Primary Selves And Disowned Selves

Embracing Our Selves: The Voice Dialogue Manual
by Drs. Hal and Sidra Stone

(Page 4 of 9)

We can see, then, that what is generally seen as the ego, or as one's personality, is basically the Protector/Controller selves and its friends. The job of the ego, as always, is to provide an executive function for the psyche. It needs to make choices, like a good CEO, to drive our psychological car, to bring order to the conflicting parts of the psyche. If the ego is the in fact the primary self system. the choices that we think we are making in life come from the consciousness and basic psychology of these particular selves. This is why people are so convinced of the rightness of what they feel and think. They are living in an identification with the primary self system and this is their reality.

Whatever the value structure of these "owned" Primary Selves, there are contrasting selves of equal and opposite energy that are disowned (or repressed. If a strong Pusher develops in order to have John be successful in the world, then the part of John that does not like to work, the part of him likes to play or just to "be" will be disowned.

The most common personality developed in our culture is one in which there are strong Power Selves and where vulnerability has been totally or largely disowned. In this situation, the Primary Selves allow an individual to operate in the world with authority and power. In this way, one is safe and less likely to be hurt or victimized. The selves that lose out in this process are, of course, ones that have to do with vulnerability, sensitivity, shyness, "beingness" and the expression of real feelings and emotions. These are the selves that are seen as subversive and possibly even dangerous by the more powerful Primary Selves. Judgment towards others always comes from our primary self system.

Jane is identified with her Pleasing Mother self. She is always available to people and doing things for people and never gives priority to her own needs. Her Selfish self and her Vulnerable Child are both disowned. How is Jane to ever know this? Her concept of her personality or ego is, of course, this Pleasing Mother self. She would not call her behavior by that name. She would just say that this is just who she is, that she has always been this way. It is not a problem for her. It is true that she gets migraine headaches and is not sleeping well at night, but since her Primary Selves determine her perceptions of her world, she would not connect these difficulties to the way in which she behaves in the world. These Primary Selves are the window or the glasses through which each of us sees the world. They represent our ego reality until we do the work that separates us from this limited reality and helps us to give birth to a new Aware Ego. The following technique can help us to discover the fact that we are, indeed, identified with a group of Primary Selves and can help us to determine what, exactly, they are.

We begin by searching for our disowned selves, the ones that represent values that oppose those of our primary selves. This is relatively easy. Just take a moment and ask yourself the following questions. Whom is it in your life that you cannot stand? Whom do you hate? Whom do you judge? What political figure pushes your buttons? If you can discover the quality that you hate, judge and cannot stand in another person, then you have the essential ingredient of one of your disowned selves. Conversely, whom or what do you overvalue? Who is so wonderful that you are a mere nothing in comparison? Is there somebody you would like to resemble, if only it were possible?

If you can discover and isolate the quality or qualities that you overvalue, then, too, you have a disowned self or selves. Let us see how this process works.

George is a very successful trial lawyer. He has the reputation of being tough but fair. He hates "wimps". A "wimp" is someone who is weak and vulnerable and who cannot take care of himself or herself. A wimp cries a lot and always seems to be victimized by the world. Unfortunately, George's daughter fulfills all these requirements. George is very hooked into her because she suffers terribly at school and with her friends. Everyone seems to take advantage of her. In his growing years, George had parents who were very strict with him, especially his father. George's Primary Selves were very much identified with power to make up a powerful Operating Ego. These included a Pusher, a Money Maker, an Ambitious self, a Perfectionist, a Controlling Father self, and a very strong Power Broker. Vulnerablity, weakness of any kind, shyness, all became an anathema to these Primary Selves.

Every disowned self returns to haunt us in our lives over and over again. Whatever we disown, life brings to us in relationshhip. As we have said in our "Embracing Our Selves" book, every disowned self becomes one of God's little heat seeking missiles. We marry our disowned selves or we hate the people that are in our lives that carry them. Our children often live them out or they become our business partners or our enemies or all combinations of the above. George's daughter lives out all his disowned material. Until George is able to separate his Aware Ego from his Primary Selves, he will never be able to learn to honor the selves on the other side and, perhaps in that process, free his daughter from her role as the family victim.

