Are you familiar with having an Inner Critic? Maybe you’ve noticed other parts of yourself that have different goals, strategies and attitudes? In Psychosynthesis they are called ”subpersonalities” (in IFS they are called ”parts”) but I like to see them as ”wildlings” in our inner landscape. In this program we explore our inner ”Wildlings” in order to handle them better. During 10 weeks you get to meet a number of typical subpersonalities and explore your own. Part course and part workshop, I often describe his adventure as a ”guided exploration”.

Family roles that might create subpersonalities: We bring a lot of patterns from our family of origin, and one is a tendency to pick one of the following roles (there might be more) in any groups that we seek to belong to in the future: The Hero – the one who needs to ”prove” their value (by achievements in sports or school etc) in order to be accepted by the group/family and also raise the value of the group as compared to the outside world. Negative consequences might be chronic over-achiever leading to burnout. The Clown – diffuses all group conflicts with humour and other methods of deflection. Negative consequence is not being taken seriously, even though they are highly competent. The Lost Child or Wallflower – trying to survive unnoticed to not cause any more drama or be drawn into existing conflicts. Will find it a big challenge to speak up about injustices or their own needs later on. The Caretaker – trying to solve everyone’s problems. A tendency to overstep others’ boundaries as well as not taking care of their own needs. The Scapegoat / black sheep – the rebel who speaks up against the system and is being ostracised and dismissed because of it. Tends to feel that they don’t deserve to belong, in other group settings. Some common subpersonalities: The inner critic – usually trying to protect you from outer criticism. The inner perfectionist – often with the same goal as the inner critic but with slightly less cruel messages. The task master/achiever – trying to drill you into achieving more than is actually reasonable, often due to a hidden fear of not being accepted or valued. The soldier/invulnerable one – Setting up a mask of strength, which makes it harder to set appropriate boundaries and ask for help when needed. The indispensable one – always trying to find tasks within a new group, to prove that you are valuable and therefore worthy of being a member (such as volunteering to be a meeting secretary, preparing coffee etc) The fearful one – seeing dangers in every situation, stopping you from taking any risks (represented by the rabbit in the image above!). The subpersonalities can cooperate when they have a similar goal, the inner critic and the inner perfectionist make a splendid team – possibly combined with the fearful one; the task master and the soldier are also a strong pair.

During this program we will explore subpersonalities whose goals do not align with yours, so that we can return control to your authentic self instead of letting the subpersonalities ”drive the car”.

The subpersonalities, or survival personalities as some prefer to name them, are created in childhood to protect us. They can therefore be viewed as children, and when we start communicating with them we usually ask them their age. Then it’s even more obvious that we don’t want them to control our adult life.

(Note: they are NOT the same as your ”inner children”, who are the version of your inner self from various ages. A healing journey almost always include healing your inner children).