Ego State Therapy
I wonder if you are aware of a feeling of fragmentation within yourself or if you find yourself having internal arguments and conflicts about your daily routine? It’s as if, perhaps when you are tired, sad, scared or nervous, a different part of you takes over and controls your reactions and responses. You feel you are not in control of your life and habits and you become exhausted with the constant struggle to try and re-gain that control.
Ego State Therapy works on the premise that we are all made up of different states or parts, kind of like having multiple personalities. Our parts are actually neural pathways of our brain. Each pathway has a purpose and most were created from infancy through to late adolescence.
In the Ego State Therapy model we imagine these pathways as if they are children in a classroom. The classroom is your brain, both left and right sides, both sub-conscious and conscious. If one of the children is uncomfortable or feeling a negative emotion, it is likely the other children in the same room will be affected by this (in the same way that anxiety will snowball or addictions will increase over time). Some of the other children may try to help the vulnerable ones, offering solutions like food, an emotional release or a habitual response. Some children may feel they need to protect the one feeling bad so may become loud, aggressive or attempt to hide the child from ever being hurt again. While others will feel they need to criticise the unhappy ones to stop them causing this chain reaction.
Although these solutions are offered with a positive intention, they are only band-aid techniques, often inflame the situation and rarely resolve the bad feelings. Ego State Therapy introduces the therapist as a teacher. The teacher uses information from the children to find the one that feels bad and asks it, directly, what it needs or wants to feel better. The magic of this method is that the classroom is a place where the imagination runs free and can look, feel, sound and be anyway the children want it be. The past experiences are not removed or forgotten but the way the children feel about it and therefore respond to it are different, better and exactly the way the collective classroom of the brain wants it to be. This means that the negative emotion is resolved, the bad habits and thoughts stop, energy returns to the room and your children are all free to express themselves as they want to.
The way to get internal harmony is to have all of your children happy and fully integrated. Ego State Therapy is the quickest and most direct way to do that.
One part of you says:
“Eat healthy, you’ll have more energy. Stop smoking it’s bad for you. Exercise, you’ll feel better. Think positive and you will attract good things. Be nice to yourself, you’re a good person.”
While another part says:
“You are tired, eat some sugar. You deserve a cigarette, one won’t hurt. Your too tired to exercise. Life is too hard. You can never be truly happy. That person thinks your not good enough so you mustn’t be.”
We have all experienced this type of internal conflict. One part says “get up, it’s time to get going” while another says “no I want to sleep some more”, the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other. By the time they have stopped arguing both are tired and drained from the conflict.