as a
recovering person, a therapist since 1981, and a lifelong student of human relations. I've blended my
perceptions with his and several other theorists, and am responsible for what's presented
here.
Ever Argue With
Your Self?
Remember
the last time you momentarily "hated" a beloved person? Or the last time you wanted
to go to an interesting event, and an inner voice said "Oh, come on, stay home and
rest!" Have you ever struggled between longing for a delicious treat and
"knowing" that it was "bad for me"?
When was the last time you said
(or heard) "I don't know what got into me!" or "She really seems like two
people"? Do you ever have whole dialogs with your Self, or talk to your Self out
loud? Ever wrestle with "breaking a bad habit," or wonder where your dreams
come from and what they mean?
Most of us have inner
discussions and battles many times a day. They're so
routine as to be almost
unnoticed. Yet most of us don't know who these inner "voices" are, or how to
harmonize them and effectively use the very real gifts our many "speakers"
(subselves) bring
us.
|
Like many other researchers, I propose that these "voices" in us belong to a real inner family
or team of semi-independent personality "parts" or subselves. They can learn to be peaceful,
cooperative, and highly productive in astonishing ways. Meeting your
inner family and organizing it to function as a clearly-motivated,
well-led team vs. a squabbling set of individuals is called "parts
work" and
here. |
This article introduces you to your devoted
team of inner specialists that shape your daily life, and hilights some implications of learning to
harmonize them. To set the stage,
let's briefly review five evolving ideas about how we all
"tick":
Subselves Aren't New
Socrates writes us
across the ages that his inner life was controlled by "daimons." Like him,
people have tried for millennia to explain their thoughts, dreams, actions, and
"natures." All cultures have evolved beliefs that spirits, gods, imps, stars,
leprechauns, fairies, goblins, cosmic and planetary rays, witches, angels,
"ethers," ghosts, and space-beings cause humans to feel, experience, think, and
do weird and wonderful things. In most developed countries, this crazy-quilt of explanations
began to change a century
ago...
Freud's Three "Parts" and
Three Minds
In the early 1900's,
Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud proposed a startling new idea: that we each have
three personality parts that determine who we "are:" our
Id, Ego, and
Superego.
These, he felt, cause us to act from "instincts" and "drives," with
pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding as their goals. He also proposed that
we all have three minds: the
unconscious (contents never "knowable"),
the preconscious (eventually knowable), and the (fully)
conscious (knowable now).
Freud felt that
these three interact in ways we can't comprehend, causing inevitable mystery
in what we think and do, or don't. His ideas and the emerging art of
hypnosis revolutionized at least the Western world's
views on how to understand and heal "madness" and many human
"mental problems."
Around 1950,
scientists began an increasing exploration and use of "psychotropic"
(mood-affecting) drugs.
These reliably relieved depression, controlled violent mood swings, and improved other
troublesome human emotional behaviors. The combination of Freud's ideas and the new
chemicals turned (many) shamans with rattles into psychiatrists with couches in just four
generations: an evolutionary finger-snap.
Our
(Outer) Families Become "The
Patient On The Couch"
In the mid 1950's, a
few pioneering mental-health clinicians began exploring the novel idea that clients'
emotional problems could be eased by putting their whole family on
the couch at once, so to speak. Family therapy flowered, bringing impressive results
for many, specially when combined with emerging
communications and
theories. Clinicians increasingly began to work on outer families, while a dedicated core
kept focused on taming and balancing Ids, Egos, and Superegos.
Freud Revisited: Our Inner Parent,
Child, and Adult
Because Freud's ideas
were obscure to many, they were recast in the 1960's by professionals who used
"Transactional Analysis" (TA). In 1967, Dr. Thomas Harris wrote
"I'm OK - You're OK", which suggested that we each had an
Inner Parent,
an Inner Child, and an Inner Adult personality parts that collectively determined our
feelings, beliefs, and behavior. A therapeutic TA goal became helping people
understand and balance these three inner entities, and keeping their Adult in charge.
