Subpersonalities and Relationships

[This is a long post from IOC that introduces the concept of subpersonalities and how they operate in relationships. I feel that this is a huge area for exploration. Kira and I have made huge strides in the last couple of months, and most of the progress has come from identifying our subpersonalites and how they interact.

Please share in this thread anything you feel comfortable with about your own subpersonalities and they act and react in relationship.]

I posted a while back (on IOC) on subpersonalities after returning from D.C. That post was based on the Internal Family Systems approach to working with subpersonalities. I recently have become interested in how subpersonalities impact relationships and started reading a book by Hal Stone and Sidra Winkelman (now Stone) called Embracing Each Other (their first book was called Embracing Our Selves, which I read a few years ago).

They refer to subs as selves, which is one of the common ways of talking about subpersonalities. Their view is role-oriented in that all subs have a unique role which brought them into existence. The problem is that each new self also brings an equal and opposite self with it, which they call disowned selves. These are important in understanding our relationships, but more on that in a bit.

I want to try to explain their system as briefly and clearly as possible.

The Primary Selves

When we are born, we are just a vulnerable collection of cells without any kind of “self” in the way we normally think of a self. It doesn't take long for the ego to begin its development. Not long after the ego emerges, the first alternate self emerges, the protector/controller. Its job is to protect the fragile and vulnerable self and to control our behavior and (as much as possible) the behavior of those around us. It quickly develops an awareness of which behaviors are rewarded and which are punished and acts accordingly. It continually seeks out new info and changes its “rule set” accordingly. This is a basically rational self (although it can't express itself that way until the ego reaches rational thinking stages) that attempts to explain the world and ourselves and provide us with a frame of reference with which to make sense of our lives.

The protector/controller is usually in charge, even after we become adults – it becomes the “acting ego” in their system. It generally does not like anything to upset its system and is often closed to outside input unless that input can help it in its role without challenging its assumptions about the world. The downside is that this self keeps us isolated from direct experience of reality. In the system these therapists advocate, weakening the power of the acting ego is crucial in experiencing a more full life. In general, I agree with this position, especially since my own “protector/controller” is a literal control freak.

The protector/controller has as its primary ally the pusher. The pusher makes lists, pushes us to complete tasks, and keeps us busy doing the things we are “supposed” to be doing if we want to think of ourselves (and have others think of us) as good people. The pusher makes it difficult to relax and just be. This is another one that I am intimately familiar with.

Another major self is the perfectionist. This self strives to make us perfect in every way it can. This self essentially wants to protect us from criticism and often works closely with the pusher to make sure we are doing everything we are supposed to be doing, and doing it perfectly. This self gets lots of positive feedback in family, school, and work, so it can get very dominant. The downside is that it prevents us from taking risks and doing things we might not be perfect at.

The inner critic, which is often the introjection of one or both parents to start with (and later, teachers, peers, and society), works along with the perfectionist and pusher to catch all of our mistakes and inadequacies before anyone else does so that we won't displease anyone. The downside here is a shattered sense of self-esteem. We may end up feeling as though we can do nothing right and that we are unlovable. The pusher and the perfectionist will then work even harder to make us acceptable.

The last of the primary selves is the pleaser. The pleaser is very good at tuning into the needs and wants of others and working to meet them no matter the cost to us. When the pleaser is running the show, we tend to forget our own needs and the result can be latent hostility. In a relationship, we have to learn to work past the pleaser to see what our true feelings are and to honor those feelings.

All of these primary selves work to protect the vulnerable inner child from pain. All of us will have one or more of these that is more dominant than the others, or some combination of them. These selves are not unhealthy unless we continue to be unaware of them and act from their needs without any consciousness of what is happening.

The Disowned Selves

Nathaniel Brandon coined the term “disowned selves” in his book by the same name (The Disowned Self, 1972). These are shadow expressions of the primary selves – feelings and needs that run in opposition to the primary selves.

For example, in my own life, my pleaser would do its best to not rock the boat, to keep everyone happy. But at a certain point its shadow would emerge and sink the boat and everyone on it, often with as much rebellion as possible. It took a lot or work to own that I had a pleaser, and even now I think it is still a problem in intimate relationships. I'd rather swallow the anger (since I won't express inappropriate rage at an intimate partner) than take care of my own needs sometimes. This is a sure way to destroy a relationship. Learning to express healthy anger and displeasure is crucial to relationship health – I'm still working on this one.

