The Illusion of a Single Personality

Managers, firefighters, exiles. Inner team members, ego states, parts, sides.

Many therapy and coaching approaches, such as IFS, Schulz von Thun’s Inner Team, ego state therapy, and many others, work with different self-states. One thing these approaches share is the view that we are not one monolithic personality but carry various personality patterns within us.

The distinction of these different parts into self-representations and other-representations adds something essential: it separates the image of myself from the image of the world.

Self-representations and other-representations emerge from early relational experiences and consolidate into stable inner structures. They don’t “exist” as things; they are pattern-forming observations.

What was once a wise response to a difficult situation solidifies into something that stands between us and our needs, and co-determines which needs we allow ourselves and which we are no longer permitted to feel.

Because often it is not “I” who rejects a need, but a specific part, shaped from old experiences that no longer apply today.

This separation creates a productive tension that supports, or even makes possible, working through the impairment:

Without the separation, the experience often remains diffuse and all-encompassing. Everything merges: self-image, expectations of others, feelings, bodily sensations. It can’t be grasped, located, or worked with.

With the distinction, the diffuse condenses into something concrete. The self-image becomes separable from the image of others. What was previously flooding takes on contour and becomes something that can be discussed.

In work with chairs or other forms of externalization, the value becomes especially clear: when I externalize an other-representation, for example onto a chair, a cushion, a place in the room, then for a moment I no longer have to carry it inside me. It becomes a figure I can engage with.

A manager feels chronically overwhelmed: 🌫️ Diffuse: “I’m not up to this.” 💎 Precise: “A part of me says I have to be perfect (SR). And I expect every mistake to be punished (OR).”

Or:

A client can’t voice any wishes: 🌫️ Diffuse: “I’m just not like that.” 💎 Precise: “I experience myself as too much (SR). And I expect rejection if I ask for something (OR).”

From diffuse to precise. From flooded to condensed. That is the gain of this distinction, and often the first step toward finding access to our needs again.