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MAKING RELATIONSHIPS WORK
by
Astra Niedra
We are all identified with a way of being
- a personality - with certain characteristics, rules and judgments.
This applies on a personal level and on a group level. We label
our identification as "me" or "us" and we believe
the way we see things is the correct way. If a person or group expresses
a quality opposite to one we hold, we either judge them or over-value
them.
So what do I mean by saying we need to make a shift
in how we see ourselves? Aren't we just who we think we are? The
answer is no. It has been known for some time that we all have many
parts to our personality and that each of these parts has specific
functions. These can be called "inner selves" or "subpersonalities".
The person you identify with is really a group of these selves,
which together form your sense of "I", your "ego".
Each of these selves has developed in your particular family situation
and culture and has as its primary function the protection of your
vulnerability. Each self has particular characteristics, abilities
and perceptions about the world, which revolve around defending
the vulnerable child you were at birth. In addition to the parts
of your personality you identify with, there's an equal number you
bury, or disown, sometimes referred to as your "shadow".
These stay in your unconscious and get projected onto other people,
groups and cultures.
For example, if you are identified with a giving self
all the time, you will have disowned your selfish self. From the
perspective of your giving self you will judge those around you
who are selfish. Not only will you judge them, but you will find
yourself always having to deal with selfish people because you will
tend to get into relationship with them. Maybe you are married to
one, maybe your children are selfish, maybe your boss is selfish.
It is as though the universe brings into your life that which you
have disowned so that you become conscious of it and integrate that
quality within you to become whole for no aspect of personality
is wholly bad or good. Generosity is good as long as you can set
boundaries and take care of yourself, too; but if you are always
generous, you will be taken advantage of and will not allow others
to give to you, thereby automatically forcing them to be the "taker"
in the relationship. Selfishness is bad when you are always concerned
with your wants and can never see what another person's needs are.
But if you have access to selfishness within you, you are able to
get your needs met and to set healthy boundaries.
Once you understand there's far more to your personality
than you had suspected, and that each of us is identified with only
a small part of ourselves, you will understand why all relationships
are as they are. You will understand why one day you can find something
about your partner adorable and on another day that same thing irritates
you. You will understand why one political party hates the policies
of another, why one religious group judges the practices of another
and why one country would start a war with another.
If you want to have a more fulfilling relationship with
your partner, and if you want a better world for us all to live
in, it's essential that you discover which parts of your personality
you have identified with, understand how these parts operate and
then separate from them and embrace their opposites. A crucial aspect
in this work is to learn to feel and protect your vulnerability
consciously rather than bury it and automatically jump into a defensive
stance when your vulnerability is threatened.
To help you gain a feeling for what is meant by "selves"
within yourself, imagine the following situation. You are in bed
on a Sunday morning, thinking about what you are going to do that
day. A part of you feels like staying in bed all day, while another
part feels like doing something active. At some point you have to
decide which "part" you will follow. You may decide to
be lazy for the day, be active or be a bit of both. It may be that
you don't really have to make a decision; one part of you may dominate
your personality so that even if you wanted to do the opposite you
couldn't.
You might already be aware that you have different parts,
but most people usually conceive of these opposite aspects of their
personality as being meshed together as one - a "stew"
we call "me". It is possible, however, to focus on the
various parts of your personality, for example the lazy self and
the active self, and speak with them directly, much as you could
fish out the various ingredients in a stew and discover they're
not all the same stuff but have their own, unique characteristics.
Voice Dialogue
There is a technique, used in counselling and psychotherapy,
that enables you to do this. It's called Voice Dialogue. Voice Dialogue
involves having your selves interviewed by a facilitator, literally
giving voice to these selves during a dialogue with them. The purpose
of Voice Dialogue is for you to separate from your various selves
so you can begin a process that enables you to stand between opposite
selves, holding the tension between them and not identifying with
either of them. This enables you to experience the perspectives,
needs and wants of opposite selves within you so you get a bigger
picture of what's going on in a particular situation. This gives
you true freedom to make a choice rather than feel compelled to
act from one self or another.
This process is a new point of reference in consciousness:
it is not identifying with a self or witnessing it from an awareness
level, but using the awareness aspect of consciousness together
with the experience of a self (traditionally labelled the "ego"
if it is a self you identify with) to give you an Aware Ego. The
Psychology of the Aware Ego, the Selves and Voice Dialogue were
developed by Drs. Hal and Sidra Stone, two American psychotherapists
who discovered this process in the context of their relationship
- trying to understand it and make it work for them.
When you start an Aware Ego process, you start to experience
rather than merely understand rationally that all relationship issues
are not black and white. You learn to embrace opposite parts of
your personality and this dissolves your judgment of others. For
instance, if you consciously own your selfish self and your generous
self, you now know what your selfish self feels and thinks and you
accept it and use it in your life as you deem appropriate. When
you are no longer solely identified with generosity, you can no
longer judge selfishness in others because you now experience its
perspective. You can bring in as much or as little of each self
as you want to so you can be giving towards others but still maintain
your own boundaries and say no when you want to. You now also create
more of a balance in your relationships with others - you don't
automatically polarize others into the selfish self. If both of
you have access to both selves, neither of you will judge the other.
