92 52
OCTOBER 29, 2020 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Dr. Deb
Getting to Who You Are By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
A
re people complicated? You would not think so, based on the ads online for marriage help and mental health help. I saw one ad that had me rolling on the floor – well, not exactly, but I would have been rolling on the floor if it weren’t so sad. This guy was promising to fix marriages if you took a course for $49. $49! Intrigued, I looked into it. Basically, the message was “just be nice.” I remember a dear rabbi in Florida lamenting the difficulty of helping married couples. He shared with me the message he was giving people who came to him: “Just be nice!” If only it were so easy. Imagine everyone being able to listen to that, take it to heart non-defensively, and never get triggered by something someone says – or didn’t say. Moshiach would surely come. The problem of over-simplification extends to the world of self-help, too. One person who claims to be a psychologist cautions people who
have a critical voice in their head to “turn it into compliments.” Yeah, right. But she is wealthy because so many people are desperate to get a quick, painless answer. And perhaps this is all that is needed for a slim minority of people. Everyone else remains suffering with that critical voice. Or the nervous part. Or the part that bites and attacks others. Or the angry part. So if it’s not so quick and easy, how do you overcome a long history of suffering because of the way you think of yourself or the way you have a hair-trigger reaction to what someone says, whether they meant it the way you took it or not? The answer is: Do healing work, work that heals trauma. And if you don’t like the word “trauma” because you’re quite certain that you were not traumatized according to the strict definition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that’s okay. You can call it “wounding” as Richard Schwartz does. Schwartz is a Marriage and Fam-
ily Therapist who, very cleverly, applied the notions of systemic therapy to a person’s inner world. Thus, we all have a “family” living inside of us! Yes, every one of us does; you don’t need a diagnosis for this to be true. And to prove it, you know for yourself that you handle the kids you teach in your third grade class quite differently from the kids that made you a parent. And you treat any of them differently than you treat your next-door neighbor or your spouse. And you treat your mother significantly differently than all of those people. Decades ago, researchers called this the “demand characteristics” of a situation. Kenneth Gergen, in his book on social construction back in 1991, called it The Saturated Self and that became the book’s title. But Schwartz has a very interesting tweak to all this. He sees these differences in our behavior under different circumstances as being much more than handling people in various situations differently. He sees each diverse way of acting due
to a different role we must take. And the different roles are carried by a set of parts within us. Each part has its own role to play and it sticks very well, amazingly well, to that role. This explains a lot. For example, it explains the person vowing to give up carbs and only sticking to the diet a mere two days (or two weeks) before backsliding. The backsliding is not due to a weakness. It’s due to a person’s part that is invested in sabotage. Many of us have such a part. This part, far from weak, is quite strong. It has a voice that overpowers the voice of the Self of that person. Or as another example, it explains the person who will not stop fighting with her husband who betrayed her in some way. He has said he’s sorry but it isn’t enough. This is due to the protective part that doesn’t want to see that woman hurt again. So this part rises to the occasion every time to prevent the Self from backing down and becoming vulnerable. Now here is the most fascinat-
