But even when these forces within ourselves are temporarily stronger, when the conscious personality is at first overwhelmed by their violence, the vigilant self is never really conquered.
—Roberto Assagioli
This stage Assagioli called “control of the various elements of the personality,” which he saw as occurring through the process of disidentification. We would agree with him, emphasizing that this disidentification and sense of personal power arise as “I”—nurtured and empowered by spiritual empathy—emerges from survival and in exploration begins to operate with more freedom and awareness.
Again, by their love therapists are functioning as authentic unifying centers, in a way forming a conduit between the client and Self. This rejuvenates the “flow of being,” so to speak, from Self to “I,” allowing “I” to awaken and emerge from immersion within the personality. To shift metaphors, “I” is like a dormant ember in a seemingly dead fireplace, and the therapist's love is like a breath of air that allows the ember to begin to glow in the darkness and eventually come back to life.
Remember too that “I” does not imply any sort of rugged individuality, any sense of self completely separate and perhaps alienated from the wider society. “I” may experience being a free agent within the larger community, or may experience being a manifestation of the larger community. However “I” manifests in a particular culture, there is yet the ability to be aware and volitional from within one's own physical, emotional, and mental experience.
With this emergence of “I” comes a growing ability to freely exercise the functions of consciousness and will, and so, among other things, an increasing ability to express creatively via aspects of the personality rather than being unconsciously controlled by them. Within intersubjective psychology it might be said like this:
Innumerable selfobject experiences with the analyst provide a context that supports the development of the patient's capacity to assume a reflective, understanding, accepting, comforting attitude toward his own affective states and needs. (Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood 1987, 104)
Clients in this stage are more self-reflective and volitional, assuming a more active role in their healing and growth. They may bring to therapy issues they have been working on during the week, using therapy as a resource and adjunct for their own ongoing work on themselves.
I've been catching myself when I begin to obsess about a woman, or have a tantrum, or eat compulsively, or become passive in relationships. It's a very gentle awareness now, though. I don't come down on myself like I used to. In fact, I sort of chuckle, “Oops, there I go again,” like I would with the foibles of someone I like a lot.
I sometimes think of you at these times, by the way, remembering how you are with me, in that accepting way. I think your way of being with me has helped me be this way with myself. It's like you and I together can look at my foibles with care and understanding. I'm very different from the critical person I used to be. I'm also spending more time around people who treat me this way, after so much of my life was spent with people who didn't accept me.
Anyway, so now I know to check inside and look under the pattern, the obsession, or whatever it is—and find that feeling of being alone and helpless. It's that same childhood level we've worked with in here, the place in me where I feel so desperate and abandoned.
And like we've done in here, I can just be accepting of myself. I ask myself what I am needing, and it's usually something pretty simple. Maybe I'm worried about an upcoming deadline at work or feeling nervous about a date. Usually small things, but boy, those are the things that can trigger me. Even just finding out I am worried or whatever, I feel better. In a way, I guess I'm being with that younger part of me who needs someone to be with him.
Sometimes, though, I find I'm getting upset because people are being mean to me. This is tougher. I'm not used to being so aware of how people treat me, so I'm not used to doing anything about it. But when my friend put me down the other day, it really hurt my feelings—that sensitive level of me again. So I had to say something to him. It worked out fine—my friend got it right away. Yeah, I'm surprised I could do that. I'm feeling safer and safer with me.
And I am feeling pretty good about myself these days in general, by the way. I am just less anxious about things, about life. I feel like no matter what happens, I will be up to the challenge. Like I am on firm ground or something, although it's also completely fluid ground too. I am not holding onto anything stable, but swimming in the flow of my changing experience. So this doesn't mean feeling happy all the time, either. In fact, it means things like feeling small, feeling my grief feeling my sadness, things that used to be very scary to me, you know. I don't feel afraid of those things—or if I am, I can be with that too—and at the same time I am feeling more joy in my life. More than in a long, long time.
Part of this has been discovering this passion I have for poetry, of course. That's been big. I'd actually lost my love of poetry as I got on with my career. I thought it was gone for good. But it has come back in spades and I am actually learning I can write it. It's been hard, real hard at times, but so good for me at the same time. I get high on it sometimes. Let me read you my latest …
At this point in the therapy, the field of spiritual empathy has nurtured the client's sense of I-amness to such an extent that “I” is beginning to function as a new executive power within the personality. No longer simply buffeted by unconscious patterns, driven by hidden feelings, the client can live and breathe from a more authentic and fluid sense of personal identity.
He has really come a long way. I'm impressed. I'm impressed with me too, that I didn't get in his way much. I see that he's adopted a wonderfully compassionate stance toward himself, an attitude that lets him be aware of anything that arises in him, including the awareness of his obsessing—something that was very shameful and hard to talk about when he began therapy.
I can hear his openness to the heights and depths in him, and can get excited about his new sense of himself that is clearly emerging, but yes, I let go of all such theorizing, let it float freely in and out of my awareness while I stay focused on him. It's a lot like when I meditate. He's my mantra, my breath, the center of my mindfulness, and I can let all my insights and ideas float by like wispy clouds against a clear sky. In fact, we are both doing the same thing here as we swim with our experience.
At times there are ideas that come to me from this attention, maybe a comment, a question, a suggestion for a technique, and I may experiment with these. For example, I smiled when he told me about speaking to his friend about the negative comments, and asked him how his younger self felt about that. Again, inasmuch as I remain in his world, these interventions come from where he is, dovetailing with his own direction. It's just natural.
