MULTIPLICITY

 

Notice that there are times when you hear someone (or maybe it’s you) saying something like: “There is a part of me that is totally on board with the idea, but another part is a bit ambivalent about making that work.”

 

Or you find yourself contradicting an opinion you voiced during a morning meeting when you present to a different audience in the afternoon.  “When and how did I suddenly change my mind?”

 

Or you are conferring with a business colleague, and something he says makes you become inexplicably defensive and angry.  You say something that you regret and later ask yourself: “What got into me?”

 

We have traditionally imagined ourselves to be singular entities that have one mind with differing thoughts, moods, and emotions.  What Dr. Richard Schwartz discovered over the course of almost forty years of clinical practice is that we have a multiplicity of mind, with different aspects, or “parts,” that hold unique qualities and perspectives. (For more on Dick’s decades-long work, please read the HISTORY tab.)  If you take a moment and really think about it, you can probably come up with instances when you said or did something that didn't really feel like you....maybe you suddenly felt really young and vulnerable during an important meeting with a customer, or you were flooded by a sense of dissociation that came out of nowhere while preparing to lead a team presentation.

 

Having aspects of ourselves that form our whole self is not new- think Freud’s id, ego and superego in psychotherapy. The mystic, G.I. Gurdjieff wrote: “Man is a plural being.  When we speak of ourselves ordinarily, we speak of ‘I’.  We say, “‘I’ did this”, “‘I’ want to do this,” but this is a mistake.  There is no such ‘I’, or rather, there are hundreds, thousands of little ‘I’s in every one of us.”  From award-winning Stanford neuroscientist Dr. Robert Ornstein’s 1986 book, Multimind: A New Way of Looking at Human Behavior: “Stuck side by side, inside the skin, inside the skull, are several special purpose, separate, and specific small minds…We are not a single person.  We are many.”

 

Over the course of our working together, you will develop a comprehensive understanding of how this multiplicity of mind offers relief from your own inner judgments and self-criticisms and allows you to connect with your true self worth.  An increased sense of confidence and experiencing others in a new way will optimize your capacity to relate more productively with colleagues, clients and customers in the workplace.