Do you ever get to the end of a day and say to yourself,
“That’s not how I wanted it to go…”
Just about all the decisions we make, preferences we have, determinations about who we will and won’t have in our lives, reactions we have, and actions we take, are born out of familiar, well-worn patterns that were set up when we were 3 and 5 and 7 and 9 years old. We believe that we have choice, but every choice is actually determined by those patterns. When it comes right down to it, we don’t really have choice…or more accurately, we don’t have conscious choice, since these patterns operate mostly from our unconscious.
So when there are days that didn’t turn out like you want, it turns out that they did go the way you wanted, or rather, some part of you did. Are you curious to know about who (or what) within you is doing that? What does it want? How can you get in touch with it?
Definitions: Ego, Self, parts, and psyche
The ego is that aspect of us that has consciousness, so I frequently refer to the ego as the conscious. It is that aspect that is aware of ourselves and what is around us. It protects us, puts food on the table, and drives us to accomplish. Our ego is the “doing” aspect of ourselves.
The Self is that aspect of us that is not conscious, so I frequently refer to the Self as the unconscious. The Self contains many hidden treasures as well as obscured obstacles and even our demonic selves. What’s in our unconscious is very much vaster than our conscious.
Both the ego and Self consist of parts, also known as sub-personalities or selves. (Note that “Self” with an uppercase “S” refers to the vast unconscious, while our “selves” with a lowercase “s” refers to our parts or sub-personalities. (The Self includes other things besides sub-personalities, but more on that later.)
Note: In general, the ego resists having a relationship with the Self, and works hard to prevent direct contact, employing a range of strategies for doing that.
The term psyche refers to the whole system, both ego and Self, including all their constituent parts. Not only does each of us have an individual psyche, but groups have a collective psyche, complete with ego, Self, and parts. This applies to any sort of collective, whether it be a sports team, a work team, a church group, the people who live in a town or a region, people of a particular race, ethnicity, or gender, or the people a nation.
What’s the split, and why does it need to be healed?
A split refers to a division in the psyche, wherein two fundamental polarities express. These polarites are often at odds with each other, sometimes in deep conflict. Often one side of the polarity sets itself up as the “correct” or “good” side and judges the other side to be “wrong” or “unacceptable” or “evil”. Before we go any further, let’s look at the definitions of some terms and some fundamental principles.
Here are some examples of the split:
- In an individual psyche, the split is between our ego and our unconscious, or it can be between two or more parts (sub-personalities).
- In the U.S., the national collective psyche is split between ideological differences.
- The U.S. has polarized itself with much of the rest of the world.
- In the Middle East, a polarization has existed for thousands of years, embodied today by Israel vs. Palestine.
Each of these four examples of splits is essentially an ego/Self split. In the split within the U.S., the collective psyche is split between two large ego parts. In the split between the U.S. and the rest of the world, the U.S. acts as an ego, disconnected from Self. And in the Middle East, two parts of the global psyche are split.
How does a split get healed?
The word heal should not be taken literally, as in “all traces of a wound disappear”. In the psyche, the wounded parts don’t actually heal. For more on wounds, see The Stages of Development of the Psyche. Throughout my work you’ll see this concept repeated — “Healing” means changing our relationship to what is.
Healing a split involves one of two possibilities:
- Changing the relationship of one polarizing side to the other side.
- Having a separate party that sides with neither of the two polarities and that develops a relationship with both sides of the polarity.
Range, mobility, and real choice
As I said earlier, we don’t actually have conscious choice.
Imagine having access to a lot more than only those parts that we developed as coping strategies to life. Imagine being able to be more easily deal with the bumps and grinds of life. Imagine being more creative and inspired, more solid, and better able to deal with obstacles.
Increasing our range makes available an expanded set of sub-personalities that incorporates more than just those that have been operating, in charge since childhood. Having an expanded range gives us more different types of expression, like having a greater range of colors on an artists palette…we can express more “colors” of the human “rainbow”.
But just having the range, while it can be quite interesting to know, doesn’t make it useful – unless we can navigate between and among the different parts. Having mobility, we can consciously bring in different parts of ourselves at different times.
Increased range and mobility provide us with real choice.
In Shadow Coaching, we work on bringing about conscious choice, using a number of methods that help create or strengthen a relationship that brings about healing the split between our ego and parts that reside in our Self.