No one that I know of proposed treating the three together with
While the TA idea was
spreading through our culture, more psycho/biological facts emerged. These
included growing evidence that alcoholism, traditionally thought to come from a "weak
will," a "defective character," or a "demon" (e.g. rum),
really
came from a combination of the addicts' genes and childhood (family) trauma. It's now clear that some addicts metabolize ethyl alcohol
(which powers vehicle engines) differently than non-addicts
because of a genetic inheritance. This concept increased the clinical belief that
family
dynamics strongly influenced alcohol and (later) other
Our
Inner Child Becomes (More) Famous
In the
late 1970's, a new set of mindscape pioneers suggested that the grown
children of alcoholic families, whether addicted themselves or not, had
common emotional traits and troubles like depression, low self esteem,
social isolation, and
It became clear that
typical kids in
alcoholic families were accidentally deprived of key
emotional, spiritual, and sometimes physical
- just as their parents had been.
In the
next decade, a flood of books, conferences, 12-step support groups, magazines, and two
national advocacy groups erupted across the country for millions of troubled
Adult
Children of Alcoholics (ACoAs) to help them toward psychological,
spiritual, and social
From this came an
explosion of interest in nurturing and healing our "Inner
Child" (singular), who
retained the fear, sadness, and shame of real birthfamily trauma and deprivation. Two
groups of people excited by this idea were adults coming from any
kind of painful early years ("Adult
Children"), and healers and entrepreneurs who wanted to help
them. Because of unintended childhood
and
our
"Inner Children of the Past" were clearly wounded, orphaned,
paralyzed, or
lost. Unrecognized, they seemed to cause many of us
serious personal problems.
One such problem,
viewed now by many as a relationship compulsion as harmful as any chemical addiction, is
Since the
mid-80's, hundreds of Codependents Anonymous (CoDA)
12-step support groups have bloomed in
every state, as a rainbow of people admit and struggle to break free from powerful
dependency-addictions
to a lover, parent, child, or some other person.
Theorists proposed that
codependents' inner children (plural) were terrified of
abandonment, because
in
childhood, the co-dependent had felt searingly neglected and rejected by caregivers
and others. Where true, it often turned out
that the caregivers' parents had been similarly abused and/or
psychologically
neglected... "Toxic parenting" and the crippling
that it causes were wryly labeled "the gift that
Because of
expanding public interest in and acceptance of these ideas, programs and books now abound
on healing from
abusive or "toxic" parents, and
"emotionally absent" (wounded) fathers and mothers. An awful and hopeful current
offshoot is the mushrooming U.S. awareness of how common and damaging childhood sexual
has been
and is. Professionals
have recently estimated that one of four American females and one
of seven males under 18 are sexually molested. The psycho-spiritual trauma from this is usually devastating
and long-lasting. To survive any
such youthful or adult agony, people normally appear to "go to (inner)
pieces."
"Split"
(Modular)
Personalities
From studies across the
world, mental health researchers now agree that typical adults and children surviving cataclysmic
natural and man-made disasters like war and personal abuse have an automatic
protective reaction. Clinicians call it
dissociation or splitting. To
survive unendurable
like significant childhood neglect,
normal young people automatically develop protective semi-independent subselves, forming a
This seems to be a natural
way we frail humans evolved to avoid being
by intolerably chaotic, terrifying,
or painful experiences.
The fact that our brains operate modularly
has been conclusively proved in the last generation with new
scanning technology like Positron
Emission Tomography (PET). This allows photographing the dynamic thermal patterns of
living brains. Few of us are aware that many regions of our brains
are operating concurrently to create the
"simple" experience "I [see + hear + smell + touch + sense +
react to + need + love] my child."
One
symptom of false-self dominance is that trauma-survivors emotionally
themselves and (temporarily) feel no
pain from a terrible physical or psychological injury. Other symptoms are
by believing that the current horror
(a) "isn't that bad" (minimizing), (b) is happening to "someone else" (projection),
or isn't happening at all (denial). Many (most?) delusions,
hallucinations, neuroses, paranoias, and psychosomatic (mentally-caused) illnesses stem from
this automatic reflex to protect ourselves from perceived dangers.
Protective reality-distortions allow
a person in intolerable agony to "float up to the ceiling," "become an
eagle soaring free," "visit the beach," or "become an observer."
To
survive, we detach or
dissociate
from mental + emotional+ physical agony and overwhelm,
and often develop protective local or situational "amnesia." A common
trait of unrecovering Grown Wounded Children is being "unable to remember" -
or feel - much about our early childhoods and/or early caregivers.
To combat
unbearable terror, shame, hopelessness, and loneliness (i.e. to survive),
normal neglected and abused young kids automatically develop a group of related subselves. They may manifest as
"invisible companions," and/or populating dream worlds which
seem absolutely real.
