1. When a sub-personality you see or hear in another person, gives you a bad (emotional) taste in the mouth, without any obvious reason. One of your selves is obviously reacting strongly about this, but why? Because when the selves in you, who got rid of your ‘problem’ self, see a similar one alive and active in someone else they start to worry. What if your disowned self starts thinking about returning from exile and joining it? However the reaction is not always repulsion, it can be an irresistible attraction. You can be overpowered, enmeshed (or both) by the other person’s behaviour.
For example, if a hard, one-above ‘cold and logical’ self has successfully got rid of all the emotional selves in Gary, he may at first be drawn to those parts in Gina. Her emotional side looks ‘interesting’ because it seems so unlike his own personality. Later on, Gary’s cold, logical selves begin to judge and criticise Gina’s feeling selves as ‘too soft’ and this leads to the break up of that relationship. So noticing whatever it is you keep attracting into your life (and when it comes, you react strongly to it) helps identify the parts you have disowned.
2. Whatever you disown seems to attract towards you other people who are carrying or ‘holding’ similar energy to your disowned parts. It may turn up in a partner, but just as often in your children, friends, people at work, a bank manager or shop assistants. Even your pets may have selves similar to those you have disowned.
3. People with disowned selves that are the opposite of yours will be drawn to you. Gary’s girl friends will be attracted to him by his hard strong ‘logical’ side (which they have disowned). This gives Gary another way to see that he has disowned his feelings.
Other pointers to a disowned self in you:
5. Disowned selves can also reappear temporarily, when you are very tired, sick, stressed or under the influence of any kind of primary self blocking substance particularly alcohol.
Mid-life crisis or disowned self fighting back?
Faced with a major problem in mid-life, a scrupulously honest banker may suddenly start embezzling funds. A morally upright pastor may start cheating on his wife, a therapist working with addicts becomes locked in an addictive cycle of his own. This can be a sign that some of their disowned selves are staging a last ditch comeback and explains what is often labelled a ‘mid-life’ crisis.
If the newly returned self turns out to be a great deal better at protecting them, then other one-above selves may disown the previously powerful one and the change becomes permanent. The doormat who flips into their disowned rebel seldom goes back to being a doormat.
In less serious examples a disowned rebel self can come out and enable a middle-aged conservative lecturer to buy a red sports car, while a shy introverted accountant takes up belly dancing and a morally upright mother goes to a costume party dressed as a prostitute.
Feedback - please e-mail me John Bligh Nutting - at nutting@growingaware.com
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