3 ways to manage yourself: Dissociate, Identification or Being With. Which one actually heals?
You can talk about your relationships “till the cows come home” but until you notice where it meets you inside, nothing is going to change.
Whether you're aware of it or not (probably not 🙂), you’re already doing something with your inner experience, but it helps to learn how to recognize your inner relationship tendencies.
There are three things you can to do with an inner experience:
Identify with it - that’s when you don’t see that what you’re experiencing is only a part of your experience. Instead, you act as if the experience equals the whole of you.
It’s the only thing that is there.
It’s the experience of *being* the feeling.
You say “I *am* angry”.
And when you notice that you become impatient with that feeling you say, “I shouldn’t be angry”.
In this case you’re also completely identified with something in you that doesn’t want to be angry.
Dissociating from it - when you’re having a hard time recognizing that a part of you is experiencing anything at all or your experience is muted.
Like when you say “I’m *not* angry”.
Of course it’s always possible that you’re not really angry, but it's important to note when you say you’re not, something inside you is.
Being with it - when there is a part that you identify with, there’s usually also a part that you dissociate from.
E.g, when there’s an inner critic, we usually identify with the critic and dissociate from the part that it’s criticizing.
“Being with” is the middle path. You’re able to both disidentify with the part you’re identified with and associate with the part that you are dissociated from.
You say: “There’s something in me that’s angry and there’s also something in me that thinks I shouldn’t be angry”.
Then you take time to sit with both and notice how they express themselves in your body.
That's a powerful place to be because you’re making room for all parts of your experience.
When you do that you have access to your whole entire Self: the Self that’s bigger than all its parts and can hold them with compassion.
You are your strongest and you can stand pretty much anything from this place.
Some call this Presence.