Smile To Your Sub-Personalities

BFNow Self-Study Module 1 - Exploration 3

[This is part of BFNow Self-Study Module 1: Self-Awareness and Self-Compassion. For more about the overall Self-Study program, please look at About BFNow Self-Study and BFNow Self-Study Orientation.]

If you haven’t done so already, let me encourage you to pause, relax and release, perhaps with three deep breaths.

Experiential

Today we’re going to combine the two previous experientials:

1. Review your list of sub-personalities, making any adjustments that feel appropriate.

2. Pick out a few that have some emotional charge for you. Perhaps there are some that you like but have a hard time acknowledging. Perhaps there are some that you don’t like. If there aren’t enough with charge on the list of your own sub-personalities, pick some from your list of sub-personalities in others (see PS below). Assemble a group of up to three in whatever combination makes sense to you.

3. Evoke a smile of happiness and ease, as you did in the Inner Smile experiential. Reread the instructions for the Inner Smile if you need to.

4. This time, instead of smiling to your organs, smile to your sub-personalities, especially to ones with the most charge.

5. Don’t try to change them, just turn towards and be with, each in turn, these charged aspects of yourself (or others).

6. Smile and relax. If you feel your relationship with that charged sub-personality soften, great. If you can more comfortably be with that part of you, great. If your relationship to that part doesn’t shift, that’s OK too. Just observe what’s real for you.

7. Once you feel you’ve covered enough of your charged sub-personalities, thank your sub-personalities as a group and take a few easy deep breaths.

What was your experience like? Make some notes in your journal as your reflect on your experience.

Carry this experiential into your day and find two more times to smile at your sub-personalities. Perhaps one of those times could be devoted to appreciating them all as a group.

Add some more notes in your journal at the end of the day.

If you have questions or comments, please post them here.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 1: Self-Awareness and Self-Compassion Overview page.]

PS – Psychological Defenses

In case you’re wondering “why include the sub-personalities of others?”, psychologists find that qualities in other people that annoy or disturb us, especially when our reactions seem out of proportion to their actual actions, are often indications of aspects of ourselves that we are not comfortable recognizing (our shadow) and/or indications of our earlier traumas. Regardless of why these behaviors in others trigger you, they are sore spots in you that invite healing.

This is known as projection and is one common example of psychological defenses. Let’s look at these more broadly:

Psychological defenses exist with the intent to protect us, yet because of the way they accumulate over time and without self-awareness, they often constrain us much more than is needed. Becoming aware of them is a powerful first step toward loosening those constraints.

These defenses are one of the territories we’ll be exploring in the course – a bit here in Module 1 and more deeply in Module 3. Here I’d like to start into that territory by describing some common defensive behaviors. You may already be familiar with these but I want to describe them explicitly so they become shared language.

First, let me say that a psychological defense is a defense against uncomfortable internal feelings. It may not appear “defensive” on the surface. It could seem aggressive or polished or detached or many other things on the outside. Many people lack the self-awareness to recognize that they are in a defensive reaction pattern while it is happening. Learning how to recognize these patterns in yourself is an important step toward healing the underlying emotional wounds. Learning how to recognize them in others is an important part of contributing to their healing and being able to successfully collaborate.

A key indicator that a behavior is a psychological defense is that the behavior seems out of proportion to or about more than the current situation. If a person no longer seems fully present, they are likely in a psychological defensive reaction. There are situations where some kind of externally-oriented defense is appropriate but that’s not what is meant by a psychological defense.

To get started into this big territory, I’d like to go through the four behavior patterns I mentioned as key concepts in the overview page and which were included in hOS Literacy Part 5 (as in the image above):

• Projection – If you are in denial about some of your own qualities (either positive or negative), you will likely be particularly sensitive to seeing them in others. Does someone have a behavior that particularly annoys you? Chances are good that you are uncomfortable with (and in some denial about) a similar pattern in yourself. Make peace with your own behavior through some combination of acceptance and change and you will be less reactive to that behavior in others.

• Compensation – If you have a quality or set of feelings that you want to hide, you may act out an exaggerated form of the opposite quality in an attempt to deceive yourself and others. Thus bullies often carry internal feelings of weakness and vulnerability. Similarly, internal rage gets covered over with an excessively “nice” exterior. Again, make peace with the suppressed feelings and your external behavior will come back into a proportional relationship with the present.

• Transference – Do you know someone who you feel behaves just like your mother (or some other person from your past)? If you lose touch with the uniqueness of the present-time person and start behaving toward them (or interpreting them) as if that person was your mother, you are in transference. We humans do this (unconsciously and often subtly) a lot, especially if we have unresolved emotional issues from those past relationships. As a result, transference frequently interferes with all kinds of present-time relationships. What are you defending against? The pain of whatever you feel didn’t work out well in the past. You are afraid that it will repeat in the present. Unfortunately, when you slip into the past via transference you will likely re-enact your own past patterns and thus make a repeat more likely. The way out of this cycle includes learning to pause, stepping back to witness yourself in reaction (rather than being the reaction) and reconnecting to the present. Learn from your earlier experiences but don’t try to “get it right this time” by re-enacting them via transference.

• Displacement – Sometimes strong feelings come up in a setting where we feel we can’t express them. Did your boss or your client just do something that upset you? If those feelings don’t get resolved, they may well pop up – out of proportion – in a “safer” situation. So you yell at your kids or vent about politics or get wild rooting for a sports team. The Empire Era supported a lot of downward displacement. You were free to abuse those “below” you in the hierarchy but you must not challenge those “above” you. What are you defending against? Expressing and even acknowledging your feelings in the original situation that gave rise to them.

These four are pretty common but they are also just a sample. We will explore additional patterns in Module 3.

What does this have to do with sub-personalities and self-compassion? The sub-personalities that have the most charge for us, especially those that most challenge our capacity for self-compassion, likely represent one of two things to us that connect directly to psychological defenses:

• Some sub-personalities represent the persistent feeling states that we are defending against.

• Others represent our defensive patterns as they emerge in particular contexts. They act as our defenders. They mean well but can do more harm than good as they lock us into non-optimal patterns from the past.

Not all sub-personalities are about defenses but the ones that most need our self-compassion often are.