Subpersonalities – Internal Conflict and the Voices in Your Head

Posted On September 19, 2015 / Written by Dr. Linda Gadbois

One of the most natural aspects of our everyday experience is this constant inner dialogue going on within our mind as a form of discussion, negotiation, or argument between different aspects or parts of ourselves. This natural phenomenon is evident in how we describe it when we say that one part of me wants to do this, while another part of me wants to do that. This split decision causes us to feel torn between ideas, and often leaves us never really making a firm decision while constantly going back and forth between extremes of the same idea. This same reality is often depicted as a devil on one shoulder, and an angel on the other, both whispering in our ear. Carl Jung recognized this basic process of consciousness always going on, and developed the idea of the psyche being composed of multiple archetypes or personalities that are always engaged in discussion and persuasion as part of our normal thinking. Of course this idea wasn’t unique to Jung, but is a basic part of ancient wisdom and the archetypes of mythology as aspects of consciousness that represent different personalities, and astrology based on the individual make-up being based on the archetypes and their main focus within a persons basic personality. These are not to be mistaken for multiple personalities, which is an entirely different condition, but rather as different aspects of one personality.

 These inner voices, all with personalities of their own, each exerting themselves in various situations, competing for control of our will, are actually what in psychology we call sub-personalities, inner aspects, or different parts, all of which make the greater overall personality. We’re born with a cluster of archetypal personalities as part of our soul’s make-up, and we acquire them as we go through life from our conditioning, events of strong emotional impact, extreme fear, or traumas of some sort. Our parents voice, for example, becomes a natural part of our inner dialogue that continues to play out and talk to us from the same attitude, perspective, intention, and demeanor. Our belief system, likewise, comes as an inner discussion that’s always telling us about something from the perspective of the belief it represents. When we encounter shocking, fearful, or intense situations, we can draw into us and take on new aspects that are ideally suited for negotiating that situation for us, or as a means of coping with it. Whenever we’re devastated in some way, and fall apart, we let down our resistance to outside forces and influences, and become vulnerable to them through a form of magnetism.

Whatever emotional state we indulge in, we polarize ourselves to, become a magnet for the consciousness of that emotion, and draw into us thoughts that create realities out of the emotions as a possible expression of it. We take on the quality of consciousness equivalent to the emotional state, and think thoughts that form inner realities that express and produce more of that emotion. These emotional thoughts, seemingly generated by our mind as the expression of the emotions, take on a life of their own, become an aspect of our personality, and continue to operate in us through a voice that becomes a natural part of our thinking. It’s an aspect of the emotional state that produces it that perceives everything from that perspective, and has its role and intention as that perspective. It stays alive in us by thinking through us, and always talking to us in a convincing manner, negotiating the terms of its existence.

 The sub-personality is always describing things, explaining them, and pointing them out while telling us about them. While they’re active in us, we are rendered passive, and allow them to exert themselves by giving them the stage to speak freely. Even when we recognize them, and willfully subdue them, as soon as our guard is down, they reassert themselves and begin controlling our thoughts without our direct awareness. They’re so automatic that they become a natural part of us. After awhile, we can’t separate ourselves from them, come to depend on them, and let them run us and use our mind and will to create by way of us. As long as we fail to integrate the parts, they continue to exert themselves without our direct awareness, through our subconscious nature. Whatever exists in us at the subconscious level, meaning without our direct awareness of it, we continue to act out in an automatic fashion, usually producing what ultimately becomes an internal conflict. They form opposing unconscious aspects of ourselves that go against conscious aspects. We make a decision consciously to do something, and then our subconscious mind brings into play everything that contradicts it and is acting to prevent it, sabotaging our willful efforts. Because these aspects were formed out of intense emotional states, whenever we begin reliving them, or they rise in us and begin playing out by controlling our thoughts, they’re accompanied by strong emotions, which tend to overpower us, and negate rational and reasonable thinking that’s devoid of a strong emotional component.

When two ideas come into direct conflict, each represented by a different aspect of ourselves, the one which elicits the strongest emotion tends to win out. While our first approach may be to fight against the emotional aspect preventing us from consciously progressing in a more favorable direction through active choice and will, this can prove hopeless and at best a temporary gain through dominance and suppression, yet the real solution lies in negotiating terms with the sub-personality, by gaining realization around it, what its purpose and agenda is, what it’s meant to do, and thanking it for its service to you by helping you through the difficult situation in which you acquired it in, then telling it to leave, while mentally forming a pathway out of your body and sending it back out into the universe to be of service to someone else.

