Most of us are not neuroscientists and the fact that everything we experience or do involves brain neurons firing is far too complicated for most of us to understand. But I hope these few puzzle pieces I’m going to share can help us grow in our ability to understand some of our reactions, to find pause buttons that allow better choices, and thereby help us love better.
Some ego state theories talk of parts of self as if they are “real and have a life of their own.” Some understandings of dissociated parts of the personality talk of them as having their own biographies. We don’t have to go that far. We can simply allow ourselves to use our imaginations to visit the same dimension where memories exist and retain unresolved experiences. Doing so can open up conversation with the unfinished business and allow God to bring healing and enough resolution to free us from the unfortunate intrusions that undermine love today.
It's possible that as you read through the early parts of this six-part series, you may begin realizing you "get hi-jacked by parts of self" more often than you've recognized before. You've known you have overly strong reactions to people or events sometimes, but these new lenses may bring things into focus in a way that you find disheartening. Please keep reading and trust that the Lord is at work providing you with this new way of understanding yourself and others. The later posts explain what happens in the nervous system when "someone or something pushes your buttons" and provide some ways of handling it while you are on this journey toward greater self-awareness, understanding, and the freedom you need in order to become who God is calling you to be.
Part 1
I’m going to be explaining how I use the idea of “parts of self” in my work and I’m beginning in a somewhat unusual way. Read Trisha Yearwood’s “The Song Remembers When” (and if you’re so inclined, you can listen to it on YouTube and elsewhere). Later in this post, I’ll use “Trisha” to refer to the woman having the experience in the song.
I was standing at a counter, I was waiting for the change when I heard that old familiar music start.
It was like a lighted match had been tossed into my soul, It was like a dam had broken in my heart.
After taking every detour, getting lost and losing track so that even if I wanted I could not find my way back,
After driving out the memory of the way things might have been, After I’ve forgotten all about us, the song remembers when.
We were rolling through the Rockies, we were up above the clouds, when a station out of Jackson played that song.
And it seemed to fit the moment, and the moment seemed to freeze and we turned the music up and sang along.
And there was a God in heaven and the world made perfect sense, we were young and were in love and we were easy to convince
We were headed straight for Eden, it was just around the bend and though I had forgotten all about it, the song remembers when.
I guess something must have happened and we must have said goodbye and my heart must have been broken though I can’t recall just why…the song remembers when.
Oh for all the miles between us and for all the time that’s passed, you would think I haven’t gotten very far.
And I hope my hasty heart will forgive me just this once if I stop and wonder how on earth you are.
But that’s just a lot of water underneath a bridge I’ve burned and there’s no use in backtracking around corners I have turned.
Still I guess some things we’ve buried are just bound to rise again for even if the whole world has forgotten, the song remembers when.
Yes even if the whole world has forgotten, the song remembers when.
Leaving aside the reality that she undoubtedly does remember what broke her heart and why they split up (after all, lyricists have to make the rhymes work, right?), the song poignantly captures an experience most of us have had: a piece of music “takes us back” to a different time and place, even a whole period in our lives.
Maybe “that was ‘our song’” or maybe it was just wildly popular at a certain time in our lives. The single opening chord of Rod Stewart’s “Maggie Mae” instantly and invariably time-warps me back to my freshman college dorm, evoking a wave of emotions and visual pop-ups play on the movie theater of my mind. Why? Because that song played everywhere on campus throughout that year when I was on my own for the first time. My time journey when I hear it is usually fleeting, but maybe you can also identify that if circumstances in the present lend themselves to it, I might take a much longer walk down memory lane and doing so can turn my mood to sweet nostalgia or regret, to heady excitement or a sense of lostness, even embarrassment and uneasiness about some things that took place that year. The mood it puts me in can then affect my current day actions and interactions. Ever had that experience?
