THE HUMAN PSYCHE WORKS
The Self and the subpersonalities may be thought of as a set of perceptual filters or frameworks the Ego can look through — an assortment of perspectives on one’s self, life, and the world — or as different ways the Ego can tell the story of its life using a variety of narratives. They may also be thought of as different hats the Ego can wear or psychosocial roles it can play. Mature, psychologically healthy people can consciously choose, most of the time, which version or versions of themselves they operate as. But someone with limited psychological development — or a more mature person in temporary, stressful circumstances that trigger the survival strategies of one or more subpersonalities — might have no capacity to choose. The availability of the Self’s perspectives and hats depends on conscious cultivation of our horizontal wholeness and its four facets.
A large percentage of people in the Western world seem to be at the mercy of how their subpersonalities react to their circumstances. Social settings, relationships, and traumatic events trigger or evoke particular subs, which then dominate consciousness, choice, and behavior. Many Westerners have no awareness of the Self and no ability to access it, no realization that they have other options; their consciousness is entirely identified with their subpersonalities. You could say that, at any given moment, they are one of their subpersonalities… until their circumstances abduct them into another sub. And any one of us, no matter how mature, can on occasion get locked into the rut of a subpersonality that confines us to the role of Victim, for example, or that of Conformist, Addict, Tyrant, Critic, or counterfeit guru.
When identified with a subpersonality, we simply react to our perceived circumstances. But as we cultivate our ability to observe and act from the Self, we become proactive. When our Ego is identified with the Self, we have multiple behavioral options. With the Self’s many resources, we’re far less likely to get stuck in a rut or hijacked by a subpersonality.
Soul and Spirit
Like the Self and the subpersonalities, Soul and Spirit, too, are filters or frameworks, but they are transpersonal ones, and most people access them far less often than the Self and subs. We might imagine the Soul as the psychospiritual ground into which the 3-D Ego can learn to sink roots. Spirit can be likened to the heavens above, or the air, the wind (the breath of the world),15 the atmosphere, the entire cosmos, cosmic consciousness, or the great Mystery — the ultimate context within which the 3-D Ego is embedded.
When anchored in our 3-D Egos, we understand ourselves as agents or handmaidens for Soul. The Soul, after all, is the dimension of our human psyche that knows what’s really worth doing with our “one wild and precious life,” as poet Mary Oliver puts it.16 Soul holds the knowledge of what we individually were born to do and to be. The Ego, on the other hand, knows how to get things done, to make things happen, but it doesn’t know from its own experience what to offer its life to. The genius and beauty of the mature 3-D Ego is that it possesses the ability and creativity to make real the Soul’s passions. Indeed, the 3-D Ego is the only means by which the Soul’s desires can be consciously manifested in our world. This is why so many mystical traditions speak of a love affair between Ego and Soul, the Lover and the Beloved: Each possesses something the other entirely lacks and longs for. Ego possesses the heart, hands, senses, imagination, and intelligence to manifest, but doesn’t know what’s worth manifesting; it yearns to know the deeply authentic purpose of the Soul. Soul possesses the song that’s worth singing, the dance that wants to be danced, but it has no way to manifest this in the world; the Soul yearns to be made real by the Ego. Ego is long on know-how and short on know-why; the opposite is true of the Soul.
As 3-D Egos, we also understand ourselves as agents or emissaries of Spirit. We experience ourselves as integral participants in the unfolding story of the Universe, as filaments in the vast, singular consciousness that moves through everything. We discover ourselves to be essential extras in a cosmic drama in which Spirit plays hide-and-seek with itself, a pageant in which Spirit occasionally catches a glimpse of its own evolution through the consciousness of self-aware beings. Within this (upperworld) frame of reference, the Ego is entirely at home in the Universe and is cultivating a personal relationship with Spirit, sometimes experiencing itself as a child of Spirit, at other times as Spirit’s Beloved or Friend, Partner or Collaborator. A person with a mature Ego understands that by serving as an agent for Soul, she’s also serving as an agent for Spirit.
Immature Egos
A person with an immature Ego, in contrast, understands herself as primarily or solely an agent for herself — or at least acts that way, whatever she might believe. Western and Westernized cultures have devolved to the point that many of their members perpetually experience themselves as “looking out for number one.” They have little or no direct experience of Self, Soul, or Spirit (or of truly belonging to a human community or to the Earth community or of our interdependence with all things).
Because immature people experience the world, self, and others primarily through their subpersonalities, we can say that their subpersonalities are substitutes (subs) for Self, Soul, and Spirit. (This is another reason for abbreviating subpersonalities as subs.)
Essential Services Provided by Subpersonalities
As we’ve seen, the function of the subpersonalities is to protect us, especially psychologically and especially during childhood: they keep us safe by keeping us small. I mean small in the psychological and social senses: relatively powerless, nonassertive, harmless, invisible, and unaware; or, conversely, psychologically small by appearing socially, economically, or politically “big” through the wielding of immature, dominator power over others. The four groups of subpersonalities accomplish this in different ways.
The subs protect us by influencing us to act in ways they believe will reduce the chances of our being criticized by others, or humiliated, rejected, ostracized, disempowered, injured, left to die, or killed. Most of them are very good at what they do. Without them, most of us would not have survived as well as we have. We owe them a lot. Probably our lives.17
WHOLING, THE FOUNDATION FOR TRUE HEALING
The Nature-Based Map of the Psyche serves as a guide to the healing and wholing practices foundational to becoming fully human.18 By wholing, I mean the cultivation of the Self, including all four of its facets. Wholing — which enables us to understand both the limitations and the gifts of our wounded or fragmented subpersonalities — is a necessary step in optimal human development.
Wholing is the foundation for true healing. Some degree of personal wholing must precede any deep healing, not the other way around. In Western societies, many believe we can’t be whole — truly loving, highly creative people contributing to the world — until we have sufficiently healed from our childhood wounds. But I believe the opposite is closer to the truth: Deep psychological healing is the result of learning how to embrace our woundedness and fragmentedness from the cultivated perspective and consciousness of the Self. We must to some degree cultivate our wholeness before we can truly be healed. Wholing comes first and is foundational.
In the predominant paradigm in Western psychotherapy, the therapist acts as the agent of the client’s healing. The mature therapist accomplishes this by being present to the client with the resources of the therapist’s Self. It’s the therapist, in other words, who supplies the wholeness.19 This Western mode of psychological healing provides a great service, especially when the client has little access to her Self, but this is not the sort of in-depth healing from which we most benefit. It’s more of a temporary fix or a relatively shallow healing that might later reveal deeper wounds. The more in-depth healing occurs when we learn to embrace our fragmentedness from our own wholeness. This is self-healing — or, more precisely, Self-healing (healing accomplished by an Ego rooted in the Self).20
But
