Creating an Ego-Self
The inner system of sub-personalities is largely a direct reflection of subjective experience. Taken as a whole it reflects the mirror-like quality of the human being’s inner world. The meetings, conflicts, confluences, and memories of early life are the personal history of the sub-personality images and relationships.
Interpreting past events and present dynamics in life the young child assembles a dramatis personae as the cast list for his life drama. Both a reflection and an attempt to internalize and interpret inner-outer events, sub-personalities can be seen as an attempt to process and make sense of inner-outer relationships and events.
There is however a deeper and more fundamental purpose for the complicated interrelationship and dynamic of sub-personalities. Since sub-personalities are the workings or the composite parts of the personality, they serve the overriding need of early life which is to create an ego-self.
In order to do this we actively practice ego-processes which may be summarized in three steps: identify, separate, and divide. In childhood our principal concern is personal survival and that survival is ensured by our creating a viable, protective ego-self, inwardly demonstrated in the formation of character and outwardly expressed in our experience of personality.
Thus we have a complex but clear sequence of events governed by primary existential needs:
grappling with dependency to ensure survival
creating an individual identity
establishing conditions of separation and division
inwardly reinforcing and developing identity through...
... forming character and character defenses (see module 8 of Sacred Attention Therapy Online Trianing)
outwardly repelling assaults on the organism which may threaten the core-self through... ... expressing character through personality
Creating a personal identity is thus the most fundamental, necessary, and crucial activity of childhood. Sub-personalities have a long history. By the time you encounter your client in the therapy room the process of creating, testing, refining, and concretizing the diverse parts of his mask are lost in distant early memory and buried deep long ago in the unconscious.
Excerpt from SAT Online Training, Level 1 lecture manuscript
https://www.centerforhumanawakening.com/SAT-Online-Training-Is-It-For-You.html
Serving your personal journey toward enlightenment
7 年Sub-personalities are indeed very well entrenched by the time we reach the chronological—but perhaps not psychological—maturity of adulthood. We have learned well what we need to do to protect ourselves from the ongoing challenges we faced during childhood. Among the many gifts that Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) offers us is the opportunity to uncover our character defenses through our sub-personalities. These sub-personalities may not be as sinister as the motion picture industry may glamorizing or demonizing in their portrayal of split personalities through such films as The Three Faces of Eve, Identity, Raising Cain, Sybil, David and Lisa, Voices Within: The Lives of Truddi Chase, to name a few. Sub-personalities are more subtle aspects of ourselves that reveal themselves depending on the situation we find ourselves in. Sub-personalities work was one of the more enjoyable aspects of my inner work through the SAT teachings and approach. It felt easy and relieve-ing to identify those aspects of myself that, up to that point, came forward without much, if any, conscious thought. The sub-personality was merely a reaction to the given situation or external condition that presented itself to me. Identifying my sub-personalities felt easy. Identifying one sub-personality naturally gave birth to the next, and the next, and so on. I can remember smiling and even laughing as the sub-personalities revealed themselves to me, now, in my conscious. I examined each one, gave it a name (e.g., Controller, Nature Lover, etc.), explored the facets of each, examined the relationships between and among the sub-personalities, and dissected the origins of each sub-personality. Having identified my sub-personalities, I began to become aware of when any given sub-personality was present. At the zenith of my awareness, I could enter a room and be aware of who was actually entering the room. Never was it my whole self; it was always an aspect of myself that came forward depending on what I either was still processing from before I went in the room, or what I anticipated was going to unfold when I walked into the room. I later came to an awareness that had I walked into the room in the ‘present,’ I would be walking into the room in my whole state—not with or through one aspect of myself I was using to defend myself against mis-perceived conditions or threats. The next time you go out for groceries, make dinner, attend a play, go to the gym, show up at work, walk in a room…ask yourself, “Who is showing up?” “What part of me is here?” “What part of me have I left behind?”