Illuminate the Committee in Your Head – Day 4
Illuminate the Committee in Your Head Day 4
By Stephanie Foley
Day 4 – What is a Subpersonality?
Each of us is a crowd. There can be the rebel and the intellectual, the seducer and the housewife, the saboteur and the aesthete, the organizer and the bon vivant – each with its own mythology, and all more or less comfortably crowded into one single person.
~Piero Ferrucci
Today’s objective is to understand what a subpersonality is, and how they form out of from habitual reactions, repression, wounds, and latent gifts. Tomorrow you will do an exercise to identify a few specific subpersonalities, a.k.a. committee members. Think back to the list of roles you made and released earlier this week. Many parts comprise your identity and you have many qualities, roles, habits and so on. At any time, you may over-identify with any one aspect and lose your sense of wholeness. All of your qualities and moods, positive or negative, higher or lower, are facets of your personality that can be called subpersonalities by transpersonal psychologists.
Psychosynthesis takes the position that all of us have multifaceted multidimensional personalities. Yet underneath the variety of experiences, the many partial identifications, we have the possibility of a sense of “I” as the personal centered self.
~John Cullen Ph.D.
A subpersonality can be a habitual reaction, and while it is only a part of the personality, we can become over identified with it. When this happens, we place its needs and perspectives above all else. A subpersonality might also be a part of ourselves we disown – a shadow that to us may seem like an inner monster. In this case, we meet none of its needs, and deny its perspectives or actively fight against these perspectives when we see them in the outer world. Subpersonalities can be left behind as wounded parts of ourselves as well.
