Integrating Our Inner Polarities

When we over-identify or over-idealize certain aspects of our personality, we tend to disavow any opposite tendencies or attributes. For example if you think of yourself as right and exact, then you don’t want to consider yourself wrong or messy nor do you want others to think of you in this way. Or if you think of yourself as strong and tough, you don’t want to appear to yourself or others as weak and wimpy.

To avoid these unacceptable parts of ourselves, we put them in the basement (our unconscious) where we can forget about them. This is called repression. Splitting is a variation on this maneuver. Instead of being a whole me, we become the good me and the bad me.

These defensive techniques create divisions within ourselves.

If relics in the basement start to offend us, we can go a step further and throw our garbage out. For example if you think of yourself as wise and perceptive and find looking foolish quite intolerable, you can cast out your foolishness and then find yourself surrounded by a confederacy of dunces. This is called projection. Instead of being a sinner among sinners, you are a rose among thorns, or a good me surrounded by not-so-good you’s.

The process of projective identification goes a little beyond projection. Instead of simply throwing our trash out and leaving it in others with a good riddance, we put our unsavory characteristics in others, then work on our offensive features in the garbage bin --or cajole others into cleaning up their acts. For example if you project your inner rebel or delinquent onto others, then you will have to police them, reform them, excommunicate them, or throw them in jail. Now, not only have you gotten rid of your demons, you’ve found something to do in your spare time!

These defensive strategies create divisions between ourselves and others.

If we can re-identify with our unseemly parts and re-own them, we might find some valuable assets tossed out with our garbage. We will gain an inner integration and wholesome connections with other people, both of which lead to an increase of energy since we are no longer divided against ourselves and others.

To make friends with our inner polarities, we may need to reframe their attributes. For example if you think of yourself as efficient and not lazy, then you may need to reframe laziness as "creative leisure," a time and process during which new inspirations arise.

A paradoxical quality of polarities is the more we push them to an extreme, the more they run into and become their opposite. Jung called this enantiodromia. For example the more you try to become free and keep all your options open, paradoxically the more un-free and rigid you become as you compulsively try to avoid any limitations.

Finally, if we can find an overarching construct that embraces and enfolds both polarities, a synthesis that resolves our thesis and antithesis, then we can be enlivened by the creative tension between the two poles. For example if you think of yourself as special and refined and not common and pedestrian, you might find living a life of "simple elegance" a congenial way to express both of your polarities.

Through illustrations, exercises, and dialogue this workshop will explore each Enneagram style’s ego identifications (me) and their shadows (not-me), the defenses against the ego-dystonic parts, and ways of reacquainting us with and reintegrating our disowned characteristics.

This is an advanced workshop which presumes prior knowledge of the Enneagram.

Event Calendar and Enrollment Information