Therapy: Getting Your Lost Self Back
What happens to the lost part of ourselves? We remember ourselves being so different; happy, alive, brave, carefree, loving and generous. We seem so different to this now even though we know it's still us. Even those these parts of ourselves seem irretrievable, psychotherapy may be able to help retrieve your lost self.
Image credit: © Kasia Bialasiewicz - Bigstockphoto.com
The parts of us that got lost
It is so common for us to want to revive a part of ourselves that we feel we have lost. We felt we used to be so different and so much better; things were different – we knew different people and we did different things. Our major mistakes were still ahead of us; we were in the midst of our joy.
Then something happened, and piece by piece as part of ourselves seem to slip away. Sometimes the circumstances of our lives changed – marriages, jobs, children, divorce – but the loss seems more than that as well. Perhaps we stopped trusting others. Perhaps we started doing too much for other people.
Part of us changed and we don't understand why. Our lost self can be very saddening for us; it is hard to accept that there are parts of ourselves that seem no longer available to us, even though we know it is us.
Not lost – locked away
One of the understandings of Self Psychology is that rather than permanently and irretrievably lose parts of ourselves, we lock these parts of ourselves away in a process called vertical splitting. This happens when these parts were no longer responded to in the same positive way by the environment.
These parts are still maintained within us, but we gradually lost the ability to access these parts of ourselves because we needed to lock them away from the damage that other people might innocently do to these precious parts of ourselves.
In their place, we started to build up other parts of ourselves more acceptable to others – our professional selves, our responsible selves, our adult selves.
This is how we evolve as people, but there is a cost. The cost to you is your lost self. It's like your self-confidence – sleeping, not lost.
Getting you back
By establishing a psychotherapeutic environment where these your lost self is acceptable and becomes responded to, then these parts have the possibility of gradually re-emerging and being re-integrated back into our broader personality.
Let me know what you think in the comments. Now, read about how to face your unfinished business.
– Tim Hill
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Thanks for the article Tim, great stuff.
Working as a ‘parts’ therapist myself, I have seen the joy of unlocking parts that have been stuck in fear or rejection. Very rewarding work.
Thanks
I’m glad you found it interesting, Philipa. I think this is such a useful way of seeing ourselves; we are just too complex and internally inconsistent to see ourselves as a unified whole, and seeing us as as having various parts helps bridge this gap. Another perspective that I sometimes use is seeing each person as a collection of young parent-less siblings, all trying to get along and look after ourselves. That’s especially useful for those of us who wish to cut out and discard parts of our personality. Instead, seeing us as a group of siblings makes us confront the question about how we can find a way to ‘get along together’ as an integrated person.
I relate to this idea of ‘parts’. In Narrative we spend some time helping people see problems and skills as external of themselves- it’s useful because we can move away from the idea that ‘this is just who I am and cannot change’ towards ‘this thing seems smaller, more manageable- no longer operating in secret- and i have ways to build from to deal with it’. The idea of ‘parts of self’ feels a little similar, making everything much less overwhelming and much more ‘possible’ (what do i want to keep and what do i want to leave behind?) I also love your comment about seeing ourselves as ‘siblings’, some food for thought there. Thanks for another helpful post Tim.
Thanks Nicole; that’s an interesting perspective. I can imagine seeing problems and skills as external to ourselves both emphasises the idea of a core that is beyond skills and problems, but also that we can take on new skills and attributes more easily because we’ve done that before, and that we only need to hold them for as long as they are useful to us.