Recognize your subpersonalities through the roles you play

Describe how you think, feel and behave in each of your main roles, and notice how different those people are.

Pourquoi ça marche

Assagioli introduced subpersonalities by asking people whether they behave differently at the office, at home, with friends and alone. Each role gathers its own traits and attitudes, and people slide between them with only "a thin thread of memory" connecting them. Seeing them side by side does two things: it shows the subpersonalities as parts rather than the whole, and it makes the observer who is doing the comparing more noticeable, since, as Assagioli puts it, that observing self is none of them.

Comment faire

1. List your main roles: for example son or daughter, partner, parent, professional, friend, member of a group.
2. Give each role a plain name that captures it (the Fixer, the Quiet One, the Boss).
3. Read the list back and notice the one who wrote it — the one who can see all of these roles from outside.

Données probantes

The roles approach is set out in the section on subpersonalities in Assagioli's 1965 manual, which lists roles such as son or daughter, husband or wife, father or mother, and professional role. Vargiu says naming a subpersonality can help tell the parts apart, and warns that a name can also help keep a part fixed. Rowan's Subpersonalities surveys the concept across many schools of psychology. These are practitioner accounts; no study has tested whether naming subpersonalities in this way changes behavior. (anecdotal)

Behaving differently across roles is ordinary and is not a sign that anything is wrong. A name is a working handle, not a fixed identity; Vargiu warns that names can freeze a subpersonality and may need to change. Stop line: if you feel flooded, lose track of where you are, or images will not settle, stop and work with a trained therapist.

Sources

• Assagioli, R. (1965). Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques. Hobbs, Dorman.
• Vargiu, J. (1974). Chapter in Synthesis, Vol. I: The Realization of the Self. The Synthesis Press, Redwood City, California. Reprinted on kennethsorensen.dk as "Subpersonalities and psychotherapy" (the editor added the subtitle and abstract).
• Rowan, J. (2013). Subpersonalities: The People Inside Us (first published 1990). Routledge.

Erreur fréquente

Ranking the roles into a "real me" and "fake me". Assagioli treats all of them as roles the "I" plays; the aim is to play them more consciously, not to discard the ones you like less.