A letter to people curious about or
skeptical of personality subselves
p.3 of 3

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The Web address of this 3-page letter is http://sfhelp.org/01/letter1.htm

Continued from p. 2 ... 

 If Subselves are Real, What Does That Mean?

        There are personal meanings, and for some, professional meanings. 

Personal Meanings

        If you haven't yet, read these for perspective:

• The overview of co-parent Project 1: assessing for false-self wounds and reducing them;

• This introduction to significantly-wounded people in denial;

• Six  implications of significant false-self wounds;

• Cmmon behavioral traits of false-self dominance;

• An overview of inner-wound recovery;

• This example of wounds affecting a real stepfamily; and...

• These options for relating well-enough to significantly-wounded adults and kids.

        Reality check: if someone else asked you to explain the personal implications of a disabled true Self, could you do so now? Explaining it to someone will show you how clear you are.

Professional Meanings

        A thorough answer merits its own Web site. Here are some key implications...

        If you're a clinician or case worker who works with couples or families, and you're not routinely (a) assessing for inner wounds and (b) teaching your clients about false-self traits, wounds, and recovery options, you risk making surface diagnoses like "you're depressed," vs. "Sad and/or rageful subselves distrust your resident true Self, and are controlling your inner family." That may mean your interventions will have muted, temporary, or no satisfying long-term effects, as judged by your clients. If you work with addicted families, you risk ineffective results.

        If you're a marriage-enrichment facilitator (e.g. PAIRS) and you don't include some meaningful over-view of personality-subselves, false-self wounds, and implications in your work, you risk seriously diluting the long-term good your efforts impart. Worst case, you miss a chance to alert and motivate your couples to heal the root cause of current or potential major relationship stressors. Restated: effective relationship skills work less well or not at all with significantly-wounded couples in denial.

        If you're a divorce mediator, attorney, or family-court judge, and you don't offer some educational ma-terials and explanations on false-self wounds to those you serve, you...

• miss the chance to help them understand a core reason for their struggle. You also...

• lower the chance they'll (a) save their marriage or (b) minimize divorce-process stress and emotional scars. You also...

• miss the chance to alert your clients to a major risk in potential future re/marriage.

Any of these put their kids at risk of (more) wounding. 

        If you're a clergyperson who officiates at weddings and/or provides pastoral counseling, and you don't alert your couples or clients to false-self wounding and recovery benefits, options, and resources - you're inadvertently raising the chance of their (re)marital problems and potential psychological or legal (re)divor-ce. See this for more perspective.

        If you're a classroom or family-life educator and you omit or downplay inner-family basics, implica-tions, and wound-recovery concepts and resources, you're unintentionally contributing to your students' odds of reproducing low-nurturance families, and reducing the long-term value of what you're teaching. This is specially true if you focus on effective parenting skills without describing...

• the [wounds + unawareness] cycle and its effects,

• low and high-nurturance families, and...

• how significant caregiver-wounding and unawareness affects these, down the generations.

        If you're a medical practitioner who doesn't weave possible psychosomatic effects of serious false-self dominance into diagnosing and treating chronic maladies, you risk mis-prescribing, treating the symp-tom, and not healing (part of) the root wound. That risks (a) symptoms returning and/or manifesting in a different way, and (b) frustration in you, your patients, and your staff.

        If you're an instructor, supervisor, program director, funder, or evaluator of any of these professionals, and you don't include some basic concepts about the [wounds + unawareness] cycle and false-self woun-ding and recovery in your work, you risk preventing the professionals you work with from being aware of the above implications and making effective choices with their employers, clients, students, and patients.

        If you have any professional role like these and don't honestly assess yourself for significant false-self wounds, you risk providing less effective or even harmful human service, and not knowing it. This is multi-plied by the array of clients, cases, or patients of each professional you affect directly and indirectly.

        Finally...

Wounded, unaware professionals are at risk of passing on significant false-self wounds to their de-scendants via unintended low-nurturance caregiving.

        Consider that each person, couple, or family you work with professionally may affect the wholistic health of one or more dependent kids. That can affect an invisible fan of hundreds of descendents from those kids over many future generations. Low and high family nurturance levels tend to reproduce, unless low-nurturance (neglect) survivors take responsibility to break the ancestral cycle via true (vs. pseudo) per-sonal recovery.

        Notice what your inner voices (subselves) are saying now about these implications of psychological wounding. If your subselves were people standing nearby, what would you guess they feel and need now?

        Reflect on what you think and feel now compared to when you started reading this letter. What have you learned? Has your attitude about subselves, wounds, health, parenting, and marriage shifted? If you want to learn more about normal (vs. pathological) false-self wounding and it's effects, I suggest you read any of the books by Hal and Sidra Stone, Richard Schwartz, Virginia Satir, and/or John Rowan.

        If you're motivated to study normal personality subselves more now, go here. If your subselves aren't so motivated, read on... 

If You're Skeptical and Resistant

        Premise: human resistance to change or new experience comes from fear of significant discomfort. Your anxieties come from prior life experience ("Do not put your hand in boiling water!") So skepticism about or rejection of the concept of false-self wounding and its impacts probably means some of your subselves fear that accepting these ideas would cause you some significant discomfort like these:

"Accepting this idea about personality subselves means something bad will happen to me." This kind of vague anxiety is typical of young subselves (Vulnerables) controlling your per-sonality. A related option is that your Catastrophizer  (a common Guardian subself) is in charge. A true Self would generate thoughts like "I'm not sure about this idea about true Self and false self. It's probably worth more study before I decide whether to believe this or not."

Or...

