Your psyche is inhabited by entities that aren't you

Nobody loves describing the structure of the human mind more than I do.

*This article is from my now decommissioned Patreon Page

When it comes to dealing with difficult situations in life, describing how I feel in terms of separate sub-personalities with competing motivations and desires has been one of the most useful therapeutic tools I’ve learned to use.

Saying “part of me wants X to happen, while part of me does NOT want X to happen” is a strictly better way of describing my internal feelings because it accurately captures the internal division that so often characterizes my perceptions toward a given person or situation.

For example, I might have a friend who I enjoy having conversations with one-on-one, but as soon as we get in a group setting, they become arrogant, annoying, and suck the energy out of the room.

The part of me who values social interaction and connection wants to stay friends with this person, while the part of me who values self-improvement thinks I should cut them out of my life.

The interesting thing is that these “sub-personalities” are not entirely metaphorical. They can be thought of as truly distinct psychological entities.

Consider the following:

I had a very vivid dream some time ago where I was having a deep and meaningful conversation with a girl who I had met in real life. In the dream, we were speaking as if we had intimate familiarity, while in real life, I had only spoken to her two or three times at a very surface level.

As is often the case with dreams, while I don’t remember the specific content of the dialogue, I distinctly remember that it felt like a very compelling conversation with someone I loved.

So here’s the question:

Who – or what – was I speaking to?

Since it was in my dream, obviously the entity I was talking to was entirely a product of my own psyche.

But how I could be having a conversation with myself? I don't mean talking out loud - I mean exchanging thoughts and feelings as you would with an intimate partner who has a mind of their own.

I wasn’t having a conversation with my subconscious memory of the girl I knew, because as I said, I didn’t know her in real life well enough to have an accurate representation of her personality in my memory.

Something was animating the body of the girl in my dream, and it was entirely distinct enough from my ego that I was able to enter dialogue with it.

Carl Jung would identify this entity as “the anima,” and I think it’s a perfect (if not somewhat unsettling) example of how our psyche is divided into distinct sub-personalities. While the anima manifested itself clearly in my dream, to deny it's role in motivating my behavior while I am awake would be like denying the intrinsic human desire for love and romance.

Then I think of the split-brain experiments, where patients had the connection between their right and left-brain hemispheres severed. Each hemisphere seemed to produce a separate unique personality in the same person.

All of this is evidence that our psyches are complex and divided, and you “the ego” is tasked with mediating the competing desires of your subpersonalities.

Anyways, I highly suggest you learn to adopt the language of “part of me feels this way about X, while part of me feels that way about X," if you're interested in improving your ability to articulate your feelings.

Good luck.