Related: - [[Book - The Undiscovered Self]] - [[Book Self Under Siege]] - [[Book - The Birth and Death of Meaning An Interdisciplinary perspective on the problem of man]] - [[Book - The road less travelled and beyond]] - [[Book - The Body keeps the score]] Source [[Book - No bad Parts]] [[13-10-2023]] - **We were raised to believe in a mono-mind belief system, that we have only one mind.** - **We have multiple "parts", and "voices", within us, sometimes contradicting**. - **Mono-mind belief causes us to fear our parts, we believe that we must only have ONE thought and feeling. The need to "discipline, hide, ignore, fight" with ourselves**. - Historically, mono-mind perspectives asserted that underneath the mind's surface lies selfish, aggressive and pleasure-seeking instinctual forces. - Psychology - Freud's drive theory is pessimistic about human nature - Religious - Christian Theology - Man has fallen, sinful nature. "Heart deceitful above all things" - "John Calvin: “For our nature is not only utterly devoid of goodness but so prolific in all kinds of evil, that it can never be idle … The whole man, from the crown of the head to the sole, is so deluged, as it were, that no part remains exempt from sin, and, therefore, everything which proceeds from him is imputed as sin.”2" - **Culturally - "Worshipping of Willpower". Emphasis on Willpower, Self-Control. We need to discipline and use willpower to correct ourselves. to resist bad impulses.** - It also shaped how we make sense of inequality - "e.g the poor are lazy and lack of self-control." - **The mono-mind paradigm causes us to fear and hate ourselves because we think we only have one mind, which is flawed, and we cannot control it.** - "*The mono-mind paradigm can easily lead us to fear or hate ourselves because we believe we have only one mind (full of primitive or sinful aspects) that we can’t control. We get tied up in knots as we desperately try to, and we generate brutal inner critics who attack us for our failings. As Van Ness notes, “I spent so much time pushing little Jack aside. Instead of nurturing him I tore him to pieces…. Learning to parent yourself, with soothing compassionate love … that’s the key to being fulfilled.”6"* - **We need to reframe seeing the ego as a protector. Instead of forces that seek to destroy, they are parts trying to keep us safe.** - The collection of parts that these traditions call the ego are protectors who are simply trying to keep us safe and are reacting to and containing other parts that carry emotions and memories from past traumas that we have locked away inside. - It began to dawn on me that maybe these parts aren’t what they seem. Maybe, like children in dysfunctional families, they are forced out of their natural, valuable states into roles that sometimes can be destructive but are, they think, necessary to protect the person or the system they are in. So I started trying to help my clients listen to their troublesome parts rather than fight them, and was astounded to find that their parts all had similar stories to tell of how they had to take on protective roles at some point in the person’s past—often roles that they hated but felt were needed to save the client. **Get to know the "parts" within, and they will calm down and become valuable to the system.** - *Some discoveries I made about parts: - *Even the most destructive parts have protective intentions. Parts are often frozen in past traumas when their extreme roles were needed. When they trust it’s safe to step out of their roles, they are highly valuable to the system - What if i reframe and see "destructive behaviours" such as addictions as a way the parts are trying to protect the person? Will that generate more compassion for that person? - *"It’s common to believe that a person who gets high all the time is an addict who has an irresistible urge to use drugs. That belief leads to combatting that person’s urge with opioid antagonists, with recovery programs that can have the effect of polarizing the addictive part, or with the willpower of the addict. If, on the other hand, you believe that the part that seeks drugs is protective and carries the burden of responsibility for keeping this person from severe emotional pain or even suicide, then you would treat the person very differently. You could instead help them get to know that part and honor it for its attempts to keep them going and negotiate permission to heal or change what it protects."* - ==**Parts have body and carry burdens. The person learn to help the parts to unburden.**== - Burden get passed on. Parts can get frozen in time during the abuse. - **The author wrote that the Self is in every body, and cannot be damaged, doesn't have to develop, and possesses its own wisdom about how to heal internal as well as external relationships** - "*That’s the part that I call the Self. And after thousands of hours doing this work, I can say with certainty that the Self is in everybody. Furthermore, the Self cannot be damaged, the Self doesn’t have to develop, and the Self possesses its own wisdom about how to heal internal as well as external relationships. For me, this is the most significant discovery that I stumbled onto. This is what changes everything. The Self is just beneath the surface of our protective parts, such that when they open space for it, it comes forward spontaneously, often quite suddenly, and universally*." - **When we start to hold attention on one emotions, or thoughts, mindfully,.. it lead to whole range of feelings and thoughts -- trailheads. This exercise is "differentiation"** - "In this exercise you may have noticed that by simply focusing on one of your parts, you were separating (unblending) from it. In other words, suddenly there was a you who was observing and an it that was being observed. As I said in the introduction, you’ll find this type of separation in mindfulness practices, and it’s a great first step. Then you took the next step when you explored how you feel about it and noticed what other parts feel about it. When you feel angry or afraid of it, that wouldn’t be the Self, but other parts that are still blended with the Self."