This example of how a piece of music can shift a person—any person—from one state of being into another is my starting point for inviting you to join me in using “parts of self” language to understand yourself and others. It’s a very mild experience of having a part of self evoked. If Pixar made a music video of these experiences, Trisha would be standing at the checkout, a 50 year old slightly harried woman with her grandkids in tow. As we hear the song begin to play on the store sound system, we would see a look pass across her face and then watch with amazement as her features and whole body change into that of her 21 year old self with a different hairstyle and dressed much differently. One way I talk about this is that “21 came online.” Such brief intrusions of the past into the present via memory networks are a completely normal and universal experience.
Sometimes I use smartphone imagery to describe what happens: “hearing the song brushed up against the picture on your touchscreen of you at 21 and launched the app”. At other times, I use theater language: “There you were at center stage, just playing out a scene with your grandkids, when 21 year old you, dozing in a chair in the wings, heard her cue. It was “her” emotions that you were feeling,” that is, the feelings that were happening a lot that time in your life. As we’ll see below, theater imagery lends itself to explaining that sometimes “21” doesn’t just show up as feelings; sometimes we start thinking like she used to think back then, even behaving like she used to behave. That was “a different way of being you”, as psychologist Richard Chefetz puts it. But more on that later.
But what IS the “app” that launches or the “interior cast member who wakes up”? It’s a memory network. And it’s long been known by memory researchers that “neurons that fire together, wire together.” In the case of a one-time extreme event, it’s as if the pattern of neurons encoding that event lit up intensely and became radioactive and thereby became ready to quickly light up again. In the case of experiences that happened over and over again, due either to intentional repetition (like practicing to serve a tennis ball well or play a violin) or to out-of-our-control repetition ( like the smell of Aunt Emma’s perfume that filled the room up every time she visited), it’s more like the neurons wore a rut in the road, a rut you fall into when you encounter that smell 40 years later.
So all memories are neuronal firing patterns. The more often you had an experience, or the more intense a one-time experience was, the more likely that sequence of neurons will fire together again. And we can think of a memory pattern of a habitual, familiar way of being you as a “part of self.”
In addition to this “blast from the past” way of thinking about ego states (we use this term and parts of self interchangeably), we all have different roles in current life that bring out different subsets of our personality. These can also be thought of (and worked with) as parts of self, different ways of being you. When I’m being a grandmother, I’m different from when I’m being a therapist and both of those are different from when I’m leading worship or running a meeting or teaching a class. We speak of this sometimes as “wearing a different hat”, acknowledging that we actually dress/look differently when we manifest these different parts of self. Pixar would show the person wearing different clothes, manifesting different facial expressions and body language, speaking in different tones of voice, all ways of conveying these are different “parts” of the same person.
Sometimes the change between these current ego states happens easily and fluidly and we’re not even aware we’re changing. At other times we know we need to help ourselves shift states such as when we know we need a long car ride home from the office to help us let go of the mood and mindset from work soas to be an effective mom or dad or spouse.
Sometimes we shift states unintentionally and end up being inappropriate such as when an army officer treats other parents coaching soccer with him as if they are underlings. At other times, we might choose to activate a personality subset (a part of self, a way of being you) to handle a particular situation. An example of this would be when our mission team got stranded in Miami on Fourth of July weekend on the way home from Honduras; I “shifted into Capitol Hill Carol” to work with the airline to get 60 of us back to Maine, using a skill set and manner of shmoozing I’d learned in my youth as a congressional assistant. Pixar would show me morphing from my 55 year old self at the time to my 26 year old legislative assistant self with short stylish hair and dressed as I did in the seventies.
I often draw time lines with my clients as part of the work and we can picture a horizontal understanding and a vertical understanding of parts of self:
Therapist grandmother me
middle school me college freshman me Cap. Hill me teacher me
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Birth 12 18 23 Present day
In recent years, I’ve taken more and more to using the language of “parts of self” to help my clients understand themselves and the people they live with. Some take to this language and imagery like a duck to water, in part because English is filled with phrases bearing witness to it as part of our experience: ‘I’m wearing my school nurse hat now’; ‘I’m having trouble shifting gears’; ‘that really took me back in time’; ‘you just don’t seem like yourself today’; ‘that hit a nerve’; ‘he really knows how to push my buttons;’ ‘part of me wants to do X, but another part thinks it’s a bad idea’. The list could go on and on.
