IS MY IDENTITY A MULTITUDE OF SELVES?

The idea that you are a multitude of Selves within you is still a marginal view compared to many other concepts in psychology, but in my practice I have found accepting this view of our personalities both useful and helpful.

After all, is the idea that you have a single unitary personality enough to explain your complexity? What if instead your normal you and the problems you have, could be explained away by a natural tendency of the psyche to split into parts that are not always in agreement with one another? Would this make things harder or simpler to understand?

To most people, the idea that our identities are made up of a bundle of identities sounds strange or unreal. The reason for this is partly historical though. On the surface of things, it is a reaction to the narrow focus on individual psychology that the counseling schools of the 20th century focused on. But on a deeper level, it is an idea that challenges the very conception of the soul of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Much until recently, in fact, talk-therapy, which includes all therapy practices where the main means of therapy are language and dialogue, was conducted by viewing the patient as an individual, a single standing individual actor willfully acting into the world, a rational Self, as it was often referred to. Clients, in this view, could only be in command of their destinies if the irrational forces of their unconscious were reined in under their conscious control. 

It was a constant battle between the forces of rationality and conscious thought, now synonymous with good, and irrationality and unconscious impulses, synonymous with bad, or even evil. And for how strange it may sound today, the question of how the client’s social, cultural, developmental, hormonal, and environmental variables affected their capacity to regulate their behaviours, including their conscious thoughts, was just not part of the considerations of the time. Until mid-twentieth century that is.

At this point, and particularly after the publication of The Silent Spring in 1970, a new kind of paradigm began to emerge, one that proposed that reality was a complex web of interdependent actors and actions. Today we call this view systems thinking, and for those familiar with Eastern philosophies, it much resembles the view that Buddhists have held for thousands of years. Systems thinking is a popular and widely used term today, and one that includes disciplines as diverse as engineering, law, and sociology. Within psychology, systems thinking mostly refer to the attention we pay to how family or social systems impact individual actions and growth.

Salvador Minuchin, the family systems therapist that developed structural family therapy in the 1960s, for instance, asserted that people were basically competent but that this competence was constrained by their family structure. To release individual competence, one had to change the structure of the family: ‘Your destiny’ depends now on the shared ‘destiny of your family’, whose structure, beliefs, and system of roles, limits or supports your preferred growth strategies and behaviours.  

The therapeutic models that developed from this new interdependent view of the self, are Systemic Therapy, Family Systems Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, and the popularly known Family Constellations Therapy to mention a few. Internal Family Systems therapy, the talk-therapy approach that promotes the idea of multiple parts within ourselves, is a branch out of these lasts. These therapeutic models all shared the idea that individual destinies are tightly bound to how systems interact, from the micro level of the family to the macro level of the nation and even humanity at large. 

Without understanding how the individual is situated within his or her family system, the community, his or her social class and professional milieux, and the role, or roles, that are assigned to him or her by these various interdependent systems, it is impossible to really comprehend, and therefore rectify, the individual behaviour.

This broader and more inclusive view of individual behavior also changed our view of how reason functions and emerges. If until the mid-twentieth century reason dominated as the sole force of good within all of us, after the work of pioneering neurologists and researchers, like Antonio Damasio, Dan Ariely, and Desmond Morris, on how emotion and environment affect reason, emotions and environment became an integral part of rationality. 

Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) contributes a further layer of complexity to our view of interdependency. It’s propositions, however, simplify the work of therapy.  

In IFS the rules and roles that external systems depend on for their survival, and onto which the individual is attached, are internalised and run as ‘programs’ below the individual’s conscious sense of Self. It is not just the external family structure that constrains or supports the individual desired direction, but also the internalised version of that family structure carried along with the individual from group to group. This is where the idea of a multiple-Self sprouts.  

Ok, so despite my enthusiasm for the topic, I understand at this point that most of my readers are getting tired of theory, so let’s get a bit more practical. Everyone, from those who dominate, to those who follow orders carry, unconsciously, internal models of how to behave within groups. Each day, as we wake up, these unconscious models are loaded into our subconscious, and purposefully acted out in order to preserve the life of the group.

So, for instance, your internalised belief that high productivity is not only good but worthy of social validation, and that low productivity is, on the other hand, worthy of contempt and social condemnation, not only allows you to be more adapted to your family system, but also allows you to function smoothly in schools, work places, and everyone in the developed world. 

All of these systems share unspoken conducts of behavior, and depend on your unconscious internalized agreement to run smoothly and unhindered by conscious considerations. This unconscious connection between the external rules of behaviour, and the internal ways in which you judge and regulate your own behaviour, allow the larger family of individuals you belong to (e.g. your nation), to function without having groups of people policing and enforcing on you those very rules.  

