In “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack I wrote about the idea that there is more than one of you inside. This article takes that idea one step further. Being divided is not something that needs fixing. The problem lies somewhere else, and it is worth knowing exactly where.
The sentence that needs two of you
When you are frightened, you might say something like this to yourself, silently: I’m frightened. And then: You’re frightened right now, aren’t you? It’s alright. It is the same when you are sad: I’m sad. Sad? You’re very sad, aren’t you.
Look closely and these are strange sentences. They only work if one of you is speaking and another is listening, and both of them are you. One part says it is sad, and another part answers the sadness. You can talk to yourself at all only because you are split into more than one part. That is not a sign that something is wrong with you. Every one of us is split like this to begin with.
Being divided is not an illness
How many parts of you are there, at the most basic level? Three. In broad outline a person is divided into three, and each of those three divides again, so in practice there are many more than three. The exact number is not what matters here.
You have heard of multiple personality disorder. That is what being divided looks like when it becomes an illness. But a perfectly healthy person is divided too. So the line between health and illness is not whether you are divided. It runs somewhere else.
Because everyone is divided, knowing yourself means knowing what state each part of you is in: for example, that one part of you is frightened right now and another is trying to comfort it. Then you can hear the different voices inside you, not just one. The aim is not to tidy yourself into a single voice and get rid of the rest. It is to know which parts are there and what state each one is in.
Divided, and still connected
The parts are separate, and yet they are connected to one another. That connection is why being divided does not turn into a real problem.
Suppose the frightened part says, I cannot do this, and another part answers, You are frightened. I will stay with you while we work out what to do. The fear has not gone away, but it is no longer on its own: another part knows about it. As long as the parts can talk like this, you can have several feelings at once and still live as one person. A healthy person is not healthy because everything is quiet inside. They are healthy because the parts know what is going on with one another.
When the parts lose touch with each other
The trouble starts when the gap between the parts grows too wide. One part goes through something, and the other parts know nothing about it. The experience stays with that one part and never reaches the rest of the person. The clinical term for this is dissociation. Taken all the way, it becomes multiple personality disorder.
When the connection is cut this far, a person gets pulled toward believing things that are not true as if they were fact. Fantasy takes over. This is why someone in this state keeps saying strange, off-the-wall things that seem to come out of nowhere. The parts no longer know about each other, so no part is there to catch those thoughts and hold them back. With nothing in control, they keep coming out.
That is the extreme end, and it is a clinical condition. Having several parts inside you, as everyone does, is something else. In everyday life, parts losing touch looks more like this. If you treat the angry part of you as if it did not exist, the anger can come back as a sudden outburst or as sarcasm. If you push away the part of you that wants recognition, because you are ashamed of it, you may find yourself clinging to other people’s praise. A feeling you push down does not disappear. It comes back through other things you do.
You can stay divided, then, as long as the connection between the parts stays alive.
You only ever watch how other people treat you
Each of us has a way of treating ourselves, and hardly anyone looks at it. What we look at instead is how other people treat us. Someone says something to you, and your mind goes: Why did he put it like that? Is he looking down on me? He is. Why would he say that to me? And you stay stuck on him, going over the same thoughts again and again.
But what is really bothering you is the way you treat yourself.
Because you look down on yourself
If you tell yourself all day that you are incompetent, an ambiguous remark from a colleague is likely to sound like proof that they look down on you too. The remark stings because it matches what you are already doing to yourself. It works the other way as well. When you treat yourself as worth something, you can weigh the same remark instead of taking it straight away as a judgement on you. You also start to notice the moments when other people value you, and you can be glad of them.
So the state your mind is in depends almost entirely on how you treat yourself, not on what other people do to you.
First you pay attention, then you see
Now look closely at the you who does the treating, the part of you that speaks to you and judges you. You will find that it treats you the way your parents treated you, even in the ways you could not stand back then. That is why you can end up so worn out, lonely and in pain.
This is what you need to find and see clearly: the way your parents treated you is the way you now treat yourself. But you cannot see it until you pay attention to it. Attention is love. Not loving yourself looks like indifference: not caring what goes on inside you. So turning your attention to your own mind, to whatever is happening in it, is already a way of loving yourself, and it has to come first. You do not see first and then take an interest. You take an interest first, and then you see.
My parents hurt me with exactly this, and here I am doing it to myself. Once you see that much, you can change course. Right. I will love myself instead.
In practice, loving yourself starts with a question. Why am I running myself down like this? Why do I keep telling myself I cannot do it? Ask yourself that, and stop the criticism right there. Then start treating yourself differently, in words like these.
What one part of you can say to another
You don’t have to be good at it. It’s fine to make a small mistake. It won’t kill you, and it doesn’t make you worthless to other people.
If one part of you can say this to another part, it does not matter how many parts you are divided into. The connection holds.
Related
- “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack
- Stay Until I Fall Asleep: The Fear That Never Grew Up
- There Is Nobody There to Love Yet
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board