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mckell13 said:
I need to learn more about these ego states.
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McKell, here's a little info from this website:
http://www.clinicalsocialwork.com/overview.html
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Ego-State Therapy: An Overview
... [Paul] Federn believed that the personality was not simply a collections of perceptions, cognitions, and affects, but that these organized into clusters or patterns, which he called ego states.
An ego state may be defined as an organized system of behavior and experience whose elements are bound together by some common principle.
When one of these states is invested with ego energy, it becomes “the self” in the here and now. We say it is “executive,” and it experiences the other states (if it is aware of them at all) as “he,” “she,” or “it,” because they are then currently invested with object energy.
Ego states may be large and include all the various behaviors and experiences activated in one’s occupation. They may be small, like the behaviors and feelings elicited in school at the age of 6. They may represent current modes of behavior and experiences or, as with hypnotic regression, include many memories, postures, feelings, etc. that were apparently learned at an earlier age. They may be organized into different dimensions. For example, an ego state may be built around the age of 10. Another one may represent patterns of behavior toward father and authority figures and thus overlap on experiences with father at the age of 10.
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At the time T and I were doing ego state therapy last year, I had a vision who I am. I saw myself as a room fool of shadowy people, all myself, of different ages and characteristics. They were mostly gray, shadow people—all my ego states. A few were more differentiated (less integrated) than others--less gray--and stood out to me. I recognized them. There was the little 4 year old girl I was working with then. There was an older girl of 7 or 8 or 9, who I believe is the "new" ego state that has recently come out of hiding. There was a teenage girl too, and more. I realized I had a new conception of self—my room full of ego states. And I also had a new conception of who I am—the team leader ("executive") who holds us all together, who leads us all through life in a coordinated effort to function. And I felt proud of myself, that I could marshal the forces and get us through life.
Now current events have brought this unintegrated little girl ego state to the forefront. What I liked about ego state therapy before was, to paraphrase, that my own mature adult self was the primary agent of healing. I am really looking forward to doing this again. Helping this little girl will help me so much with current events.