Subpersonalities: The People Inside Us

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Well, this was a summary of some of the essential discoveries I made while reading Assagioli’s extensive writings on subpersonalities. I hope the articles in this book will prove as valuable to you and inspire you to keep diving into the wisdom of Assagioli. In the worksheet, Making Peace with Your Subpersonalities, you were offered a clear template to achieve harmony and peace within the community of the self. Here is a reminder of the five stages: Stand up with some room around you to move in. Close your eyes and again ask “Who Am I? “. And this time let the response come through movement in your body. Trust its wisdom and let the movement unfold until you sense a completion. You may also want to include sounds in this response, or singing. When you are ready, write about your experience.

This process often occurs without a clear understanding of its meaning and often against the wish and will of the individual involved in it. But a conscious, purposeful, willing cooperation can greatly facilitate, foster, and hasten it.

Assume a state of relaxation and take a few deep breaths. Then think about the idea of serenity: hold the concept ‘serenity’ in your mind, and reflect on it. What is its quality, its nature, its meaning, etc.? As you develop insights, ideas, or images associated with the concept, record them in your Psychological Workbook (No.1).

Personal weaknesses of which you are aware and on which you would like to work. Particular emphasis can be placed on the techniques you can use to overcome them. Record also any strong negative reactions you have to other people as they may clarify your own unrecognized and projected problems. Any ‘high’ or ‘deep’ experiences of peace, joy, love, expansion, awakening, etc., and their circumstances and effects. A helpful way of examining and understanding the relationships between your subpersonalities is drawing circles or squares, each one representing a primary subpersonality. Then add the relevant traits. You will notice significant overlaps, where the same traits appear in multiple circles/squares. It is at these points of overlap that you find common interests and shared agendas. Seeing this visual depiction can be helpful in conceptualising the complexity of your inner landscape and deepen your understanding of the subtleties of these relationships. This is where you will find many of the clues to reconciliation and resolution. Were different aspects predominant in the various circumstances of the day? What has been the relative activity of each? This evening review can be used to examine yourself and your life as a whole, or it can be modified, as in the example below, to focus on some aspect of your self, on some pattern you’d like to know more about, on some specific inner process you may want to explore. The attitude with which you do the exercise is most important.

7 Of The Most Common Synchronicities We Don’t Pay Attention To

In our society, the belief that our mind is a single and complete whole is still very common. This point of view, which psychologists call the “mono-mind" paradigm, is damaging to our way of being. First of all, if you have a part within you that causes destructive behavior or has a negative impact on you, then without knowing the multiple mind paradigm, you are likely to judge yourself through the prism of only this single part. For example, sometimes you feel like you want to just marinate, not doing anything productive. This can make you think of yourself as lazy. So you will define your entire self as lazy, while in fact it is only one part of your personality. Exactly the same thing happens when some part of you is afraid of something. You can label yourself as a person who is always fearful. Second is the paradoxical affirmation of our “perfect imperfection” as a way of pointing to the fact of continual growth, that we are never “finished” in an infinite universe, and that this is “perfectly” all right. Subpersonalities may be based on aspects of past-life personalities, meaning from an earlier incarnation.

Most of the psychotherapy work based on Internal Family Systems theory is run with us having our eyes closed. You enter your inner world and meet the parts, talk to them. Although it may seem absurd or weird to you now, if you experience it yourself, you will see that it is very simple, tangible and real, and that this is in fact exactly how our psyche works.One of the most useful instruments for long term self-development is a workbook, diary, or journal. We use the term ‘psychological workbook’ because many people tend to associate the word ‘diary’ with memories of adolescence in which often trivial and burdensome accounts were kept of one’s daily activities. See if you can see which subpersonalities you are most aligned to. There are usually half a dozen main players. There could be more and may be less, but this is a good guide. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because you can identify with something in every one of them, that you somehow have all the subpersonalities active within you. What you’re looking for are the primary influencers. From there you will almost certainly find there are other sub-groupings that are fed and sustained by the main drivers. As you work your way through and establish who are the key players in your community, you’ll come to see they are each driven by fear, guilt, and shame… and as a result are actively seeking to protect themselves and the roles that they play. In other words, like all energy, they will do anything to survive, so unless they are offered a better paradigm, they will continue to resort to the survival mode. d. What we want to appear to be: these are the roles we play in different relationships and circumstances, the masks we put on for the purposes of vanity, success, and so on.

If I am not very predominant, how would life be different if I, as a subpersonality, took more time and control in daily life? Make a sign with the words SERENITY, using the colour and lettering that best conveys this quality to you. Place this sign where you can see it daily and if possible at the time when you need serenity the most. Whenever you look at it recall within yourself the feeling of serenity. Assagioli is referring to the kind of synthesis we find in a healthy body, where the different parts – organs and cells of the body – co-operate intelligently to uphold the health of the whole body.It is also interesting to note that Assagioli considered subpersonalities to be ‘entities’– living beings – which can live a semi-autonomous life that affects the ‘I’ through patterns of behaviour that are outside of our conscious control. Assagioli (p.93) even suggests ‘each subpersonality has a kind of ego’ and that subpersonalities ‘without our awareness, independent of, or even against, our will – [find] the means of achieving their aims’ (p.84); and Assagioli states that subpersonalities can be co-conscious centres in our personality, meaning they know things about us that we are not aware of ourselves. However, the semi-autonomous nature of the subpersonalities is a condition we can change via personal psychosynthesis, which can bring the various subpersonalities under the wise leadership of the conscious ‘I’.