Quote:
Originally Posted by searchingmysoul
The first time I talked about my "parts" with T I thought that I had gone completely mad. The interesting thing for me is that when I was describing these parts of myself I used the terms in Sunrise's link without ever having read about ego states previously. I described my true self is the "executive" or leader, there is a distinct "protector", and a distinct "vulnerable child" that the protector looks after.
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The same thing was true for me. I had never heard of much of this at all, and then I discovered this young adult male living inside of me and he told me he was my protector. I thought I was highly aberrant because I had this adult character of the opposite sex as an ego state and I was really worried and embarrassed to tell T about him because I thought T would think I had truly gone off the deep end. It seemed very reasonable to me to think I had younger versions of myself as ego states, who had split off during traumatic events, but having some dude I had never even met was just weird. But T told me it is completely normal to have ego states of the opposite sex. He told me some of his clients have "inner animals" and he tried to normalize it for me. He said that for me, having ego states may seem strange, but for him, it is very normal, as he has worked with many clients and their ego states, and he said everyone has them. My male is a young adult, early 20s, and he is very, very brash and quick to anger (whereas I, on the other hand, don't really even know how to feel anger or express it). It turns out he hated this certain person in my life (totally irrational) and completely interfered with my ability to get along with this person. I would just get so angry, and I didn't know why. And that's how I discovered him. I had an email to me from this guy that totally pissed off my male ego state, and all I would have to do was read it and there would be the male. It was kind of mean to "call" him like that. I don't do it anymore.
One of my male's great fears was that he would cease to exist because I was doing healing work in therapy with T, and his protector role would become less and less important as the younger girl ego states healed. So he would throw up stumbling blocks to working with the girls and do stuff to try to get me to sabotage therapy, because he didn't want me to take his job away. T told me I needed to reassure him and tell him that there were lots of other things he could help me with and to list specific ideas for him. And to be firm with him that he should not interfere with my little girls' healing. I thought well that is great, he is so strong, I could really use him at times. I told him one thing he could help me with and he totally rejected that--didn't want to do my scut work, so I had to come up with other ideas.

Yeah, passive he ain't.
searchingmysoul, is your 15 yo protector female or male?
Yes, this is fascinating stuff! It's actually really creative of our minds to create these "people" to populate our inner world and help us out or seek refuge there. It's soooo creative.... Makes me really appreciate being human.