Pondering the Concept of Self as a Multiple
One of the many difficulties of living with dissociative identity disorder is answering the question, who am I? The question does not have a simple answer and often the concept of explaining I am we is not one that is easily grasped by those living in the world of singularity. Even those that work on the professional side of treating and researching dissociative disorders have a harder time conceptualizing what it means to be a multiple, which is evident by their theories of how dissociative disorders develop and how they ought to be treated. It’s all about how we break, or split, or fail to become one; with a focus on putting us back together again or getting us to conform to a model of being singular.
After listening to Dr. Jamie Marich & Dr. Dick Schwartz on Therapy Chat’s recent podcast episode, “458: Parts Perspectives From Lived Experience + IFS,” we have this deep drive to start studying philosophy and the topic of self and consciousness. We’ve always had this love/hate relationship with Internal Family Systems (IFS), and one of our biggest struggles with this modality is the concept of Self, because what is Self?
In the podcast episode, Dr. Schwartz talks about how Self is just beneath the surface of parts and when those parts open space, then Self pops out with wonderful leadership qualities. For us, it is so very difficult to visualize what he is talking about as it just isn’t our experience at all. For us, each of us has that Self within us. There isn’t one Self underneath all of us. There is Self in each and every one of us. It isn’t about moving us out of the way to find a true essence of what makes us who we are, because each of us holds our own essence. This idea of Self from IFS is still trying to find singularity among the multiplicity.
There may be a better word to describe what Dr. Schwartz is attempting to propose. Maybe it isn’t Self that we are reaching for, maybe it is like a collective consciousness or the idea of “no self” that Dr. Schwartz and Dr. Marich touched on when referencing the Buddhist world, in which no self is the goal.
We are not exactly rejecting Dr. Schwartz’s ideas, but most definitely we are rejecting the terminology of Self. It’s okay that we are we. We collectively access compassion, curiosity, clarity, creativity, calm, confidence, courage, and connectedness. And the word Self just isn’t enough to encompass all that makes us a we.
Is it Selves? Is it enlightenment? Is it No Self? Is it the Collective Consciousness? Does it have to be reached in the singular or can each of us find this enlightened, no self, state within our selves? We don’t have the answers, we just know that multiplicity is complex and to truly understand what the me in we is, we need to have a broader lens than singularity.
Listen to Therapy Chat’s episode here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/therapy-chat/id1031099411?i=1000678279255