We feel that these disowned selves present each of us with an unparalleled opportunity to learn and to grow. We must, however, stand back from the people in our lives that cause us pain and stress and recognize them as teachers that are essential for our own personal development. The greater the hatred and judgment, the more powerful is the disowned self operating within us. George's daughter provides him with a map to his disowned selves and, through these, a recognition of his primary selves and the possibility of developing an Aware Ego.

Jane hates powerful dominating women. She sees herself as being more loving, spiritual and compassionate. Her system of Primary Selves developed as a reaction formation against a forceful and dominating mother. Now she hates aggressive, dominating women. We may be sure that life will bring her a series of aggressive dominating women for her to fight with and suffer over until she learns the lessons of disowned selves. Her best friend is such a person. Jane says, "I can't understand why I'm friends with her. We're so opposite. Most of the time I don't know if I'm loving her or hating her!" On the other side we have her oldest daughter, a willful, dominating young lady who, at the age of five, is already creating for Jane a stormy household, the opposite of what she always wanted in her own family.

Embracing and honoring a disowned self does not mean that one needs to become that self. It simply means that one must disengage from the Primary Self system and learn to honor the selves on the other side. It is not necessary to try to change one's behavior or to become somebody different. One need simply say something like, "Look, I recognize you. You terrify me and I cannot let you take over my life, but I do know that you are there and I will be aware of you and I will listen to your words. I will feel your feelings and I will honor you as best I can."

When disowned selves first come out, they are often absolute terrors. Once they are out, however, we find that what they want is to be acknowledged, to be honored, to be listened to and taken seriously, just in the same way that you and I need to be taken seriously.

Here, of course, is crux of the matter. These selves, as we have said from the beginning, are real people. They inhabit our bodies, but they are real people. When they are ignored, they get nasty and they become vindictive towards us. The longer and deeper that they are imprisoned, the crazier they tend to become so when they finally emerge, it is often in a very primitive form, "proving" for the Primary Selves that they were properly disowned in the first place!

If one has been forced to disown natural instinctual energies as most of us have, these energies build up power in the unconscious and become frightening, perhaps even destructive. In this disowned state, they may develop unnatural power over us. They become our hated enemies. In their extreme forms, we sometimes refer to them as "daemonic."

A Protestant minister has disowned his sexuality over many years. In the course of his therapy, he dreams that he is trying to wrestle a drunk penis into a cold shower. His sexuality was not drunk to begin with. It was just sexuality. Disowned over time, the sexuality accrued greater and greater energy and became more and more difficult to control. It picked up the power of the Dionysian archetype and now it is a drunk penis and he is having great difficulty wrestling it into the cold shower. In a few years, if nothing were to change, we can probably assume that it would no longer be manageable and then there might well be a more serious consequence of this disowning process.

Does this mean that our minister has to live out his sexuality in the world? Not necessarily so. It means that he has in him feelings and a voice that wishes to express those feelings. It means he has phantasies about sexuality, yearnings about sexuality. He must separate the Aware Ego from the Primary Self System and begin to embrace both sides. He has to learn to live with his Monk and with Dionysius. He must learn to honor both selves and what they represent. What he will actually do to honor these energies is his to decide. We cannot tell him what to do. Hopefully, he will have an Aware Ego making this decision for him. As therapists, we see our job as facilitating the energies and helping to clarify the nature of these conflicts. Honoring the selves does not mean letting them take over one's life. If someone is very constricted and suddenly discovers the freer, more flowing selves, our job as therapists is not to support the new flowing selves against the constriction of the more traditional selves. All this would do is substitute one extreme for the other. Both sides have a right to live, and we see our job as enabling people to embrace these opposites by helping them to learn how to hold the tension of these opposing forces.

None of us can be saved from the reality of our disowned selves. There is nothing pathological in this situation. Each of us at this moment is identified with a Primary Self system and each of us has a disowned or less-owned self system that is operating. No amount of psychological work can save us from this condition. The unconscious is unconscious! We know what we know and we do not know what we do not know. Wisdom is, at least in part, the knowledge of this reality. And what a relief we can experience if we truly accept this!

About the Author

Hal Stone, Ph.D. and Sidra Stone, Ph.D. are the co-creators of Voice Dialogue. They are hopeless romantics and, as clinical psychologists with a combined experience of about 80 years, they are committed to keeping the magic and vitality in relationships. They have co-authored five books. Their latest book, Partnering: A New Kind of Relationship, sums up a lifetime of wisdom. Their books are available at local bookstores or from Amazon.com. www.delos-inc.com