Others have more trouble entering in to the semi-imaginative framework and I say “semi-imaginative” because as I’ve explained, there’s a physical (brain neurons) reality to how memories are stored and evoked. Some are uncomfortable entering into language and a framework they associate only with multiple personality disorder and its portrayals in the media. And while the “alters” of Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder) are, indeed, at the far end of the “parts of self” continuum, the experience of having many parts of self as I’ve described it above is widespread, even universal, at the near end. That continuum has to do with the degree of compartmentalization involved.
At what I’m calling the near end of the continuum, we are totally aware of these different ways of being “myself”. The shift from one to another is smooth either because it’s intentional and fitting to the situation (a “vertical” shift) or because the “appearance” of an earlier (“horizontal”) self’s input is only fleeting and we can identify where (“who”—what earlier time of life) it’s coming from. When it’s the memories of an earlier/younger self that have been triggered, the degree of self-awareness about that “intrusion” makes a huge difference lest we mistakenly attribute what’s come up to the present person or situation and react inappropriately as a result.
How and why does the “triggering” happen? The short answer is classical conditioning , a learning process explored by Ivan Pavlov in the early 1900’s. Pavlov was researching salivation in dogs and developed a way to measure it. By accident, he noticed the dogs began to salivate when they heard the footsteps of the assistant bringing the food. Based on this he experimented with ringing a bell each time he fed his lab dogs and did it so many times that eventually, just ringing the bell caused the dogs to salivate even when no meat was provided. In other words, the dogs’ brain-bodies were “conditioned” to respond in a certain way by repeatedly pairing those two experiences. So Pavlov learned that much conditioning happens accidentally and it can also be done intentionally. (I was “conditioned” to remember my freshman college experiences when I hear Maggie Mae simply because I heard it so often that year. Trisha was conditioned to remember the boyfriend—and to reexperience not only the sweetness of those moments but also the heartbreak that had followed—when she heard the song years later on a store’s PA system. It’s more problematic when someone is conditioned to become very anxious when twilight comes because that time of day is paired with an abusive alcoholic parent arriving home.
When conditioning has taken place unintentionally and out of our awareness, it is important to start recognizing that various parts of self “come online” (ie part of our history is having an influence right now) without invitation or permission. When we don’t recognize it’s happened, we play out old scripts without even knowing we’re doing it. An activated part of self can influence what takes place today a little or a lot. If it’s a lot, I call it “getting hi-jacked” and that typically happens because some agenda leftover from the past essentially takes over our brain for a time and this can wreak havoc with relationships.
My friend told me just this morning about how irritated she gets when she’s suddenly asked to stop what she’s doing to accomplish a family member’s agenda. Because of years of conversations with me about these things, when it happened this morning she had reined herself in, knowing a reactive part of self had been triggered. In conversation with God, she had eventually linked the feelings and attitude to a part of self who came into existence when she was age 4 when twin brothers were born. From that day forward, she often had to stop what she was doing to take care of them or her younger sister. It was Irritated Big Sister who had “waked up in the wings” that morning and had come close to unloading a lifetime of irritation on her husband, much of it from long before she had met him.
There is nothing inherently “pathological” about ego states as such. Is my friend mentally ill? No. Is she human? Yes. She has left-over business that gets stirred up by current events. As I’ve shown, we all have them. But unintentional hi-jackings do tend to cause problems because the “here and now” probably doesn’t really call for the ways of thinking/feeling/behaving that characterized “back there and then”. Or the here and now is a different “here” than the sphere of your life where the hi-jacking part of self appropriately lives out that way of being you. In order to become who God wants us to be, it’s essential for us to gain self-knowledge about these hidden and not-so-hidden parts of self primed to play out their unfinished business from the past. Their wounds and their agendas interfere with loving as God wants us to love.
To be continued.......
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