A lot of us tend to identify with one or more of our primary selves. This will result in its opposite being the primary flavor of our shadow material. They don't talk about it that way in the book, but that's the essence of what they are saying. Like all shadow material, these disowned selves then get projected onto objects and people in our world. If no one around us currently fits the role, our psyche will find someone or something that does.

Let me give another example from my own life. I've written on IOC in the past about my preference for the rational over the emotional and how that has shaped my life. Well, in this system, my rational ego is the primary self that I have identified with and its opposite, my emotional self, has been largely disowned. It would not be surprising then that I have dated a lot of people who are emotionally centered. Kira, my current partner, is a perfect example. She is deeply emotional and has an enormous range of emotional expression that is probably what drew me to her in the first place.

This is where this stuff applies to relationships. We project our disowned selves onto others and we are then either drawn to them as friends or partners, or we are so set off by them that they clearly hold some part of ourselves that we can't tolerate (this last part is the classic view of projections).

Disowned Selves in Relationship

When we first fall in love, we are falling in love, partly, with our disowned selves, those parts of us that we need to reclaim to be whole people. This is the origin of that stupid line in romantic movies, “you complete me,” or of the whole idea of the “better half,” “other half,” or “missing half” that our partner represents in relationship.

This is a normal and healthy part of relationship. But if we never get beyond it, we will either live in a somewhat shallow relationship or struggle with the end result of not owning our selves, conflict. We need to be two whole selves coming together in partnership, not partial selves looking for completion.

When the blush wears off a new romance, we start to see the other person more clearly. And those parts of ourselves that they represent then become a problem. We disowned them for a reason – we are not comfortable with them. So when conflict arises, and all relationships have conflict, we withdraw more and more into our primary selves, becoming at times almost purely what that self represents. The less self-awareness we possess, the more this is likely to happen.

This reaction pushes the other person more and more into his/her primary self as well, and so we lose the ability to embrace one another's way of being. We tend to become extreme in our identification with our primary selves, and this leaves us disowning the partner who still represents to us that disowned self that our primary self never liked in the first place.

Solutions

We must learn to reclaim our disowned selves. Sounds easy, huh? Not so much, though. The authors developed an approach called voice dialogue that they claim works wonders in reclaiming disowned selves (this is spelled out in Embracing Our Selves). The approach is basically developing a dialogue with the self and finding out what it needs and wants to be happy and a more integrated part of the psyche.

Using their own system against them, this approach seems to create problems in that the perfectionist and inner critic are not likely to want to play along with such an approach – especially if they are the primary selves. So there must be other, less vulnerable ways of working with these selves.

Journaling is one way. Allowing the disowned self to surface through visualization and then letting it say whatever it wants to say. One can even ask it questions to reveal the same info the voice dialogue technique uses, without having to do it in front of someone and without having to move from one chair to another when changing “selves.”

I think meditation and traditional shadow work also offer viable approaches.

This is only a small taste of what this book offers. Working with subpersonalities can be a powerful tool for creating a more consolidated ego, which I believe is necessary before we make any huge strides in transcending the ego.

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

This is another area where I think a biological model, specifically the three brains idea, helps a lot.

Why does it help? It helps to organize the subpersonalities, to understand their motivations, and to integrate them into an ever-more-complete selfhood.

Combining the three brains idea with an understanding of the personal “ontology recapitulates phylogeny” of the subpersonalities also works well. Subpersonalities are formed at specific ages, and reflect the concerns of that age and time.

Then, you do the self-observation work to learn how to recognize your own subpersonalities, and maybe something like art therapy to get the subpersonalities talking to each other, and before too long the shadowy host becomes a integrated bunch of friends.

;-}

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

Hi Bill,

I tend to agree with how you suggest we approach the subs, but it's also important I think to consider that many of our subs develop as a way to cope with a situation that the vulnerable child feels overwhelmed by or incompetant to handle. 

Even when we get a handle on them and know them, they can still act out when anything simulates the original situation – especially in relationship. But if we can become mindful of them and see what situation triggers a given sub, then we are more likely to be able to integrate them through art or journaling. Even then, they don't go away. If we take the view that subs arise to help us, even though as adults their responses are no longer appropriate in most circumstances, then we have something to learn from them, epsecially in relationship.

The bottom line on subs is that they develop in reaction (most times) to our parents. So when they show up in relationships, we are often channeling one or the other of our parents in some way –either as the inner critic or in some other form of introjection. 

