Over the past 6 months I have been studying various approaches to psychotherapy. One of my most fascinating discoveries is the idea that our personalities are made up of many parts and that each part causes certain patterns in our behaviour. For example a person may have a part that causes them to procrastinate on important projects. Another person may have a part that causes them to be very shy in social settings. As we saw in an earlier video, a person may have a very strong inner critic part that is constantly making them feel like theyre not good enough. A person may have a comfort-eating part that causes them to eat sweet foods in order to numb negative emotions. All of these parts of the human psyche emerge for a reason. They each serve a purpose. And the purpose is usually to protect us in some way. It is often a traumatic childhood experience that causes a part to develop. For example the person who has a part that makes them feel shy in social settings may have been ridiculed as a child at school. As a result, they develop a shy part that makes them want to hide away from social places. This shy part of their psyche is trying to protect them from the pain they experienced in childhood but it can actually make the persons life worse by isolating them from social gatherings. Likewise, a persons comfort-eating part (that numbs negative emotions) may be trying to protect them from experiencing painful feelings from their childhood such as abandonment or feeling unworthy of love and belonging. So while the comfort-eating part has a positive intent (to protect the person from pain) it can usually make things worse by causing them to put on weight, interfering with their health and even activating their inner critic which makes them feel terrible - and so the cycle continues. As we learned in yesterdays video, at the heart of each person is a True Self. This part of us is compassionate, grounded and wise. I have learned that by accessing our True Selves we can begin to understand the rest of our personalities better. By accessing our True Selves we start to see why we have developed certain parts / patterns of behaviour. We can then start to uncover what these parts are protecting us from - which is usually traumatic childhood experiences buried in our unconscious minds. Once we become aware of the childhood experiences that caused these parts of us to emerge, we can then begin the work of healing and growth. The beautiful thing is that once we heal from wounds of our childhood, we can then start to transform protective parts of our personalities into ways of being that serve us better. The goal of this type of work is to be led by our True Selves because this part of us is a natural leader. This is known as Self-Leadership. Through Self-Leadership we can harmonise all of our parts / patterns so that they serve us in a healthy, fulfilling way. In todays video I explain some of the deep work I have been doing on myself to transform my perfectionist part into a healthy striving part. This has been truly revelational for me. Without doing this work on myself I may not be so comfortable posting these articles and videos because my perfectionist part would hold me back out of fear of what others would think. Now that I am driven more by healthy striving it is easier for me to follow my heart. For anyone interested in learning more about this fascinating subject I recommend reading about a type of psychotherapy called Internal Family Systems. I also learned a lot about perfectionism and healing through self compassion from Dr. Brene Browns excellent book The Gifts of Imperfection. Thanks for reading. Enjoy the video! Conor
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 11:48:20 +0000
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