 All energies and natural forces as qualities of consciousness only come into us through a vacancy or void that creates a vacuum as magnetism of some sort, which we could think of as a form of invitation that pulls or draws it into us through resonance, we can simultaneously realize that regardless of the role it takes on, the intention is beneficial because it was designed to help us through a situation we were in as a state of mind that attracted it, or awakened it in us. While we tend to think of the mind as a product of the brain or heart, and therefore set and comprised of fixed qualities, the fact of the matter is we are born with a constitution as a set of information and memories that form our initial personality, and we are engaged in a constant process of growth and development through a constant exchange of energy with everything around us. The mind is energetic and invisible in nature, and works through vibration, sympathetic induction, and synthesis, in much the same way we take in the molecules of the air around us by breathing it, which then become an essential part of our molecular structure, while discharging or exhaling molecules no longer needed as a form of recycling. Likewise, the food we eat becomes the building blocks that form our physical body, determining our health as a physical state or condition. Our mind is the electromagnetic energy system of our body that’s drawing into it energies as qualities the consciousness around it. Blending with and becoming the same as them, altering the vibration of the mind through the integration, while emanating or sending back out energies no longer magnetized to it.

The energies of the mind as the invisible forces in the invisible space around us, are qualities of consciousness with a singular nature that form an aspect of a larger matrix of energies and become a sub-personality with a specific perspective and perception, that forms a part of our overall personality, modifying it by incorporating the singular perspective, altering the overall perspective. We experience it as a voice in our head as thought that enter into and become a part of our normal perspective of everyday reality. Because they come as thoughts and feelings, we often don’t realize that they’re not our own, and are something we acquired instead, and we give our will to them by letting them rise in us as our perception, thoughts, and interpretation of the meaning events take on. They begin discussing everything as a form of argument that clashes with and negates other aspects, always seeking to win over and resume control of our perception and thought processes.

 Like all things of the mind and the invisible plane of pure energy that we are submerged in and an integral part of, the only way to extract unwanted aspects, or aspects whose part and role is no longer needed or beneficial, is through recognition and awareness of them and how they operate to influence and control you. Because we acquire these automatically while in an unconscious state of delirium (emotion, trauma, shock, intense fear, etc.), and they’re absorbed into our unconscious mind and arise in us automatically without our direct awareness of them, they continue with us until we become conscious and aware of them. Once we become aware of different aspects of ourselves, and how they exist in conflict with other aspects of our nature, and we realize how they’re serving us through protection and service of some sort, we can appreciate them, feel gratitude for their help, and let them know they’re no longer needed. They no longer serve a desirable or necessary purpose. We can then locate them in our body through the emotion they are a part of and the bodily sensations it produces, and direct them to leave while mentally escorting them out of our body and back into the universal soul of mass consciousness where they’ll become available to be drawn in by someone else in need of their services.

 The interesting thing about qualities or aspects of consciousness is that they exists on the plane of the mind as consciousness, and can only be worked with from that same plane. The mind controls the mind, and our own conscious awareness and imagination is used to acquire, exchange, utilize, and discharge the consciousness available all around us. We work with our mind by way of our mind. We can realize that our will commands aspects of the mind not only as energies around us, but through the mind of others. We are constantly taking on and exchanging consciousness with everyone and everything around us. By becoming aware of this we can simultaneously learn how to exercise control over it.

 Once we realize that our soul as our consciousness actually jumps out of our body during events of fear, shock, and trauma, causing what you could think of as a vacancy and a form of vacuum as a magnetic pull that draws in energy equivalent to or of the same vibration and quality of our state of mind, or that’s inherent in the situation, we can begin realizing the powerful role emotions and fear play in governing us through acquisition of consciousness that increase and amplifies the state itself. Fear draws into us consciousness of the reality inherent in the fear, and makes us think fearful thoughts, or react with anger and rage, through an inner voice that begins dialoguing with us about the fear and from the perspective and attitude that sees the same type of fear in everything around us just through its perception of it. Looking through the lens of fear, we only see more fear or what warrants fear.

