I was pleased to get an email from a reader asking: “… I had a question about self states or emotional states. How do I get out of a self state or an emotional state? For good.”
The short answer is we want to recognize self-states as important parts of ourselves that historically could not find a way to stay conscious, given our sensitivity and complexity. Growing up and getting stronger means they can start to rattle and make themselves known, and we want to commit to honoring their request to be in relationship, and begin sorting out who are they really and what will our relationship to them be? Some of these emerging self-states are actually the internalized/introjected parental and authority figure “others”, who, populating our complexes, contributed to our rejection of parts of ourselves. Lots more on that via Donald Kalsched’s work with the archetypal predator/persecutor complexes. Not going there now.
Having some additional communications with the person asking the question, I am going to connect some dots tailored to the backstory. Note, recognizing one’s sensitivity and complexity, potentially a mixed blessing at best, seems actually to me like winning life’s most important lottery!
Of note, most of us have grown up believing the key to success in life depends upon the development of a well functioning ego based consciousness, which then can identify and apply best practices in everything we do. It is interesting to remember Donald Winnicott, from the psychoanalytic side, believed a successful, integrative analysis resulted in one achieving a unit – self personality. In contrast, a Jungian perspective recognizes a multiplicity in consciousness as the rule. Jung’s concept of ego and Self, imaged as the ego-Self Axis, is extremely useful. It lends its self to a non-denominational, ancestral, archetypal understanding of consciousness in relationship to the unconscious, or collective consciousness. It also addresses the developmental stage dynamics working for and against remembering what has been unbearable. We will close with more on that below.
I am thinking the reader is familiar with self – states through prior study or analysis, or, has reviewed some of my posts on the importance of the concept (see Philip Bromberg)
In his (my Source Quote) discussion, Bromberg notes when at times he might think a person’s mood has shifted, he has learned rather to consider a shift in self – states as the explanation for the change in mood. He then offers this review:
“For those who are not yet totally at home with how the concept of self – state is different from a shift in affect or mood, let me offer a one sentence clarification: Self – states are highly individualized modules of being, each configured by its own organization of cognitions, beliefs, dominant affect and mood, access to memory, skills, behaviors, values, actions, and regulatory physiology. (Chuck’s bold)
These highly individualized modules of being sound like active, dynamic willing entities with minds of their own!
Take a minute to think about what this (having your own cast of highly individualized modules of being characters within) might mean to you. And, where might they come from?
We can start with orienting to the concept of evoked companions. When I just googled evoked companions, an excellent paper popped up reviewing some of the literature around the concept as it informs the development of spontaneous imaginary characters from early childhood and throughout our lives. And the importance of recognizing this capacity for interacting with these figures as a power, not a pathology. For here, it serves to provide context around our experience of finding unknown presences in us, coming into our world, which can be confusing and frightening.
An early mentor put it this way: After about the first 24 – 48 hours of being born, the infant is never alone, because enough actual interactions have occurred with the mother and caregivers to allow the infant to experience connections with the evoked companions; something of each of those experiences with the actual others taking care of us, provides psyche with enough to begin forming internal representations of the holding environment; when a new need arises, the associated state then evokes internal representations of the presences of the caregivers who have attended to us earlier in our very short time in the world. We are wired to begin connecting, with the help of these evoked companions. See my Developmental Considerations for more on the importance of of the gradual evolution of this internal representation of being held, refueled, and released. Countless traces of interactions, averaged and generalized over time, become the condensed, composite template for one’s Experiential State.
In every childhood, there are tremendous pressures put on the child to conform with expectations to behave, in short. A beautiful image of why this is so can be found in Robert Bly’s A Little Book on the Human Shadow:
“Let’s talk about the personal shadow first. When we were one or two years old we had what we might visualize as a 360° personality. Energy radiated out from all parts of our body and all parts of our psyche. A child running is a living globe of energy. We had a ball of energy, alright; but one day we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts of that ball. They said things like: ‘Can’t you be still?’ Or ‘It isn’t nice to try and kill your brother.’ Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep her parents’ love, put in the bag. By the time we go to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say: ‘Good children don’t get angry over such little things.’ By the time my brother and I were twelve in Madison, Minnesota we were known as ‘the nice Bly boys.’ Our bags were already a mile long.”
