Written by: Jay Oliver, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
In business (and life), communication, connection, and harmony between people is crucial. And the higher up the pecking order of authority and leadership you go, the more important this gets. How can we effectively lead others and have a successful business if we are hindered in our capacity to commune, connect and relate? And what’s any of this got to do with our past anyway?
Our ability to relate with, and lead others effectively, hinges much more on our past than most people would like to believe. Why? And what exactly do I mean by our past?
When I talk of our past, I’m referring to the exiled or disowned self (sometimes called our shadow self in psychology). What this self represents is everything we don’t want to acknowledge or admit about ourselves.
Everyone has a disowned self in varying degrees, and it holds a monumental key towards optimal leadership and harmonious relationships in the present because whatever we can’t accept about ourselves, we won’t be able to accept about others, and whenever our emotional and judgemental reactivity towards others increases, our leadership capacities and ability to relate, will both invariably wane.
I’ll explain more about how all this interferes with our interactions shortly, but first, let me explain a little more about how this exiled self forms from an early age.
According to Richard Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family systems psychology, we are all born as a system of psychic ‘parts’ or sub-personalities, although some lie dormant during our early lives and are yet to come ‘online’ for lack of a better term. We also have, according to Schwartz (as well as all the world’s great wisdom traditions), an absolute and true self, which serves as both a transcendent & non-empirical reality, and a compassionate and wise leader of this inner system of parts. This self is known practically as ‘the seat of consciousness’ in IFS terms.
When we are young and innocent, we don’t seem to have the capacity to remain in conscious connection with our true selves, and we may even get attacked or criticised for showing its natural expression of curiosity, kindness and compassion, which are always emanating aspects of this primordial essence.
With both the influence of people around us and society, we gradually lose touch with this self and fall into identification with these sub-personalities, which are, in a healthy system, meant to be led by the seat of consciousness (self), rather than taking control themselves.
When this happens, we have less protection for our system of parts (although we don’t realise it at the time). Some of these parts are very vulnerable, sensitive and innocent, and are susceptible to harm through any kind of trauma, abuse or neglect. When this happens, these vulnerable parts get, according to Richard Schwartz and Martha Sweezy, ‘burdened’ with painful feelings and beliefs about themselves and the world, which makes other parts, in the absence of our true self as inner leader, lock them away (in the unconscious mind) for the vulnerable parts own safety and for the safety of the whole system. In other words, they get repressed out of awareness.
So now we haven’t just lost access to our true selves (although it’s still always there in us, albeit obscured through identification), we have also lost access to these young and vulnerable parts that have a broad range of talents, capacities, and qualities. If the part brings a lot of joy for example, we then lose touch with that joy altogether.
The parts that get locked away like this become ‘exiles’ or simply part of our exiled or disowned-self, which is more an accumulation of multiple parts rather than just one split-off personality. The parts that lock these away become ‘protectors’ because their jobs are to keep this vulnerability hidden and safely out of mind.
And so on it goes, through life exiling and exiling, until we have, in most cases, a fairly tense, delicate and constrained system of unease governed by protectors rather than our true selves.
The parts that we mostly identify with from then on are these protectors. We think of them as ‘me.’ These parts, just like exiled parts, also get burdened with beliefs and emotions that constrain the inner and outer systems of which we are embedded.
Let me give you an example.
If we got made fun of at school and the stimulus was strong enough or happened often enough, the sensitive parts of our inner system could have felt overwhelmingly humiliated and for the parts own protection and for the protection of the rest of the inner system, would have ended up getting exiled out of awareness and they would become frozen in time (at the time of the event) and burdened with the feeling of humiliation and more than likely a belief of being unlovable or something similar.
The protectors, who now mostly run the show for the conscious mind, could then become burdened with the beliefs that we have unacceptable vulnerability inside of us, and that people can’t be trusted anymore because other people are out to humiliate us. If this wasn’t enough, their new constraining roles as guardians of this inner storehouse of wounds (that they now continue to desperately prevent from being exposed) is even more burdensome!
Now, when I say that this exiled self is everything that we don’t want to admit about ourselves, I am talking about our protectors that we have become overly identified with. Our true self has no problem accepting (and healing) vulnerability, no matter how extreme those parts are in their feeling states, but the problem is that, in most cases, we have temporarily obscured our true self from ourselves via takeover of these protector parts.
These protectors are motivated by fear; fear of keeping vulnerability (and anything they deem unacceptable) at bay. They cannot, within themselves, heal and redeem these exiled parts. They can only suppress, control, deny, distract from, numb, or distort, never face, reintegrate and/ or heal.
Now, if we haven’t made peace with, and reclaimed our past (in the form of exiled parts), which also means rediscovering and abiding as our true self, the only element capable of taking care of those disowned parts to who we are that past will continue to distort, hinder & constrain our ability to perceive and to act in the present, and we (as protectors) will be motivated by fear rather than by love, which, quoting the Dalai Lama, “Is the absence of judgement” and, put simply, is the very foundation for all stable & healthy relationships, whether they are brief ones or not.