When you start an Aware Ego process you also no longer
have to flip from one self to another or have a disowned self break
out when you are stressed, tired or influenced by alchohol. For
example, you might usually be very sensible but when you have a
few drinks, a very different you comes out - a flirtatious, outrageous
self who danced on tables and takes risks. This disowned self, while
it is in charge of you, can cause you to take actions you would
normally never take. The consequences of disowned selves breaking
out can cause havoc in your life. It's far better to have access
to both your sensible self and your wild self and to use them consciously
so you have the control and not the selves.
The selves that constitute our psyche include parental
selves, child selves, rational selves, emotional selves, spiritual
selves and many more. The selves we identify with and can call "me"
are primary selves. The selves we have repressed are our
disowned selves. The qualities you admire excessively, or
overvalue, in others, and those qualities you judge in others, indicate
to you who your disowned selves are. So if you really admire someone
who is an artist and you think they are better than you because
of their artistic ability, you have probably disowned your own artistic
self and you might have as a primary self a very logical, practical
self. Or you might judge artistic people, as they may seem disorganised
and impractical to your organised, practical self.
What you have disowned and what is primary in you also
gives you a good indication of what kinds of people you will be
attracted to and enter into relationship with. You will probably
like people who have similar primary selves to yours and will usually
choose as friends those people whose primary selves are similar
to yours, but you will be attracted to people who carry your disowned
selves and these are the people you will probably enter into primary
relationship with.
Following is an example of how this works in individual
relationships, but the same process happens between larger groups.
Steve is a warm, kind, giving person. He works as a carpenter, loves
nature and has a very relaxed attitude. Steve meets Jane. Jane is
self-contained, confident and a successful accountant. Steve is
impressed by Jane's focus and bright mind. Jane is attracted to
Steve's warmth, relaxed attitude and his different way of seeing
things. They start seeing each other and a relationship develops.
Soon they fall in love. They find each other perfect. They both
feel safe with each other so their defenses go down - their primary
selves relax a little. This enables them both to have access to
modes of expression or selves they previously didn't have access
to. Jane finds she can enjoy lazing around on Sunday when previously
she'd work all day. Steve find access to his focus self and starts
thinking about how to run his carpentry business better.
Then one day Jane comes home from work feeling awful.
She didn't get the promotion she had expected to get. She walks
into the house to find Steve in the garden planting some seedlings.
She gets annoyed that he isn't working and criticises him for this.
He gets defensive and tells her she's too rigid and she should loosen
up a little. but then Steve becomes apologetic as he can see Jane
is angry and upset. Jane in turn feels guilty about telling Steve
off. But then Steve gets angry at Jane and yells at her. Does this
sound familiar? Jane judges in Steve what she has disowned in herself
and Steve judges in Jane what he has disowned in himself. At first
they liked the opposite qualitites in each other - in fact, it was
the opposite qualitites that attracted them to each other in the
first place. This is what happens when you disown some part of yourself
- you are attracted to it because your psychological system wants
to become whole. So you're drawn to it outside of yourself if you
don't acknowledge it inside. But as soon as a stress occurs in this
type of situation the attraction to the disowned self in the other
person ceases as your defenses come up and your primary selves become
dominant again. Your primary selves then judge what is unlike them
in your partner. This is called a negative bonding pattern.
Bonding Patterns
Bonding patterns occur in all types of relationships.
A bonding pattern is like a blueprint for how we interact with others.
Bonding patterns are based on the initial parent/child bonding we
call experienced as infants. They activate a parental self in one
person and a child self in the other. In male/female relationships,
a daughter self of a woman will bond with a father self of the man
and vice versa. Bonding patterns are fluid; we flow from identifying
with a parental self to identifying with a child self and back again,
and so does the person we are bonding with. When Jane missed out
on her promotion, she felt vulnerable. Her whole identity as a successful
accountant had been threatened. But instead of admitting to herself
and to Steve that she was upset and needed some support, which is
really admitting responsibility for the part of her that is her
vulnerable child, she, in order to maintain her self-protection,
fell into her main primary self. From here she judges Steve for
his opposite characteristics. Then, when Steve felt that his primary
self was judged and criticised by Jane, he became defensive. His
vulnerable child felt awful about being criticised, but because
he is also not aware of its existence, he fell into his primary
self, which is judgmental of Jane.
So the bonding pattern here can be described as follows:
when Jane came home from work, her critical mother self bonded with
Steve's defensive son self and Jane went into the guilty daughter
self. When our vulnerability is threatened we fall into our primary
selves automatically. This is because when we were infants the reason
our primary selves developed was to protect our vulnerability. The
above bonding pattern is described as negative because the
feelings activated are negative. When you are feeling vulnerable,
what do you do? You get defensive, and from this defensive position
you attack the other person. If you don't attack them, you at least
feel self-righteous about your point of view. Either way, the other
person flips into defensive mode, too.
