portraits-of-america: “I have this fundamental belief—I’ve had it for as long as I
portraits-of-america: “I have this fundamental belief—I’ve had it for as long as I can remember—that I would not be attractive to anyone, that I would not find love. It made no sense to me logically, but it was something I believed. I struggled for a long time with that and then I said, ‘Okay, if that’s not going to happen, the least I can do is be happy with who I am.’ And I am happy with who I am, so it made no sense that someone else wouldn’t be. There was this disconnect between my logical side and my emotional side and I didn’t know what to do about that.” “Why did you believe that no one would find you attractive?” “For a long time I thought I was boring, and not physically attractive. Once I realized that, objectively, I was not that boring, all of my anxieties got pinned onto my physical appearance, and that’s something I still struggle with, although not as much as I used to.” “What has changed?” “I started going to therapy. It’s called internal family systems model, which basically considers you as a multiplicity of parts. So there is a self at the center of who you are, and it’s associated with emotions such as calmness and confidence and compassion, but there are also other parts of you that govern your day-to-day existence that are called managers in this model. They make sure you get stuff done and stay on top of things. Then there are parts of you that are exiles. Usually they have suffered some sort of early childhood trauma, and they are the parts that are most vulnerable. And a lot of what the managers do is to prevent the exiles from getting hurt. But that also prevents the exile parts from expressing themselves fully and being part of who you are. Then the third set of parts are firefighters, which in times of crisis can do things that are physically destructive. I don’t have many firefighters—I don’t do things that are physically destructive, which is why I am not worried about me. But I’ve had this part of me that has been in exile for so long that I still don’t know exactly what it is, but it has to do with attractiveness and love in a non-platonic sense. I made a list of everything that might have driven this part of me into exile, and each individual thing is so small, but the added effect of all of them is to keep that part out of my life, which is why I identified so strongly with work for so long. So the whole purpose of therapy has been figuring out what those parts are and getting them back into balance. The idea is that you then start thinking of yourself as a family of small parts. The goal is to bring about leadership from the self and not let those parts dictate who you are and what you do. Once you do this, you start seeing the rest of the world the same way, so it’s a very outward-looking model, not one focused on the inside. You see other people’s interactions in terms of the parts that they may have, and it lets you feel a lot more compassion for people, and for yourself—if you understand that every person is not just a single person and what they say and do is not motivated by who they are fundamentally because there is no ‘who they are fundamentally.’ That ‘who they are fundamentally’ is complicated.” Somerville, MA …. If you have never supported Portraits of America, please, consider doing so today:https://www.patreon.com/portraitsofamerica PayPal: portraitsofamerica@outlook.com or PayPal.Me/portraitsofamerica -- source link