"Accepting this personality-subselves concept means that I and/or someone I care about is sick or crazy." No, it means that you or they are normal.

Or...

"Accepting this false-self idea means that 'someone else' has been making my life deci-sions, and I'd have to mistrust my own perceptions and judgments." If you feel this, your dilemma becomes: "Do I want to continue living as a hostage to misguided, protective sub-selves who don't trust there's a viable safer/better way for me to live? How will I feel about this when I'm approaching my death?"

Or...

"Accepting this inner-wounds idea means that I would have to blame my parents and grand-parents for being inadequate caregivers, which is intolerable."

Parents who co-create low-nurturance family environments that foster false-self wounds deserve compassion, not blame - partly because their ancestors and society were unable to fill their early psy-chological and spiritual needs well enough.

More common fears...

"Accepting this inner-wound idea means that I have inadvertently...

• harmed my child(ren) and been a 'bad parent;' and/or I've...

• picked a significantly-wounded partner, and/or I have...

• (unintentionally) misled other people who have depended on me, and/or...

• I'll have to admit to myself and others that I've been wrong; and/or...

• someone I've respected as a wise teacher and a guide has been wrong; and/or...

Or...

"Fully accepting the implications of this false-self dominance idea means my professional work and/or the organization I work for is unintentionally providing misguided or harmful ser-vice. If I stay with them without working for change, I'll have to pretend to go along with values and beliefs I really don't agree with. I'll have to sacrifice my integrity for my security.

        True, which means your protective subselves choose security first and your integrity second. This promotes daily anxiety, shame, and guilt - "inner pain" - which relentlessly promotes false-self control and wounds;

"Accepting this inner-wound idea means I'll have to change my core beliefs about relation-ships, and show others that (or pretend...). That's likely to evoke resistance, conflict, and rejection. If I persist, I'll risk others' scorn, ridicule, disrespect, and possible censure and abandonment."

        The first part is probably true. The second part depends on (a) how and why you pre-sent your new view of personality subselves and false-self wounds to other people, and (b) how you react to their reactions (empathically, defensively, respectfully, sarcastically...). What strategy have you evolved so far for managing major values differences with other people?

        More possible resistances (fears)...

"Accepting this [ low-nurturance > inner-wounds ] cycle means that I'd have to live with believing...

• our whole society is wounded and ignorant,

• the majority of other people are really wounded, deluded, and living false lives; and...

• our government, and legal, educational, religious, and law-enforcement systems are misguided and focusing on the symptoms, not the causes."

        Pretty scary, isn't it? Social change is inexorable, and starts with individual convictions and decisions. The courageous people who "walked their talk" and risked reputations, friend-ships, and security to abolish colonial dominance, slavery, racial and religious bigotry, child exploitation, and women's inequality show us the way to reduce our epidemic of  unqualified child conception and low-nurturance parenting...

"Accepting this inner-family idea means that I...  (what?)

        These examples invite you to identify the fears that cause your subselves to reject, discount, or ig-nore the theme of Project 1 - assessing for significant false-self dominance and reducing any you find. Identifying your fears is a chance to learn about the subselves that govern your thoughts, perceptions, and actions. If they're too frightened, they'll creatively persuade you to do something else...

Reality Check

        Before we end, clarify where you stand now: T = "true," F = "false," and ? = "I'm not sure."

I can say out loud why I'm reading this letter.  (T  F  ?)

I can clearly explain what "family "nurturance level" means.  (T  F  ?)

I can clearly describe (a) what personality subselves are and (b) where they come from.
 (T  F  ?)

I have thoughtfully read these typical questions and answers about subselves and false-self wounds and recovery.  (T  F  ?)

I can (a) clearly describe what a "true Self" is, and (b) I'm sure my Self is guiding my personality now.  (T  F  ?)

I can clearly describe (a) what a false self is, and (b) at least six typical behavioral traits that indicate someone's true Self is disabled.  (T  F  ?)

I can clearly describe the six false-self wounds proposed in this Web site, and at least three of their common implications.  (T  F  ?)

I believe that motivated, aware people can reduce their false-self wounds over time by intentionally retraining and reorganizing  their subselves; and/or I want to learn more about this now. (T  F  ?)

I will assess myself for false-self wounds within the next 10 days  (T  F  ?)

I want to discuss the Project-1 concepts with one or more important adults in my life in the next week. (T  F  ?)

        Pause, breathe, and notice your self talk now. What did you just learn?

Recap

        This nonprofit stress-prevention Web site is partly founded on the ancient premise that normal human personalities are composed of a group of semi-independent subselves or parts. This open letter is written to people who are skeptical about or reject this alien, uncomfortable idea. It aims to (a) validate and ex-plore your reactions, and (b) raise your self-awareness. If you reject or ignore these core Project-1 pre-mises, most of the articles in this site will be of limited use to you.

Being "uninterested" or unwilling to learn whether subselves and wounds are real and personally relevant probably means you're controlled by a well-meaning false self without knowing it. Notice your reaction to this premise...

        To learn more about personality subselves and recovery from false-self wounds, consider investing in the Project-1 guidebook "Who's Really Running Your Life? - free your Self from custody, and guard your kids." (xlibris.com; 2nd edition - 9/03). It integrates many of these Web articles and worksheets on wound-assessment and recovery.

        Before you decide, try this safe, interesting experience of having a dialog be-tween your true Self and one or more of your favorite subselves. Option - read this unsolicited testimony about doing parts work, and this example of subselves affecting a real stepfamily.

        I wish you well on your life journey, whatever your subselves decide..

 -  Peter Gerlach, MSW

Author and Founder, Break the Cycle! project
Member NSRC Experts Council 

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