Our Complex Selves

We are a lot more complex and intelligent than we give ourselves credit for. Much of our relationships happen within the sub and unconscious terrains of our mind in the form of complex negotiations between a variety of sub personalities or personas, each with it’s own agenda.

The best analogy I know of for understanding this is the complex inner dance occurs on a large scale in our American government with its laws, special interest groups, representatives, negotiations and votes that occur constantly on a dizzying variety of topics. Very few of us have the time to even begin to monitor Washington or notice even a smallest pieces of the business that occurs every day,  affecting the lives of all Americans.

The same is true inside. Within each of us is a complex system of chosen and inherited laws from our culture and ancestry and an ongoing conversation between the many pieces of our self that have been cultivated from the many paradoxical environments we have been exposed to in this world.

Each decision we make affects a powerful cast of characters within us that actively participate in the decision. Most of this happens too quickly for us to monitor, or lie in the invisible domains that we deny ownership of.  These parts of ourselves include special interest agendas, militants, innocents, wise ones, lovers, artists, those that want success, and those that want vengeance. There are emotions and thoughts, and an array of large and small choices littered throughout our past that still affect us, even though many of them, like our national laws from the eighteenth century, are outdated.

Rather than viewing ourselves and others as simple people with either good or bad intentions, it is helpful to learn to recognize the complexity of what is in fact going on. At any given time we may be simultaneously:

• Judging our partner and looking down at them with our critical parent
  

• Asking them not to judge us from our hurt child
  

• Testing them and provoking them in order to gather intelligence about how threatening they might be to us from our protector
  

• Denying vocally that we are spying on them at all from our politician
  

• Seeking revenge for past hurts that others who appeared similar have given us from our judge
  

• Wanting to turn our partner on sexually and then not following through to punish them and give our user a sense of power
  

• Resenting the frustration of all of this mixed motivation within ourselves from our peaceful one
  

• Afraid of being found out in our covert activity and hiding our true thoughts and feelings from our criminal
  

• Trying to control our partner to do it our way so we can be safe from our protector
  

• Being nice and not looking at our partners shadow as an unspoken deal in exchange for them not looking at ours
  

• Identifying with an angry judgment we inherited from our father that people who fail are not godly, and deserve to be disowned.
  

• Feeling the depression of lost innocence
  

• Feeling simple joy in each other’s presence
  

The list just goes on. It is challenging to even remember this list, let alone be conscious of this many voices simultaneously.

What is important to own in all of this is that even while most of this is not conscious, we are a lot more sensitive and intuitive about this than we give ourselves or others credit for. So while we may verbally be spinning things nicely to avoid getting slaughtered in the press of our spiritual critic, our partner may feel and understand many of the games we may be hiding even from ourselves. When they say yes to your request for love, it may in fact be a yes to a relationship that they understand will allow them to play out their wounds with you. When your partner says “no” to your love, it may be that they know that your needy one is piggy backing on your lover and they don’t want to be dragged down.

In the larger political scene many of us look on in dismay and wonder at the power marshaled to follow a path we believe to be uninformed and consequently destructive. While this is our view as an observer, transformation begins as we recognize our selves in every facet of the world out there and turn our attention to healing the relationships between the many divided identities we house.

Action: Take an important decision in your life. Write a list of pros and cons from your conscious perspective for that decision. Now explore deeper and notice what personas you are able to discern within you and each of their agendas for the decision.

Contents

Cresting the Waves:

A guide to sailing through life on

Relation-Ships

Dane E. Rose