On another angle, Bill, do you see the triune brain as being the biological basis for pre-personal (reptile), personal (mammal), and post-personal (primate) forms of consciousness? Just curious.

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

Wow - really interesting post! I see my subpersonalities in a lot of my interactions in intimate relationships. I have two main questions stemming from your post Bill:

1) Why do these subpersonalities show up most in our romantic/intimate relationships? Why do they not show up in close friendships as much?

2) In reading the section on the disowned self, you mention that they are “feelings and needs that run opposite to the primary selves. What “labels” if any could/would you give to the opposite of the primary selves?

Question for Bill-2 - can you explain the three brains theory some more? I am intrigued as you have mentioned this in another discussion on this pod.

Really great stuff!

Wendy

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

Hi Wendy,

I'll try to answer your questions as best I can.

1) As near as I can tell, the reason subs show up more in romantic relationships is because we tend to choose partners who will trigger our “stuff” – our psyche's way of pushing us toward healing – and most of our stuff comes from childhood wounding, which is where most of our subs developed. So in relationship, our partners have much more power to trigger our stuff because it is with them that we play out a lot of our wounding (such as codependency, low self-esteem, isolationism, and so on). When the stuff gets triggered, there is almost always a sub behind it some place.

I think that subs come up quite a bit in friendships, too, but that the vulnerability isn't the same since we aren't fully naked (in every way) with our friends the way we are with partners. 

2) There are a lot of primary selves besides the one's that I wrote about. Those are simply the five most common ones the authors found in using this approach with clients.

From my own life, however, I can give a couple of examples. We might think of disowned selves/subs as parts of our shadow. For me, my vulnerable child was disowned for more than 25 years and only since undertaking this work again a couple of months ago have I really started having access to him. The vulnerable child is the polarity twin of my perfectionist self.

Another example for me would be that my controller/manager is hyper rational and masculine, and the corresponding disowned self is feminine and intuitive/emotional. I've also been doing a lot of work to reclaim that part of myself as well, but I think she won't feel safe to come back until I am more vulnerable, which means more work to access the child.

As you get to know your subs better through journaling or art or dialogue, they become more whole. So that, for example, the controller/manager in me is named Apollo because he has some of the attributes of the Greek god: narcissism, hyper rationality, “golden child,” and so on. His disowned twin is Sophia, again named after a Greek goddes because she carries wisdom in her intuition and emotions. They can be named anything that helps you indentify them when they come up.

I hope that helps a litte bit?

Have you started looking at any of your subs? Any that you can identify as being foremost in your life or relationships? 

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

Bill - it does help. I have only started to realize my subs. My last relationship helped me to realise a lot of the subs I have. My primary ones are protector/controller and inner critic. I tend to protect myself from hurt/rejection/disappointment/abandoment. This has been a recurring theme in all my intimate relationships. As a result, I don’t open up to my partner and this has been difficult for some. I also have a tendency to want to control the situation and my emotions. I am learning to let go and accept.

I have been journaling each day and mediating to get in touch with these aspects of myself. I like your idea of naming them to identify them as they come up. I’d like to try some more creative routes as well.

Thanks for clarifying!

Peace,
Wendy

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

Thanks, Wendy, for sharing about your subs. What you described was my pattern exactly until Bill and I got together. Then I realized that uh-oh, none of the old strategies would work with him. I knew I didn’t want to keep going in the old pattern, but I didn’t know how to get out of it. I discovered that the way out of it was to be with someone I loved and respected who loved and respected me, and someone who’d “play hardball” with me and tell me the truth (and welcome my honesty as well). But really, aside from the falling-in-love stage at the beginning, we’ve been taking baby steps in breaking old patterns until the last two months – and really until the last six weeks.

I love the “creative routes” for exploring subpersonalities and look forward to sharing more with you about that. As soon as I get a different browser, I’m going to start posting art and dialogues on my blog that relate to my exploration of my subs. But the short version, for now, is that I often start by letting out whatever wants out through art. When I’m feeling plugged in is a great time to do art, especially using big sheets of newsprint and oil pastels (which are like crayons). Much of the time, what comes out is kid-like drawings accompanied by kid-like words (get away, I hate you, leave me alone, etc.). I just let it out, page after page, until it feels finished. Then I often feel a desire to write a dialogue between the sub that just expressed itself and either me (my conscious self) or some kind of higher self that spontaneously appears while I’m doing art. The dialogue often opens into some kind of insight about what the sub needs to say, how I’ve been ignoring it and need to pay attention to it, etc. I don’t let it “have its way” as in indulge its every whim (much as I wouldn’t indulge a 6 year old having a tantrum), but I respect that it has something important to say, and I try to meet it with compassion and openness.

