Why Should You Trust Me and My Premises?
If you trust me (the author) enough or don't care about my credentials and beliefs,
go here.
You don't know my background, personality, or motives. I've studied human
behavior most of my
73 years - professionally
since 1979. Because my premises here about personality subselves and wounds
are probably alien to you, I expect you to question whether my knowledge,
perceptions, and reasoning are credible. For an overview of my background,
read this and return. If you're
curious about my current core beliefs about
people,
relationships, families, and
"problems," follow the
links.
My undergraduate
training and 17 years' experience in engineering validated the now-accepted
idea that the behavior of groups of people can be understood via
My social-work masters degree training (1979 - 81) and multi-year study and practice of
indirect (Ericksonian) hypnosis in the 1980s convinced me of the ceaseless
dynamic,
mysterious interplay between our unconscious, semi-conscious, and conscious
minds. With new-therapist zeal, I took hundreds of hours of post-graduate
seminars, laced with reading several dozen clinical theory and practice
books, to try and "understand" this profound mystery.
The subjects
included Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP);
personality disorders; healthy grieving, anger management, healing shame and
guilt; divorce causes and impacts; brief therapy, paradoxical therapy (the Milan Group),
Transactional Analysis (Erik Berne), and Gestalt therapies (Fritz Perls et.
al.); guided imagery; the therapeutic paradigms of Murray Bowen, Carl
Whitaker, Salvador Minuchin, Virginia Satir, Peggy Papp, Harville Hendrix,
John Gardner, Jay Haley, Richard Fisch, Paul Watzlawick, Joseph Zinker, and
many more.
I was licensed as a Certified Social Worker (CSW) in Illinois,
and as a Parent Effectiveness (P.E.T.)
Trainer and a
Rainbows (divorce-adjustment)
facilitator. I had no initial training in dissociative disorders. Like most
colleagues, I paid little attention to Multiple Personality Disorder
because it seemed rare and my instructors ignored it.
Wrong.
This rich stew of ideas fed my evolving a theory of family-
and how they
affected human personality development. I began a solo psychotherapy practice in 1981, specializing in working with stepfamily adults,
couples, and kids. I
got early clinical training in this specialty from the writings of Dr.
Clifford
Sager and Esther Wald (University of Chicago), and a weekend seminar with Drs. Emily and John
Visher who founded the nonprofit Stepfamily Association of America in 1979.
My hundreds of average Midwestern clients
allowed me to reality-test and meld the ideas of all my many academic
teachers into this multi-topic stress-prevention
In 1986, I "accidentally" discovered
that I was the son of two functional alcoholics, and came from a very
dysfunctional (low-nurturance) ancestry. That life-changing epiphany
explained much about the painful qualities of my life, including two divorces.
I began to learn all I could about what being an
"ACoA" (Adult Child of Alcoholics) meant, and what could be done
about it. As I read and attended seminars about this and
addictions, including
codependence and our
Inner Child(ren), began to see a pattern
in what my clients and my own personal therapy were showing me. The
pattern had three themes:
When
asked, clients
described their childhood families as having relatively few of
these
nurturance traits;
They
sketched their and their mates' family trees as
having a significant number of these
traits, and...
My
therapy
clients' presenting problems and life choices had exactly the same
traits
as typical ACoAs, though many said their early caregivers weren't chemically
dependent. One common client trait was
divorce and/or a series of
unstable, unsatisfying relationships. Another was an almost universal
inability of adult clients and couples to think clearly and
communicate (problem-solve)
effectively. Many had minor
kids who were "acting out" or "troubled."
I began to sense a connection among these three, but didn't know what it
was. None of my post-graduate training had affirmed or described a
connection, or
proposed what to do
about it.
By "chance," I attended a 1990 seminar led by Chicago psychologist Dr. Richard Schwartz on
inner-family-systems (IFS) therapy.
It provided the missing link between my troubled clients' three patterns. His IFS
concepts, based on a decade of study and practice, made instant, intuitive sense to me. I signed up for two
nine-month externships with Dr. Schwartz at the University of Illinois, and
began my first faltering steps working with my clients' and my personality "parts"
(subselves).
Since then, I have had hundreds of clinical and personal experiences of
hearing and seeing people's subselves in action. I have watched scores of
average women and men
react with amazement when their
an array of
reactive
- and their
wise, resident
- would "speak" (cause
thought streams and emotions), when respect-fully invited to.
I
watched people's physical posture, facial expression, and vocal tone change
subtly or clearly, as different parts took turns running the
client's inner family of subselves. I have witnessed several hundred troubled
people interviewing their subselves, and learning that these personality parts
were certain they were living in a time decades before - the
"bad old (childhood) days." I have listened to people
cry and
laugh as they recounted having inner-staff or
council meetings, and
journaling
live dialogs
between their conflicted or distrustful subselves.
I began to study dissociative disorders intensely, including multiple personalities. I
read three helpful books on
"voice dialog,"
a kind of therapy by veteran psychologists Hal Stone and Sidra Winkleman
Stone. I adapted their ideas, and found the high majority of my
clients very receptive and responsive to them.