Let’s have a look at these processes in finer details.

Bowen, who pioneered the study of how families and their problems evolve over many generations, showed how burdens, in the form of extreme beliefs or feelings, are transferred across generations. Classified as Exiles in IFS theory, Exiles are emotions that all members of a system, from grandparents to grandchildren, try not to act out. Exiles, the rule goes, remain hidden within everyone’s personality but carefully out of public display. 

So for instance, an individual’s profound sense of self-betrayal, can be explained not only in terms of how he or she may have betrayed him or herself, but also in terms of how an unspoken personality of betrayal, shared by all the members of a family, continues to exist across generations irrespective of the particular character, desires, and behavioral preferences of any of the group members. The scope of this internalisation, is to balance out a system state that is still unable to deal with betrayal.

To look at another case example, most people have a poor self-concept because they believe that the many extreme thoughts and feelings they experience constitute who they are. The wholeness of the statement ‘I am jealous’, for instance, instead of helping me to understand myself better and be free from it, validates a sense of exclusive responsibility. It is ‘my jealousy’, and the jealousy is either good or evil, rational or irrational, to be accepted or rejected completely.  

Similarly, when Bill’s anger takes over the affection he feels for his wife Mary, all his contributions towards the well-being of his wife and children, is crushed under the temporary feelings of anger. Then when, in the midst of a fight, Mary says, “I hate you,” Bill thinks, even after Mary’s apologies, that she really does hate him with her whole self, "because she wouldn’t have said it if she didn’t mean it”.  

The view that our personality is a single exclusive phenomenon leads to all manners of additional feelings (e.g. shame, guilt, anger, hatred). Seeing how, apparently personal experiences, reflect larger and broader group process, even across time, helps the suffering individual to not only identify long standing patterns of interactions in the family system, but also to unburden him or herself of personal exclusive responsibility.  

Within a systemic view, these very same feelings and beliefs acquire the positive value of being partial forces that unconsciously benefit group survival. My jealousy, Bill’s anger, and Mary’s hate can now all be reinterpreted as sub-parts of ourselves whose interest is that of maintaining and contributing to the survival of the group and its unspoken purpose. We may or may not desire or agree with that purpose, but jealousy, anger, hate, acquire a positive purposeful adaptive significance, even though they do not explain the whole of me, or Bill, or Mary, or any of the other group members.  

In this view, IFS is non-pathologizing. Solutions are not seen in either/or dualisms, but in for/with systems. People are viewed as resourceful agents, rather than as persons with deficits, and birth-given sinful drives. When the purpose of jealousy, anger, and hate is understood in its current inner and outward systemic function, both the individual and the therapist can begin to channel this energetic drive towards more adaptive goals. 

In unburdening the therapeutic process of the tension brought about by absolute identification with a singular Self, the therapeutic process is simplified. This occurs because in addressing our jealousy, anger, or hatred as a portion of ourselves, we allow the jealousy, anger, and hatred to exist without added contempt, like: “I hate the fact that I hate myself”, “I am angry at my being in despair”, “I am disgusted by my love for him despite what happened”.

In Internal Family systems, the greater Self, as it is known, provides jealousy, hatred and anger the necessary space to exist without judgment and identification. “I hate myself” is turned into “We hear that you feel hate for us all and yourself”, and a profound welcoming silence follows. Because we do not feel threatened by this ‘part’ emotion, we can provide the space for these events to unfold in their pure form, towards their pure goals.  

The anger is not my whole self and it is not alone in experiencing it. The hatred may be high, but several other parts of me are holding it as valuable information. The jealousy I feel has taken hold of me, but it is both temporary and purposeful.  

Space is created between us and the jealous part, our jealous part and the reasonable part, the reasonable part and the compassionate part, the compassionate part and the fearful part. In this way, our over reactive fight or flight reactions are also allowed to slow down, to de-energise. And when our hurt part is safe to be, our whole system slows down, our reason feels safe to re-engage, and with it our capacity to listen carefully and to empathise.  In a strange way, therefore, thinking of a disturbing inner event as not being a full description of yourself, but an expression of a complex system of Selves, allows You, with a capital ‘Y’, to stand in the position of a person who can now provide wisdom, care, empathy, reason and attention to details. This is essentially how it works, and why it is one of my favorite approaches to the work of therapy and a practice I use with great benefit in my own journey of love and healing.  

Wishing You Well, 

Your Shrink in Bansko