This is all pretty much intuitive – not guided in any way by what I think I “should” feel or do or think. I can feel a letting go in my body when I get to the heart of things.

I’d love to hear about your creative routes to exploring this and look forward to sharing more!

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

I think another reason these issues come up more in close relationships is that we spend more time with our partners than our friends. There's more occasion for the rough parts of each other's personality to tangle with one another. 

Bill recommended to me a book called Embracing Our Selves. Our library doesn't have it, so I'll probably end up buying it next week.

Just recognizing these “selves” as aspects of your own personality can be tremendously empowering. It's like being a teen, and suddenly realizing one day that you don't have to obey your parents' every command. 

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

I don't want to seem boorish, but again I think you guys are not addressing he single most important reason that unintegrated personalities can cause trouble in relationships, and usually less trouble in friendships.

It's biology again. There's vastly more at stake in a sexual relationship, than in a non-sexual or only slightly sexual friendship.

We form bonded relationships, first and foremost, to fullfill our biological needs to reproduce. Kids are hugely expensive in all kinds of ways. Secondarily, we form relationships as businesses. There's a terrific amount of money and possessions at stake. Thirdly, our relationships give us _status_ in the great herd.

These three things - kids, money, and status - are the reason unintegrated personality fragments, what you are calling subpersonalities, cause so much more trouble in relationships than friendships.

If it wasn't for kids money and status, if it was only about love and the dyadic union, relationships would cause us hardly any trouble at all.

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

I don't think that these things play any part in my relationship with Kira. We have no kids and never will. We don't live together or mix finances. And neither one of us has any concern with status among the herd. Quite the opposite, actually.

The concerns you list, Bill, seem to me to be lower meme concerns. My guess is that people who are interested in an integral level relationship are likely to be motivated more by partnership, soul-bond, and spiritual growth, not by biology, don't you think?

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

Well, I'm not so sure we should call biological imperatives “lower”, but that's another discussion.

Your relationship sounds like the exception, not the rule, Bill. My relationship with Marisa is similar to it - no kids, based on a 'spiritual' connection and a deep joy in each others nature. But my relationship is also far from the norm.

Still, in my relationship, it has been the biological concerns that caused the most trouble.

And I'd be willing to bet big money that if you analyzed your relationship closely, you would see that whatever issues you did have in it would have biological roots. And that the “higher meme” aspects of it, as you called them, all pretty much took care of themselves with fairly little trouble.

And what trouble they caused were related to status, money, and kids, and their corallaries of territory, freedom of choice and activity, and the use of family resources.

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

ooops, put those corrollaries in the wrong order, they should go - territory, use of family resources, and freedom of choice and activity.

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

Bill,  the “far from the norm” relationship is exactly what we hope to explore here.

For Kira and I, the primary source of conflict has been emotional availability and the lack of it. She needs more emotional continuity, and until recently I have been unable to meet that need. With unmet needs, we each withdrew in some way.

When I say lower or higher, I am talking within the framework of an integral developmental model, for example, the great chain of being: body, heart, mind, soul, spirit. Or this one from psychology: prepersonal, personal, postpersonal. So within the integral model, biological drives are lower than emotional drives, which are lower than spiritual drives, to give just three.

But what I think I hear you saying is that all “higher” needs are just translations of biological needs. Is that right? Is there something you can recommend that I read?

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

And as I've said, at least in my experience, 'far from the norm' is a total piece of cake, compared to more common and typical relationships.

Using the example you gave as a starting point: 

“For Kira and I, the primary source of conflict has been emotional availability and the lack of it. She needs more emotional continuity, and until recently I have been unable to meet that need. With unmet needs, we each withdrew in some way.”

First, I'm sure you realize this is a completely typical story - the woman wants the man to talk more and be more demonstrative. If we were to pile the number of womens magizine articles devoted to this typical problem, how high do you think it would reach?

And again, this problem is rooted in biology. male and female brains work differently.

Are we males the prisoners of our brain structure? No, we have considerable flexibility, it would be trivial to train ourselves to be more verbal and demonstrative in the ways that women like.