The Stones' book "Embracing
Each Other" helped me understand
"relationship difficulties." A recovering colleague gave me this poetic
excerpt
about a stepfamily-couple's subselves from Michael Ventura's book
Shadow
Dancing in the USA. I began to see more and more evidence of false
selves and their effects in and outside my clinical office, including in the
media.
As Dr. Wayne Dyer wrote, "You'll See
It When You Believe It." The
fact that the
Center for Self Leadership (CSL) staff has been conducting clinical training workshops
internationally since 1995 testifies that I am one of many who
sees the reality of inner-families of subselves and
their effects.
The annual CSL conferences in Chicago have been attended by hundreds of
clinicians from all over the country who are finding the inner-family
concept real, useful, and viable. International interest is growing as I
write this.
|
A core
premise in this site is that
low-nurturance childhood years
promote the formation of a survival-motivated
This needs to be independently validated by formal
research. If this premise is true, the social implications are as
impactful as discovering fire.
|
Another core
premise here is that
until well into true (vs. pseudo) wound-recovery,
people ruled by false selves tend to pick each other as mates
and associates repeatedly, despite painful results. Veteran
marital counselor Dr. Harville Hendrix (Keeping the Love You Find) and
others seem to agree. Logic is
clearly not useful in explaining this.
I have studied and experienced personal
recovery from a low-nurturance
(traumatic) childhood since 1987. I have met hundreds of people
(including clinicians) who spontaneously testified they came from
childhood lacking psychological and spiritual nourishment, and who were
clearly Grown Wounded Children
What I can report factually is that the two premises above seem to be
born out in interviews with hundreds of average, random
and
stepfamily clients since 1990.
Since 1981, my stepfamily clients have been referred from dozens of different lay and
clinical sources around Chicago. I continue to get un-solicited feedback
like this from people who are
exploring these inner-family ideas in their own lives.
As far as my motives for maintaining this Web site and my zealous focus on
breaking the silent [wounds + unawareness]
causing most major
personal, family, and social problems - I want my life to matter by
contributing to the common good. I want to use my knowledge, talents,
and limitations (e.g. my wounds) to raise public awareness of the toxic
link between low childhood nurturance,
and
and (re)divorce. In studying relationships and
family dynamics across almost three
decades, I've never seen the link that is proposed here. This has become a
compelling
life mission for me.
At 73, I'm not interested in wealth, fame,
prestige, or power. My payoff is epitomized by a sexual-abuse survivor with
whom I worked for several years toward harmonizing her terribly chaotic
inner family of subselves. She called unexpectedly one Christmas day to say "You've
been on my mind, Pete. I just cal-led to say thanks so very much for the
(inner-family) work we did. It has made a major positive difference in
my life! I'm passing it on to other people now..." Her true Self was
speaking...
AH!
If
Subselves are Real, What Does That Mean?
It means that you and people you care for are at risk of these common
personal and relationship
It also means:
-
if you're an unrecovering GWC
you risk
unintentionally enabling the [wounds + unawareness] cycle in your
children. If you're a human-service professional, you risk giving flawed or harmful service
to your clients and patients; and it
means...
-
you have the opportunity (and moral
obligation) to alert other people to the lethal [wounds +
unawareness] cycle, and why and how to break it (Lesson 8 here);
Reflect on what you think and
feel now compared to when you started reading this article. What
have you learned? Has your attitude about subselves, wounds, health,
parenting, and marriage shifted? If you want to learn more about normal (vs. pathological) false-self wounding and it's effects, I suggest you read any of the
books by Hal and Sidra Stone, Richard
Schwartz, Virginia Satir, and/or John Rowan.
If you're motivated to study normal personality subselves more now, go
here. If your subselves aren't so
motivated, read on...
2)
If
You're Skeptical...
Premise: human resistance to change or new experience comes from
of
significant discomfort. Your anxieties come
from prior life experience ("Do not put
your hand in boiling water!") So skepticism about or rejection of the concept of false-self wounding and its
impacts probably means some of your subselves fear that accepting these ideas would
cause you significant discomforts like these:
"Accepting this idea about personality subselves means
something
bad will happen to me." This kind of vague
anxiety is typical of
controlling your personality. A related option is
that your
(a common
Guardian subself) is
in charge. A
would
generate thoughts like "I'm not sure about this idea about
true Self and false self. It's probably worth
more study before I decide whether to believe this or not."
Or...
"Accepting this personality-subselves concept means that
I
and/or someone I care about is sick or crazy." No,
it means that you or they are normal.
Or...
"Accepting this false-self idea means that 'someone
else' has been making my life decisions, and
I'd have to mistrust my own perceptions and
judgments." If you feel this, your dilemma becomes: "Do I want to continue
living as a hostage to misguided, protective sub-selves who don't
trust there's a viable safer/better way for me to live? How will
I feel about this when I'm approaching my death?"
Or...
"Accepting the [wounds + unawareness] cycle means that
I would have to blame my parents and grandparents for being
inadequate caregivers, which is intolerable."
|
Parents who co-create
low-nurturance family environments
and foster psychological wounds deserve compassion, not blame
- partly because their ignorant ancestors and society were unable to fill
their early
psychological and spiritual
needs well enough. |
Reality Check