Protectors are not capable of this (true) love, as they always have an agenda of keeping vulnerability out of mind, and therefore have a script of judgement of what is acceptable and what is not. They are ‘conditional lovers’ at best. Only the true self can relinquish judgement and fear, or rather, is already free of it. Only the true self knows unconditional love, both inside and out.
Now you might think, “I’m not coming from a place of fear when I interact with others,” but if you have an agenda that denies any part of their presenting reality, and you are overly identified with this, then I’m afraid you are, even if only on a small scale.
Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying we should become passive in the face of any injustice, or put up with any mistreatment or rudeness, I’m simply saying that we are unable to be an effective agent for (peaceful) change and an effective leader in the world (and workplace) if we haven’t first come to an acceptance of and have compassion for, all aspects of all people first. And the only way to arrive here is for us to have total and complete acceptance and compassion for ourselves (all our parts), leading from our true selves both inside and out.
Anything else will serve to strengthen extremes of protector/ protector & protector/ exile relationships, both within us and within others, because without this wholeness within, you would deny, judge, reject or have distaste for certain aspects of another person that happens to be with you at any given moment because they represent an aspect of yourself that you (as protector parts) can’t or are unwilling to accept and embrace.
If someone is overly joyful, for example, and joy belongs to one of your own exiled parts, your protectors will rush to the barricade, obscuring the true self as they go, and will treat that person in the same way as they treat your own exiled part, the part that once upon a time got punished or denied repeatedly for exhibiting joy. As this part and its gift of joy got you into a lot of pain in the past, it serves as a threat, even when presented through other people. Your protectors will react to this same trait in another person with negative judgement and some form of distaste or disinterest perhaps, which the other person will feel and be affected by subliminally, inside or outside of awareness.
Or if you were repeatedly punished for wasting important study time as a child because you were being creative with your own interests instead, this ‘creative part’ that wanted healthy expression could have (if the injury was intense or often enough) ended up being exiled any person you then meet or work with later on who adopts a creative self-expression would become a threat to you, or would simply become distasteful to you (as protector) as those same traits had caused you pain as a child and continue to, at least through the burdened eyes of your protectors, pose a threat of pain to the system.
Since protectors essentially want exiles banished and out of mind, they will, even in subtle ways, want to banish parts or traits that represent these exiles in other people. When protectors identify with us (or ‘blend’ with us in IFS terms), we will always react to the things negatively in others that we react to negatively within ourselves.
This reactivity can range from irritation, fear, harsh judgement or even anger, to mild impatience, lack of interest and/or subtle denial.
And so, it's the same with all traits and all parts that resemble or remind us of our own exiles. Can you see then, how this would constrain, interfere with, and/or hinder our relationships (or just interactions) in the present?
Also, in the face of protector leadership, can you see how it will be easy for us to react emotionally and be judgemental towards others?
How successful a leader are we if we have ‘hot buttons’ that can get triggered easily by others?
How can we remain mature, open, attentive and compassionate towards other people in this way? And how likely is it that those people will feel safe around us and feel trusted, as well as have trust in you?
The only way to regain optimal outer leadership is to regain optimal inner leadership, and that means rediscovering our true selves once more, underneath these protector parts.
When the self reappears to care for, nurture, accept and love our own exiled parts, we will spontaneously begin to do the same for others. Our parts will trust us more and our capacity to lead them, and so will people in the outside world who represent those same parts. In this way, all relationships improve.
In summary then, we must take responsibility for our past if we are wanting to succeed in the present and in the future within our relationships and within our ability to lead others effectively. We could go as far as to say that whatever we avoid in ourselves will ultimately dictate the fate of our relationships and maybe even our businesses too down the line.
By creating an all-inclusive and loving inner environment for all our inner parts, through true self-leadership, we create the necessary conditions to do the same for others. And what we elicit in ourselves, we will ultimately elicit in others, “As within, so without.”
So, will it be compassion, acceptance and open heartedness? Or emotional reactivity and harsh judgement? Love or fear? Which would be more powerful when it comes to interpersonal success?
For more information on using IFS for conflict negotiation, healing and redeeming our past and creating harmony and balance in relationships, see the book ‘Internal Family Systems Therapy – second edition’ by Richard C. Schwartz and Martha Sweezy (2020). This article owes all credit to this book and these two phenomenal authors. Thank you for reading.
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Jay Oliver, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Jay Oliver is a mindset coach for entrepreneurs and business owners. Having struggled with his own psychological suffering earlier in life, and having a severely autistic child, Jay studied to understand human psychology; the forces that drive & imprison us, and how we can maximize success and contentment in our daily lives. Jay has a modern approach to strategic and psychological intervention, he is focused on helping other people navigate the rough terrains of life and relationships, getting the most out of their inherent human complexity, as well as the eradicating of conflict in human systems and sub-systems. His mission: to help people discover their own untapped resources and reach their full potential.