It's become well documented and increasingly accepted
since the 1980s that about 5% of typical
Western populations have true multiple
personalities. These afflicted people repeatedly show patterns of socially-hidden or obvious
changes in thinking, abilities, and behavior as though they literally become
"another" person at times.
Studies
have documented on video tapes that
each
subpersonality or alter
in the host person can have its own IQ, memories, skills, voice,
likes, values, and even unique allergies and eyeglass prescriptions!
Some
alters may not know about each other. If they do, they can be deeply loyal, indifferent, or
suspicious and fiercely competitive for control of the host person.
Research suggests that a high
majority
of such exceptionally wounded people have experienced devastating traumas in their early life.
From the media, the public learns of only the most sensational of such
cases, like
Sibyl,
When
Rabbit Howls, and
Mind
of My Own. People who suffer from what used to be
called multiple personality disorder (MPD)
are
usually terrified, disoriented,
depressed, and embarrassed
by its symptoms.
They (like Socrates?) live with what feels like an uncontrollable
inner life. Understandably, they try hard to
or mask the evidence of their alters.
Someone in your life now may have MPD - relabeled
"Dissociative Identity
Disorder" (DID) in 1994 by the American Psychiatric Association
- without you suspecting it.
Professionals working
with these
patiently assist them towards awareness, acceptance, and
eventual fusion and permanent integration (the opposite of
dissociation) of some personality alters. Many reports of permanent
integration are now documented.
So in the last
century, at least (part of) Western society has gone from believing in moon rays (making
"lunatics") and devils; to Freud's Id, Ego, and Superego parts
of the psyche; to
(outer) family therapy; to inner children, adults and parents (Transactional Analysis); to
modular personalities and dissociation; and finally to adult
from childhood
trauma and low nurturance.
| The
clinically-validated concept of ordinary persons having an inner family or team of
subselves affirms,
combines, and extends these prior
ideas. |
Colin Ross is a highly respected veteran DID researcher and clinician, and past president of
the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. In
The
Plural Self - Multiplicity in Everyday Life (1999), he writes (p.
193) that multiplicity - having a multi-faceted (modular) mind and self
- is normal. He con-cludes that
what colleagues and I call a
is a "cultural
sickness" - a widespread condition fostered by our culture's traditions
and practices, and the unchallenged old delusion that "I am one person."
There's growing
evidence that few of us have true multiple personalities, and most of us do
have mod-ular personalities. Some people have more discrete
"modules" (subselves) than others, depending on their genetic inheritance and the emotional/spiritual
they
got as a young child. Since I began studying this
phenomenon in 1988, I’ve witnessed scores of average women and men identify 15
to 35 subselves
or parts without being "crazy" in the least - though at times
we feel that way!
Our subselves seem to be like a group of people living in the same
dwelling. They each have different skills, jobs, ages, values, and needs,
and may or may not know about, understand, like, and accept each other. They
can ally, fight bitterly, or ignore or hide from some others, like
members of any human group. Conversely, if
individual subselves are acknowledged, respected, and
inner-personal stress
drops and harmony, energy, spirits, and achievements soar!
Our language doesn't
yet have an accepted word to describe these subselves who dwell within our
brains and bodies. In
his interesting 1990 book "Subpersonalities - the People Inside Us,"
(Rutledge, London / NY) researcher/therapist
John Rowan has discovered 25 different terms for them in international
literature.
Yet
we often
write and speak about our parts - e.g. "He was of two minds…",
"She has a musical side to her"; "I’m getting a
from you"; "Make up your mind, will you?", "Roy
has a yellow streak," and "Sometimes
she can be very
In these Web pages and related
guidebooks,
I'll use the terms
parts, subselves, inner team or inner-family members, and
inner voices interchangeably. Pick which term feels
best to you, or invent your own...
Is it possible
or
probable that "" are really a number of semi-independent
subselves sharing one neural system and body? What are you
("thinking") right now? Is there more than one voice (thought stream)? If so,
who are they? Where did they come from? How do they feel about each other?
What do they want? How harmonious are they?
|
What would your life be like
if your
unique crew of subselves willingly worked as
a co-operative, loyal team effectively led by your talented
true Self? What might happen to your favorite "bad habits,"
phobias, and other stresses?
Take a break and review this, and
then... |
 Continue by reading a brief
(typical) unsolicited
reaction to the inner-family concept from a typical co-parent. Then learn
about the four types of
subselves who run your life. See who you recognize!
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Updated
September 27, 2008
|