But often during this period I've been finding myself just tracking him, hearing where he is going, witnessing his unfolding path. Sometimes this can trigger me too. Am I doing my job? Am I useless here? What is he paying me for?
I also sometimes feel uncomfortable, hearing about his insights and growth from his meditation practice, his body work, and his dream group. Shouldn't our work have gotten to these? But I know those distractions in me only too well—I always expect my insecurities to be prowling about—and get back to him pretty quickly.
Now he's reading his poetry to me. Is that okay? Is this a waste of his money? Not my decision! I do understand—I'm someone who sees him and can witness his passion. His parents didn't seem to be able to do it, with their push for his career … but I'm missing his poem. “I'm sorry, I got distracted. Could you read the last stanza again?”
Here we see the therapist, even after having developed a loving empathic relationship with the client, still having to remain vigilant about distractions that take her away from him and his world. This is an ongoing practice of the psychosynthesis therapist—a meditative, mindful, spiritual practice, in fact. Here therapists are challenged minute-by-minute, day in and day out, to die to their world and be reborn to the world of the other. This is altruistic love.
In our case example, the spiritual empathy of the therapist has allowed the client the freedom to move from survival toward authenticity along all three dimensions: detachment from the survival unifying center, disidentification from survival personality, and disentrancement from the survival trance.
Clearly this client has been connecting to the therapist as an authentic unifying center: “I sometimes think of you at these times, by the way, remembering how you are with me, in that accepting way” (though this fact is seldom as explicitly recognized as in this “omniscient” example). Within the field of spiritual empathy, the client has found the therapist as a model and has internalized this model. The therapist “represents or constitutes a model or a symbol and is introjected in some measure by the patient” (Assagioli 2000, 5).
By virtue of the therapist's spiritual empathy, this client was able to gradually realize not only his connection to the therapist but to recognize other authentic unifying centers in his life as well. Thus held in being, he is experiencing an emerging sense of personhood that allows him to take active steps vis-à-vis his inner and outer environments.
Also, as this connection to authentic unifying centers develops, he has been able to detach from his self-critical, demeaning inner voice (internal survival unifying center) and from outer environments that are unsupportive or judgmental (external survival unifying centers). When he now becomes aware of problematical patterns of behavior, his inner and outer environments support him in an empathic attitude toward himself.
Part of this emergence of “I” has been a shift in identity. The client is no longer the way he used to be, resigned to a role of being passive and ill-treated in relationships, and is experiencing a sense of self beyond that identity—that is, he is disidentifying from survival personality. As he does this, he is able to reach to other parts of himself, most notably here the “younger part” who received much of the primal wounding he experienced within his family of origin. From this new place in himself, he can reach to this wounded layer, hold it in self-empathy, and take steps to form a way of life that supports the ongoing healing of this vulnerable area of himself. This is the burgeoning of authentic personality.
This disidentification from survival personality brings into play another dynamic in the emergence stage: he has become willing to consciously take over the functions of the survival patterns. These automatic patterns were in place for a good reason—to protect him from primal wounding. The emergence of “I” does not mean he suddenly has no need for such protection; it means that instead of minimizing or ignoring wounding as he did to survive, he can now consciously and intentionally engage wounding elements in himself and others. To his “surprise,” as he becomes aware of this wholeness, including his awareness of being treated badly, there may be many choices—such as that with the friend who hurt his feelings—that can be made regarding demeaning people and environments in his life.
So again, here is the “psychology of the external” discussed in chapter 5—therapy need not be about adapting to problematic or abusive environments, but can engender an awareness of wounding so those environments can be transformed, bridging the oft-criticized gap between therapy and social action.
Finally, note that in this emergence of the client's authenticity there is an increased openness to both the heights of the higher unconscious and the depths of the lower unconscious. This is a disentrancement from the survival trance. He has developed a continuity of being—“Like I am on firm ground or something”—that allows him to embrace a far greater experiential range than before, from the depths of his aloneness, grief, and “feeling small,” to the heights of the acceptance, love, and joy.
Disentrancement means also that the middle unconscious, originally constricted by the splitting and repression of higher and lower unconscious, is now expanding. This expansion opens the person to learning new, more creative patterns of behavior that include far more gifts and talents than possible in the trance. This client's passion for poetry is a good example. Here he is learning to do something that demands he operate from an expanded sense of reality, not only to inform his poetry itself, but so he can engage the aridity, struggle, and uncertainty of the creative process as well as the excitement of artistic inspiration and production. Therapists do well to witness such strong expressions of healing and integration, the emergence of “I.”
And, of course, as he negotiates all these dimensions of authenticity, there will be times of revisiting the earlier stages of psychosynthesis as well. He may find his old patterns reasserting themselves in certain situations, and once again he is walking in survival, or he may find new material emerging from the unconscious asking for more exploration on his part.
Overall, authenticity is continuing to replace survival as “I” emerges. The person is moving out of the survival mode in which he is controlled by inner and outer events, in which unconscious patterns automatically protect him from past and future wounds. And he is moving toward a mode in which his physicality, emotional responses, and cognitive functioning are increasingly an expression of “I am,” and are not so much devoted to protecting and hiding wounds.
Where could a client possibly go from this point? Is not this personal self-actualization enough? Is it not enough to be conscious and awake, free to live and move with the wholeness of one's full experiential range and personal gifts? Much psychological theory would answer in the affirmative, but any transpersonal psychology like psychosynthesis remains open to further steps on the path. Again, held in a field of spiritual empathy, a person may well begin to move into stage three, the stage of Contact with Self.