Embrace Your Complexity

How do you do life? How do you show up most of the time?

Our Psyche is an interesting, complex thing that yearns for integration and wholeness, and today I'm exploring the concept of 'parts'.

It is liberating to recognise that I choose to show up as the caring doctor most of the time, but there are other parts of me longing for expression.

Integrating all aspects of the self is a lifelong, rewarding process that you can start right now!


Transcript

Hello beautiful well-being family.

I'm back again with something that I think is really interesting.

I do love making this podcast because I get to reflect on things that happen to me during the week and experiences that I have and how I'd like to explore them and expand them here in the podcast.

So it's a wonderful opportunity for me.

Thank you.

And today I'm recording outdoors because of necessity so you might hear a few more bird sounds because it's a very lovely springtime here in Queensland.

And what I wanted to talk about today because it's something that I do see every time I do therapy with anyone and in myself of course is that we are incredibly complex as human beings.

Our psyche is incredibly complex.

There's not one single way that we are constantly showing up.

Maybe for some people who are very consistent there's a there's a sense of being more consistently the same in every situation but for most of us there's a complexity to our psyche which I'm gonna call and it's very interesting because when I first started my psychotherapy journey I remember reading about a book by Roberto Asagioli I think his name is a beautiful Italian psychotherapist who picked up from Freud and expanded on Freud's ideas and developed a form of therapy called psychosynthesis and Gestalt takes certainly takes something from psychosynthesis and the idea is that we have many parts we have many many parts to us and some of those parts are more used more every day whereas others can be hidden away and depending on the conditioning that we've received some parts are deemed good and others not so good and some parts are deemed the ones that other people want whereas others are the ones that people don't want and I remember vividly when I read this psychosynthesis book he talked about being really late for a plane and rushing to get to the airport and rushing to get onto the plane and when he got onto the plane he took a deep breath and then summoned all his parts to him to check that they were all there with him and I thought that was such a beautiful just such a beautiful story because underlying it is this sense of total self-acceptance right because what I know about this like the whole work of psychotherapy really is integration it's integration of these parts of us which often we have banished out into the cold and the dark and you know they're out there longing to come in from the cold they don't go away they're just banished and they actually take a lot of psychic energy when they're banished because we need to keep them at bay we've decided that this part of me is not a good part and I don't accept it I don't want to be like this I should be and usually that's the other polarity I should be hard-working so I'll speak about a polarity that emerged for me during the week that I thought was very funny because you know I love to do yoga and go walking and be fit and eat well and work on my well-being and there's definitely a part of me that that aspires to being the best I can be that wants to be self-actualized and wants to make that effort towards being really really well vibrant and well but there's also another part of me right that wants to curl up in bed and say why bother and doesn't want to make an effort there's always a resistance to getting on the mat I've talked about this with my friends and even with my clients a lot recently that even though I know that when I do yoga I'll feel better there's always a resistance to getting on the mat and sometimes I have to actually start feeling really bad before it will force me onto the mat other times I get onto the mat because I'm feeling good but I laugh at this part of me which which actually just doesn't want to do much work wants to kind of sit back and say what the hell I'm sick of trying I've made an effort you know I want to see the results now like you know why do I have to do this again surely I've done enough yoga surely I've eaten enough blueberries couldn't life just you know lay it out in front of me so she's you know she's a bit jaded she's a bit of a victim she wants things now and she wants them easily whereas the other part of that the other side of that polarity knows that I need to work every day for this that there is that bliss doesn't come easily right bliss takes hard work it's hard work to sit at the pottery wheel and learn how to throw but once I do and I throw a beautiful thing then there's an enormous amount of bliss right so I'm just using that as an example of two parts of me that are really the complex and opposite they're in polarity and often we'll find that there are these polarities and we've decided that one is a much better place to hang out right because it's more rewarded it's more positive it's it gets places at and the other not so much but I suppose what I'm saying here is that it's actually really important for our mental health to recognize that both polarities exist you know I actually feel quite delighted by my I'm gonna call her the slug I started calling her the slug and then I thought oh that's not very compassionate but then I thought well actually it's quite funny and she is a slug she just wants to she wants to make no effort she really wants to make no effort and then the other side the other part of that polarity is saying no we're gonna go on a five-day hike at Kulula we're gonna walk 85 kilometers we're gonna carry our backpacks and all our food for five days and it's gonna be amazing and