Getting to Who You Are by Dr. Deb Hirschhorn

Dr. Deb

Getting to Who You Are

By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.

Are 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 Family 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-

ing piece of Schwartz’s model: The parts arose when we were kids! They, therefore, are kids. They may seem irrational, temperamental, and immature because they are!

And there you are, your Self with a capital “S,” trying to peek through the maze of parts obscuring your true identity, and perhaps somewhat frustrated with the parts because of their behavior.

Schwartz’s answer to that: Appreciate them. These parts came to help you when you needed it. You were young and you were vulnerable when they took on roles just for your sake, roles that were, indeed, heavy burdens. And because of them, you survived.

So, if we look a bit deeper into the first story, we find that the sabotaging part has always been there to “save” the person who could be extending himself too much and really getting into trouble for it. This part is not against the person; he is trying to save him from his own decisions

which the part is concerned are not good ones.

And if we look a little more closely at the second story, it is clear that the bratty teenage part is merely trying to prevent a catastrophe when the woman allows her heart to return to her husband and will be betrayed all over again.

These parts are kids so they don’t know how to finesse these dangerous waters well. But they are doing the best they can. They’re trying.

And this is why Schwartz doesn’t embrace the word “trauma.” He prephenomena are so universal and so ordinary.

But healing is still necessary.

How, though?

Step one is to recognize your parts. And appreciate them. Step two is for the Self to emerge as separate

We all have a “family” living inside of us!

from the parts. This is tricky. Peofers to call it wounding because the

ple so often feel totally attached at the hip to their parts that they don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

Schwartz has a clever way to help us tell the difference. He calls it the 8 C’s of Self. The Self has these characteristics:

• calm • courageous • curious • connected • confident • compassionate • creative • clear

These first steps – out of several – make a world of difference in and of themselves. Just recognizing that the part of you that you’ve never appreciated has been trying to save you is an enormous insight and a way to see yourself in a better light. It is liberating; it is the beginning of becoming who you really are.

Just holler if you need help navigating all this.

Dr. Deb Hirschhorn is a Marriage and Family Therapist. If you want help with your marriage, begin by signing up to watch her Masterclass at https://drdeb. com/myw-masterclass.