By learning how to manage our state of mind, we can recognize aspects we’ve acquired that aren’t us. We can begin distinguishing between our real self and our acquired self. We can begin realizing that certain aspects of our thinking are associated to specific events of our life where we acquired them and they became a normal part of our thinking. We can begin realizing how they play a part in sabotaging other aspects of our life, or argue against and negotiate through seduction to prevent willfully bringing about desired changes through conscious decisions to do so. By becoming aware of their strong emotional component we can not only resist their control, but learn how to identify them further, while simultaneously using compelling emotions to fuel and empower our conscious decisions. By gaining realization around them and what they act to prevent, protect us from, deal with, or cause, we can see their purpose and how they were intended to protect us, and how through that same attitude and behavior now act to sabotage our intentional efforts, we can thank it for its help, and tell it it’s no longer needed, then consciously and willfully release it, freeing it from the body and mind, and no longer be subject to it. Anytime we are removing one aspect creating a void or opening, we have to consciously draw into that space what we want to fill it, or it’ll do it automatically with whatever is available without our direction. As we create an opening or vacuum we have call or pull our soul back in to fill it, recovering it and becoming whole again. This is traditionally referred to as Soul Retrieval in Shamanic Arts.

All energy as spirits, entities, qualities, or emotions is subject to and commanded by the will of the human mind. We willfully acquire them through needing or wanting, or by vacating our body creating an opening for them to enter, take hold, and remain apart of us. While they occupy a part of us, our own soul can’t fully enter back into and operate through us, and remains on the outer boundaries of the mind where an opening has to be created in order to draw our own soul aspects back into our body. Only through awareness, realization, and willful control over them can we release or discharge them. The problem is, once they become a part of us, we build our identity around them as an essential part of ourselves, and form a kind of love for them, and hold them to us as a result. We don’t want to let them go because we’ve become accustomed to the story we began living out of them due to the traumatic circumstances we acquired them through, and feel as if we would lose an important part of ourselves by letting them go that would change tour very psychological make-up by making us encounter and experience in us what they were designed to protect us from. We only draw into us and acquire consciousness that’s of service somehow and therefore useful.

Even when we perceive them as bad or destructive, they’re preventing us from coming face-to-face with other aspects of ourselves that we fear even more, even though they might be ultimately good and serve our growth. For example, anger and hostility may be acquired in response to something terrifying that was exactly what we needed to deal with that event, and so it helped us cope and be able to get through it, that once the terrifying event passed, we still maintain an aspect of us that approaches ordinary experiences with an attitude of anger and aggressiveness, or we see them in a way that makes us feel angry and aggressive that’s an inappropriate response. We can continue to look at ordinary things from a perspective that warrants anger and a hostel attitude. In this way, the very quality that protected us in one situation, now becomes our downfall because it becomes a primary part of our everyday life and we’re angry a lot, or it becomes an inappropriate response that we can’t seem to help, and we begin employing volatile reactive behavior in the ordinary sense.

 While we may come to a conscious decision of no longer needing their diversion, and are willfully choosing to step into what we originally feared and resisted, they continue to play out preventing it by introducing contradicting thoughts and emotions that go against our active decisions and hold us to the same attitudes, identity, and behavioral tendencies they served to develop in the first place. Once they become apart of us, we mistake them for being us, and continue to let them control us by living out of them and never sticking with our decisions that would eradicate them by rendering them subjective to our will.

Like all things, the idea is never to fight against or resist something, but rather to remove it and its influences from the system altogether, modifying the mind, and removing all blocks to progressive growth through willful decision making. At the level of the mind and consciousness, awareness is the key! Anything we remain unaware of continues to play out in our life, without our consent. By becoming aware of unconscious or shadow aspects of ourselves, we can dissolve them through awareness itself. Not through hating them or judging them to be bad, weak, or wrong, but rather by recognizing how they were serving us at some level and were exactly what we needed to deal with the situation we were in when we attracted them. When they entered us they were helping us to cope with and negotiate some situation that was difficult for us, or that we didn’t feel equipped to deal with. It’s only through true recognition and love and gratitude, that we work with the very consciousness that makes up our own being and serves to create our life experiences and impose a distinct direction on our life’s path by playing a part in controlling our choice and will to bring about certain realities. Love, appreciation and gratitude elicit a natural state of cooperation necessary to direct energetic forces.

 Dr. Linda Gadbois

Transpersonal Psychologist, Personal Transformation Coach, and Spiritual Teacher

 Save