In my time at Antioch University, I had the pleasure of hearing Tim Desmond, author of Self-Compassion in Psychotherapy and The Self-Compassion Skills Workbook, speak several times. In the course of talking about his approach to mindfulness and self-compassion, he would often lay a foundation of a truth he believed to be universal:
Everyone, deep down, desires to be happy and free from suffering.
It’s a truth that I have never found an exception to, and I operate on the faith of that statement with clients, family, friends, and myself. However, I don’t just think it’s the individual as a whole that benefits from keeping in mind that simple motivation and desire.
As a psychodynamic therapist, I do not believe that the self is a coherent whole. We do not think or feel just one thing at a time. We do not have just one motivation. We have many parts of ourselves that can all be active at the same time, interacting with each other, opposing each, cooperating with each other, or flat out sabotaging each other.
Often, people seek therapy because they want to change something about themselves or their lives but find that implementing the desired change is difficult on their own. Some come in angry at their anxiety or impatient with their depression. Many often want me to give them something that will take away a self-destructive habit right away or a trick that will change them into a different person.
For my part, I treasure those parts that they dislike because I believe that those difficult, cantankerous, annoying, and unwanted parts want to create happiness and be free from suffering. Moreover, I also believe that for all the problems those parts are causing, they’re trying really hard to be helpful towards those goals.
Granted, very often they’re not doing a great job. Maybe they were coping mechanisms that worked at one point but aren’t working anymore. Or maybe they’ve always been inhibiting—even self-destructive. But generally, they’re at least trying to do something positive, be it protecting someone from something, avoiding pain, preventing failure, or any number of goals.
So while I hold in mind that the feelings people have towards those parts are valid and their desire to change is important, my first goal isn’t necessarily to eradicate those parts. Rather, it’s to understand them and offer compassion to them—the compassion that the individual isn’t able to offer themselves in that moment.
Jung called the unwanted, pushed-away parts of the self the Shadow, and he believed that the Shadow was problematic precisely because it was pushed away and cut off, buried in the shadows of the mind. Pushing those parts away doesn’t make the need or motivating factors that drove them actually go away; it just makes them look for secretive, unconscious ways of asserting themselves.
Integrated and owned, those parts could become healthy parts of the self because the individual would have the freedom and insight to make conscious, intentional, and effective choices of how to pursue meeting that need or accomplishing that goal that the Shadow was so bad at achieving.
By approaching these difficult parts of the self with compassion and an attitude that they have good goals deep down, change becomes more natural. It becomes a negotiated process of working with oneself rather than against oneself. And when someone’s various parts have gotten on board as allies, they often find the process of change and growth much more enjoyable.