And he offers this gorgeous description of our arrival, ‘trailing clouds of glory,’:
“The drama is this. We came as infants ‘trailing clouds of glory,’ arriving from the farthest reaches of the universe, bringing with us appetites well preserved from our mammal inheritance, spontaneities wonderfully preserved from our 150,000 years of tree life, angers well preserved from our 5,000 years of tribal life – in short, with our 360° radiance – and we offered this gift to our parents. They didn’t want it. They wanted a nice girl or a nice boy. That’s the first act of the drama. It doesn’t mean our parents were wicked: they needed us for something. My mother, as a second-generation immigrant, needed my brother and me to help the family look more classy. We do the same thing to our children; it’s a part of life on this planet. Our parents rejected who we were before we could talk, so the pain of the rejection is probably stored in some pre–verbal place.”
…so the pain of the rejection is probably stored in some pre–verbal place. Somehow, somewhere in psyche, the unconscious, our bodies, all these rejected part of our selves, self -states, remain, continue on, waiting for the conditions conducive for them to re-enter our consciousness.
While we’re here, this pre-verbal place is also the realm of the sub-symbolic mode of experience, in contrast to the symbolic mode. Much more on that later as it informs our vulnerabilities to enactments.
As it is our fate, all starting out as infants, we will be overwhelmed at many points in life, and it is helpful to acknowledge and appreciate psyche’s life-saving super power of dissociation, or what we think of as the splitting off and encapsulation of unbearable, whole episodes of experience. It is as if dissociation functions to take the 110 voltage wired ego off-line in the face of 220-10,000 voltage traumatic physical and emotional episodes of overwhelm.
We can/will go on, but one more key concept for right now: recognizing the blur.
As in “healing only occurs within the blur.” When I first heard my psychoanalytical mentor reference this profound notion, at about age 41 for me, I immediately recognized how important it was to understanding the healing process. He went on to clarify that the blur state represented a betwixt and between state where in what was happening in the here and now, for real, was activating a remote time and space experience of something unfinished in our emotional life. Which is to say, our here and now experience is somehow infused, as if in a dream, with some emotionally charged unfinished business. This can be thought about as a co-created, dissociation enabled re-enactment of the wounding. The blur state refers to the peculiar experience of finding one’s self in this activated state.
Learning to recognizing this it-is-going-to-be-uncomfortable-state is key to begin having more choice in when to go there. Preparing to go there may be psyche’s first half of life task.
For a story like imaging of a number of important inter-related concepts, see my companion pages: Couple Experiential State Complex: Re-enactment of the Wounding and the Couple Experiential State Complex as Activated Threshold.
The key concept here is we all have lots of parts of ourselves that have become lost to us along the way, from birth to now. And our life’s work is re-integrate those split off parts. This requires building the capacity to hold what in earlier life was unbearable. This ultimately requires being able to consciously suffer the powerful affects evoked by unbearable traumatic experiences. Typically, this is the work of the midlife and second half of life. If one is called to this early, the challenge is to know how powerful it is and that psyche has your back. Think of it as a totally precocious midlife initiation. Because it is just that. It can be very helpful to begin to orient to Jung’s Ego-Self Axis Separation and Reunion frame.
In closing, here is an observation which suggests what we can try do to reconnect with our precious little lost selves: do your best to create/embrace opportunities to dance with your inner child:
“In healthy families, a baby forms a secure attachment with her parents as naturally as she breathes, eats, smiles, and cries. This occurs easily because of her parents’ attuned interactions with her. Her parents notice her physiological/affective states, and they respond to her sensitively and fully. Beyond simply meeting her unique needs, however, the parents “dance” with her. Hundreds of times, day after day, they dance with her. … There are other families where the baby neither dances nor even hears the sound of any music, in these families, she does not form such secure attachments. Rather, her task – her continuous ordeal – is to learn to live with parents who are little more than strangers. Babies who live with strangers do not live well or grow well.”
Be well and, borrowing from Joyce Vance,
We’re in this together,
chuck
Healing Within the Blur 
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