Please correct my summary if it doesn’t match your experience: it reads as though you have an extremely powerful talent to project different facets of your personality and creativity, and you want to bring a greater understanding of this into you life, as well as having a more stable base state which is more like your ideal self.
There’s a very easy questioning technique to do the latter (finding the stable base that is your ideal self, that is). I’d recommend trying this with a second person (someone you trust) asking the questions, as long as they’ll do you the service of sticking exactly to how the questions are worded. Change the wording, change the result.
I’d suggest running the exercise in three parts:
Part 1
- Identify five emotions that you are likely to experience in any given week. They have to occur with that kind of regularity, you’ll see why in the next step.
Identify five specific instances in the last week when you felt each of the five emotions strongly. Sometimes it’ll be the same set of circumstances that will bring up a range of emotions, so you don’t have to have one separate instance for each emotion. If it helps, relive the situation and its associated emotional state, paying particular attention to what you see, hear and feel (and maybe taste and smell, too) – it’s especially fun to do this with happy memories. Then run through these questions, in this order, using this exact wording:
1. In that situation, what were you ______ about? (Fill in the blank with the emotion, ie: …what were you angry about?)
2. What is significant about ______? (Fill in the blank with whatever answer was given in response to question 1, using the exact wording that was used in response to question 1)
3. Why or how does ______ matter? (Fill in the blank with whatever answer was given in response to question 2, using the exact wording that was used in response to question 2)
To give a rationale for how this works: our emotions give us vital feedback about things that are important to us and our identities. These questions will probe into specific instances that elicit those emotional states, getting to the bottom of exactly why it’s important. When I ran through this exercise I asked the questioner to write down my answers (using the exact words I’d used) and the information about me that was revealed was pretty central to how I view myself and my identity. And yes, you can ask these questions week after week and get progressively varying results, because we’re all identity configurations in constant flux. The more you do it, the more you get to know yourself.
Part 2
Straight into questions this time. Again, it’s very important to use the exact wording (even if the wording sounds strange or badly phrased when you insert material from a previous answer), and to get the answers recorded, too. Recording with a dictaphone and then transcribing it is certainly worth the effort.
1. What are you always caring about?
2. What are you always trying to achieve regarding ______? (Fill in the blank with whatever answer was given in response to question 1, using the exact wording that was used in response to question 1)
3a. How do you go about doing ______?
3b. What does ______ mean for you?
(Questions 3a and 3b are pretty interchangeable. Fill in the blanks in accordance with whichever questions you asked immediately beforehand, or even backtrack and fill in both with the answer to question 2)
4. How is ______ and expression of who you are? or, How is this an expression of you?
By using the universal quantifier *always* you’re going to be sorting through your experience to find the things that matter to you the most, the structure than underpins your model of the world. Your answers will say a great deal about your core identity. There’s no reason to just run through this once, you can always begin over by saying, “What else are you always caring about?”
When both Part 1 and Part 2 have been done, do some contrastive analysis. Explore your answers to see how the results from the two exercises are similar and different, and perhaps even start sorting the information to see if it naturally falls into categories that seem right to you. If you want to give the categories a name or a symbol, feel free to use whatever you want, as long as it’s yours and you feel happy with it. Know that it can change again later, anyway.
Part 3
This is where things become really interesting, in exploring the relationship that these projected characters and personalities have with your core identity. You might already have found that connections are apparent even after having run through Parts 1 and 2.
There’s all sorts of ways you can do this. You could run Part 1 and Part 2 for each facet in turn, then compare the results to each other, and then finally for the version of you that isn’t acting out these characters. You could describe each character in detail, their physiology, sensory experience (what they see, hear, feel, etc), thought patterns, emotional state, even their histories, and see how this relates to you. You could run Part 1, only substituting instances in which you feel specific emotions for instances in which you manifest each different persona. Or you may find that you’re so comfortable with the identity mapping you got from Parts 1 and 2 that you don’t even feel the need to investigate further and do Part 3. You’re a creative person, I bet you can think of tons of other ideas.
The key to this process is to explore slowly, by stages. Maybe only do Part 1 in a day, then come back and do the rest later. Give yourself time to process each stage, don’t let your conscious mind race to find answers, because the important answers will come in their own time. And trust yourself. If you feel this kind of exploration isn’t helpful, then don’t do it. If you get that kind of objection, then ask the part of you that’s objecting, “What is your positive intention in raising this objection.” It’ll give you interesting answers, and you can always negotiate with yourself to get permission to do the exercises, even if you state it as, “Well, shall we just pretend to do it and we can see what things are like afterwards?” You can always do it later, but I’d trust yourself if any part of you doesn’t want to do it.
It’s fun to do this kind of stuff, but remember: none of it is necessarily true. Treat it as concepts, ideas and values at play. Enjoy it but understand that these things are ephemeral, you’re nailing jelly to a wall with a particularly well adapted nailgun. Have fun! |