we're gonna see these views and the slug is going really are you kidding me like I don't want to do that I just want to stay home and watch TV right so when you can start having conversations between the two polarities and you know there's many different polarities that's when life starts getting really interesting because it's like I've become really honest with myself yeah there is a part of me that wants to go and do an 85 kilometer walk carrying a backpack and another part of me that thinks that's just ridiculous and should stay home and drink cups of tea and eat chocolate in front of the TV the whole time so I'm going to invite you to really start releasing some of your parts and getting to know them getting to know them well like the whole idea I think of psychosynthesis is that we want to get to know as much of ourselves as possible the whole idea of any therapy really as I said it's about integration and therefore that requires bringing into awareness of more parts of the self and that can be very confusing and conflicting but getting to know and love all your parts is integration and it's the work of therapy and there's a beautiful theory of change in gestalt called the paradoxical theory of change which is that generally in the world the way we approach change is to say right I don't like this about myself I'm too fat so I'm going to go and do all these things where I can lose weight but actually what we know about lasting change is that change happens when we can actually embrace ourselves accept ourselves love ourselves enough right here right now as we are because that creates a really solid platform in which to be in life we're no longer at war with ourselves but can you imagine well I mean all of us have an experience of it I certainly do of that internal struggle of me hating myself and yet trying to be better right it's a it's a complex dynamic that create takes a lot of psychic energy whereas this idea of psychosynthesis of becoming aware of your parts accepting those parts so dropping the judging mind and allowing curiosity and interest and understanding to emerge allows us to really step into more of who we can be and be kinder and more self-compassionate to ourselves like I think this sense of kindness and self-compassion really does underlie so much of therapy which is why I love Kristin Neff's work on self-compassion and I really urge you to read those books so we can be kinder and much more understanding of ourselves when we're aware of our parts and give ourselves what we need I mean I can remember when I was younger being so confused about myself because sometimes I would be the absolute life of the party and others I just wanted to be a hermit and couldn't think of two words to say to somebody and now I recognize that those were different parts or another way to think about this is archetypes and I've been listening a lot to Caroline Mace who's a spiritual teacher from the USA and she teaches archetypes and it's essentially the same thing so you know the parts that emerge they are archetypal they're often archetypal and if you want to play with this an interesting way to do it is to buy a set of cards that Caroline has made which are archetype cards and I think I mean there's a quite a lot of them and you just lay them out and look at each of them and and think about which ones really speak to you which ones do you feel you relate to which ones do you have and read about the shadow side and the light side of each of those archetypes and how they might be showing up so get to know yourself basically it's a way to get to know yourself and you know it's so important to understand that everybody has different parts like we once we start honoring our own individuality that's when really true psychological health and wellness can start to develop I think it's super interesting because Freud was quoted as saying that he was interested only in the basement of the human psyche he was interested in getting into you know the unconscious and the id and the basement whereas Robert Assagioli said but there's more to us there are positive aspects to us as well and I want to know the whole building and I want to get up onto the Sun Terrace and go sunbathing which I thought was really lovely so that really is the journey that that when we know ourselves well and accept ourselves and allow ourselves to be who we are life gets a whole lot easier in gestalt they used to have a thing called a parts party where you could come along to a party dressed as a part that you don't normally inhabit so an opportunity to be the part that you normally would suppress if you like some years ago I did acting and that was a wonderful way to explore parts of me that I would normally never let out right like I have so internalized this idea that the only kind of acceptable or useful part of me is the is the one who is helping and kind and compassionate and caring and looking after everybody else right but you know it's incredibly liberating to play a role of someone who's harsh and angry and unaccepting of other people and that can be quite liberating when you've been stuck in one polarity in your conscious life because the other polarities there that's for sure so how to think about it where do you like to hang out what's your dominant role in life and what's the opposite of that play with that and you might want to explore in some of the ways that I've talked about today see you next time

Reviews

Really made me pause and reflect about all my different parts and not dismiss the bits I don’t like. Also lots of other references to follow up. Thanks
😊

thank you :’)

this was exactly what I needed to hear today! Thank you!

👌🏾👌🏾

Lovely to listen to. Thank you

Dear Leila, thank you for your insightful encouragement and exploration. I am putting on my curious, playful, acknowledgement cap to explore the parts of me I have banished (yet leak out none the less), Sending good wishes.