I was reading my friend Guillermo Wechsler's blog and he has an interesting point in his post on Services for Multividuals. Let me offer a quote to illustrate Guillermo's perspective on "multividuals". In speaking about one of his customers he says:
"They were dealing with a physician as if the physician were a homogeneous individual with needs. What they didn't realize was that just being a physician was being a conflicting network of role identities that even the physicians were unaware of. Physicians play, at the same time, the roles of: the healer, the hospital employee, a self-employed entrepreneur, an experimental scientist, a political activist, among others. Each of these roles have a different structure of concerns, ethical values, moral norms, and instrumental goals that produce interesting tensions and possibilities for change and innovation when you are able to map them, make them explicit, and recognize interesting "user-generated" bridging practices already invented by spontaneous collaboration. While the healer wants more time to listen to a person in pain, the employee wants to perform out of the hospital's standards of efficiency -- "bed usage" or referral rates. And the entrepreneur wants to maximize economic value. All these conversations do not fit together easily. Of course, the set of role identities that I just mentioned is very narrow; but it is a lot bigger than thinking about physicians as those that prescribe your drugs."
What Guillermo is revealing in this observation is an aspect of the integral intuition - to embrace multiple perspectives - that, in my experience, most integral theorists and practitioners miss by stopping at quadrants, levels, lines, and states (see what is integral? for more on these). For sure we can say that the multiplicity of roles identities "live" within the quadrants. But describing roles identities with the language of quadrants really isn't that helpful for generating interesting shared futures.
In addition to the multiple social role identities that we have as humans we also have systems of intrapsychic parts or subpersonalities within us. Two good discourses on this come from Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Voice Dialogue. I'm more familiar with IFS so let me offer an illustration from that discourse.
In IFS, we understand ourselves as a Self System composed of parts and a Self (also called the True Self or Higher Self in some traditions). Parts are of two kinds: Exiles and Protectors. Exiles are the traumatized and wounded parts of us that were formed when we were young. They are painful to experience and it is the job of the Protectors to prevent us from experiencing that pain. Protectors come in two flavors: Managers, who control circumstances and states to keep the Exiles and their painful feelings away, and Firefighters, who act rashly to intervene and protect us from the Exile's pain when the Managers fail.
To illustrate, many of us have an Exiled part that feels unrecognized for our contribution. It can feel very painful to access this part of us because it can trigger negative self-assessments such as worthlessness and deficiency. And because being unrecognized for our contribution is painful to experience we might have a Manager that acts to avoid feedback from others. No feedback = no possibility of feeling unrecognized. However, sometimes feedback isn't avoidable. We get feedback from a client or our boss often unprompted. And even if it is positive feedback we often can't take it because the feedback never captures the breadth and depth of our actions and who we are and so we feel unrecognized and the accompanying pain.
The Self is an open, accepting, curious, and compassionate presence that is not divided or split off as parts are. Through the Self we access a holistic experience of ourselves. The Self is our source of authenticity whereas parts generate reactivity. From these simple distinctions offered by IFS, we can begin to understand the system dynamics between our various parts and the Self and how that generates our behaviors and, in turn, our results in life. IFS gives us an active way of interacting with our parts to unburden them and open new possibilities for action.
Please follow the link above to learn more about IFS. I don't have the time or space to go further here.
To combine these two perspectives, we are both an interior Self System and an exterior Social Role System. We are "multividuals" in our interior and exterior identities. In fact, this is how we actually live. Socially, we live multiple identities (e.g., a son, a father, a husband, a brother, a leader, a customer, a supplier, etc.) each with their own concerns, moods, and narratives. And, within ourselves we have multiple parts each with their own concerns, feelings, and narratives.
Working in integral ways means also working with these structures of self and public identity not just quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types. Working (phenomenologically) directly with how we know ourselves and how others know us enables us to generate new ways of being. It is generative as opposed to descriptive.
I'd love to hear your thoughts, comments, and questions.
Take care,
-Steve
Comments