The bonding pattern is going on at the subconscious
level of your psyche. All you are aware of is an uncomfortable feeling,
which you try to get rid of, and then you feel defensive, angry
and judgmental toward your partner. You both keep arguing from your
individual perspective and nothing is resolved. It's almost like
the more you argue the more both of you are pushed into opposite
extremes.
There are also positive bonding patterns. With the example
of Steve and Jane, the responsible mother in Jane looks after Steve
by making sure all their finances are in order. She supports and
encourages him in his work. She is bonded with his good son self,
who tries to create the best furniture for their house to please
her. Then the pattern switches when, as a thank you for her support,
he cooks her dinner and eagerly waits for her to come home from
the office so he can take care of her. When he is in this nurturing
father self, she goes into needy daughter self and enjoys his attentions.
This is a positive bonding pattern because the feelings are good.
Bonding patterns are our primary way of making contact with others;
they are the way in which we are able to give and receive nurturing,
just like in the above example and in the original infant/parent
bonding. However, because they are like a blueprint, we behave in
ways that are only a part of our being; we are compelled to act
in a certain way.
One reason why long-term relationships fail is a couple
get stuck in a positive bonding pattrern. The feelings in it are
good but there is no longer any passion or sexuality. How can there
be between a good mother and a needy son? Another reason relationships
fail is the two people get stuck in a negative bonding pattern.
The judgment from each person's primary selves is so strong it gets
to a point where the two people can't stand being together and so
divorce. These bonding patterns also apply between groups of people.
Negative bonding patterns are responsible for ill-feeling between
families, anger between political parties and wars between countries.
Each part involved becomes more identified with their particular
position and so judgmental and angry from that position that they
feel justified in committing acts of emotional, psychological and
physical violence towards the party they are bonded with.
As individuals we need to "clean up our own backyards"
to make a difference on a larger scale. The more people who become
aware of what they are identified with and separate from their identifications
to embrace their opposites as well as their vulnerability, the more
positive the effect will be on a larger scale. There is no need
to get rid of your primary selves - you can have your favorites
- but you do need to honor those opposite selves, those disowned
selves in you and those which other people express as their primary
selves. And this means developing an ego that can be aware of the
totality of your being. An ego that can embrace opposite selves
and which enables you to have choice in how you will act. An Aware
Ego.
This is a dramatic shift for many people - most people
likely to come into contact with the concepts outlined here would
do so in a therapy situation. The problem is that most people do
not seek therapy and so there needs to be education and discussion
of the concept of selves constituting the identity in the broader
community. The concept and development of the Aware Ego in individual
and cultural identity needs to be taken up by the wider community
soon if we are all to share this world and participate in harmonious
relationships with each other.
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1. Consider
who in your life you really judge. Write down what it is you
judge about this person. This quality, or qualitites, are
what you disown. These are qualitites you need to integrate
into your own psyche so you can become whole.*
*Note: If you judge someone because they are violent, this
does not mean you have to become violent in order to become
whole. It simply means you have to look at what the violent
person has that allows them to be violent - coldness, which
gives you the ability to handle people in the world who are
cold to you, physical strength, anger, the ability to fight.
Basically, whatever kinds of people there are in the world,
you need to have available to you the qualities those people
have so you can protect yourself. This does not mean that
you use those qualities all the time - maybe you never do
- but you need to be able to access them in order to stand
up to and handle what might come your way. |
| 2. Now consider
the people who you are really in awe of. What is it about
them that you value so much? These are also qualitites you
disown. |
| 3. Finally,
now consider what are the opposite qualities to those you
judge and overvalue in the people you have identified above.
These qualities are problably those you identify with so are
characteristics of your primary selves |
| Common examples: |
| If you judge: |
Then your primary
self is
probably: |
| messiness |
tidy |
| loudness |
quiet |
| wildness |
sensible |
| selfishness |
generous |
| flirtatiousness |
reserved |
| irresponsibility |
responsible |
| laziness |
active |
| shyness |
outgoing |
| emotionality |
unemotional |
|
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If you are in awe
of,
or over-value: |
Then your primary
self
is probably: |
| sporting ability |
more mentally oriented |
| great intellectual ability |
not very intellectual |
| adventurousness |
more homebound |
| people who are "interesting" |
concerned with the more everyday |
| glamour |
ordinary |
| artistic ability |
rational |
| serenity |
stressed |
| social popularity |
more introverted |
| risk taking |
careful |
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For more information about Voice Dialogue,
visit www.voicedialogue.com.
There you will also find a list of voice dialogue facilitators in
Sydney, Australia, and links to sites with lists of facilitators
worldwide.
Astra Niedra is a Voice Dialogue facilitator
and teacher in Sydney. She writes a monthly newsletter called Daily
Voice Dialogue which you can subscribe to from www.voicedialogue.com
or for further information tel: 61-(0)2-9810 1130. |