But, our baseline is still going to be to tend to be more concerned with the details of our “hunting” (that is, with pursuing our _doing_ to bring wealth and resources back to the family) than with the verbal and physical exchanges that women crave.

There is a simple enough answer - it's easy enough to train ourselves to give our partner more attention than would be our normal baseline. And to give our partner enough freedom to go out and get from her female tribe the rest of the talk and emotions that she is biologically designed to seek.

I've done it. I am certain you can do it. It doesn't feel natural at first, and it's not like you want to do it all the time, but it is doable.

—

“I think I hear you saying is that all “higher” needs are just translations of biological needs.”
 
I tend to see it as more like this - our biology creates a deep geography for our psyche, and the “higher” needs form themselves over the shapes of our biological imperatives. I see them more as continuations and elaborations, than translations. Biology provides the source structures and motivations, which are repeated again and again in more complex and 'human' forms as the person evolves and integrates.

As for what to read - let me think about that - I assume you've read a fair amount about the evolution and anthropology of sexuality?

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

Hi Bill(s) and the rest…

I think what Bill(2) is using as a baseline for discussion are the ideas from Evolutionary Psychology.  I studied this a ton before I found Wilber's work.  It is a beautiful theory that describes a ton of human behavior, although it starts to fall short when you get into higher spiritual concerns, and other aspects of life that Wilber covers much more thoroughly.

I posted on my blog a while back with some book titles:
http://integralvalley.typepad.com/blog/2006/04/ilp_day_13_.html

As far as relationships go, this stuff is absolutely crucial to understand.  Overriding our biology is a tough, tough undertaking.  The first step is to acknowledge this side of things.  Another really good resource is Ken Wilber's latest video on Integral Naked:
”An Upper-Right Approach to Sex ( 12:48 ) “  http://in.integralinstitute.org/live/view_iamness.aspx#7

Thanks for the discussion.  I'll start participating more as I'm able.

Aeryck

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

Well, while I have no real problems with the Evolutionary Psychology concepts, actually most of what I'm trying to communicate comes from two sources.

The first and most important being the discipline of self-observation and the observation of others. This is one of the most valuable practices anyone can undertake.

And the second being relatively straightforward anthropology, one of my old favorite areas of study.

But it's self-observation that really informs me. The endless and merciless questioning of behaviors. “Why did I do that? No, really, why did I really do that?”.

Admittedly, I'm willing to use evolutionay psychology models, and a lot of my language is similar - but I haven't read so much of the latest books that would be considered evolutionary psychology.

I do like Edward O Wilson, in general.

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

Hi Bill,

I agree that self-observation is a rich source of information, especially when it’s conducted rigorously, as you refer to. Yet I also think there’s a potential hazard in making the leap from “This is how I operate” to “This is how people operate.” I don’t identify with the factors that you refer to. I agree that they’re utterly central to the lives of most people in the world (I have an anthropology background, too), but it’s my sense that people at the growing edge of consciousness are breaking out of the old mold and evolving in ways that are much less tied to biology than our ancestors’ ways. Your thoughts?

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

That makes sense. I didn't mean to say that you were definitely using that set of vocabulary.  Just that what you were describing is well articulated in that genre.

I totally agree about the self-inquiry practice.  I have ideas about how biology fits in with the spiritual stuff WH is describing.  I'll post it later in a separate post.

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

I look forward to reading your post.

You and Bill have a different take on this stuff that I want to learn from. 

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

Nice observation, Jay. I agree.

The companion book to the one I recommended is Embracing Each Other (used copies are cheap), which deals with how selves/subpersonalities work in relationships. This book may literally have saved Kira and me a couple of months ago. We were struggling through a hard time and the book gave us the language and tools to look at things with brand new eyes. We're still reaping the benefits.

Much of what was posted above came from the early chapters of that book. I'll have a second, more detailed post related to this one in a couple of days.

Embracing Our Selves is a wonderful introduction to working with subs/selves. 

~ Bill 

Re: Subpersonalities and Relationships

I agree with Bill #1 that kids, money, and status are irrelevant to our relationship – it’s my sense that subpersonalities arise in intimate relationships that don’t revolve around those three factors because we opened ourselves to trusting another human being – a deep soul connection has called us out of hiding and invited us to override our habitual defenses (our ways of keeping others out) – it’s my sense that habitual defenses keep at bay the longing to connect deeply with another human being – and once we set aside our defenses, we open ourselves to the kind of vulnerability that created some of the subs in the first place