The Enneagram archetype I fall under is Type 4. One of our outstanding pursuits is to find our unique identity. With this insatiable desire comes deep internal exploration. For me, it's been a wild goose chase. The pursuit to find my identity has been exhausting and educational. It has been nothing short of a never-ending rabbit hole.

Am I the beliefs I hold true about myself? Am I my feelings? Am I my mind? My perceptions? My energy? My body? My desires? My love? My happiness? My anxiety? My depression? My addictions?

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a transformative tool that conceives of every human being as a system of protective and wounded inner parts led by a core Self. We believe the mind is naturally multiple, and that is a good thing. Just like members of a family, inner parts are forced from their valuable states into extreme roles within us. Self is in everyone.

Due to attachment trauma, a protective part of me took over my system: anxiety. This anxious part of me was so chronic and present throughout my life that I had identified with it. It was deeply ingrained in my subconscious. It was the part of me that needed connection but was unable to connect, so it was constantly pursuing that essential human need, albeit in a very dysfunctional way, since its need was not met in childhood. Fear of abandonment and similar issues clawed at my psyche.

We are either securely attached, disorganized, anxious, avoidant, or a mixture. The attachment we all wish to attain is secure attachment.

Secure attachment is based on the ability and reliability to fulfill one's needs, which is learned from our caretakers. If we do not secure our attachment to our caretakers in childhood, we will forever be seeking this need in others. We still expect others to fulfill these needs because our child's mind is dependent on our caretakers to fulfill these needs when we are helpless. If this need is fulfilled, we move on from being dependent on our parents and we become independent, self-reliant, healthy adults.

If it is unmet, we will be frozen in time, still believing we are dependent on others to feel secure; how could this not happen, this is how our brains develop? When our caretakers are secure in themselves, children learn to become secure in themselves. We may hold beliefs about ourselves that tell us we are unworthy, wrong and bad but these beliefs arise out of one thing; not getting our needs met. Understanding this is invaluable. As children we are not responsible for getting our needs met because simply put we are incapable.

If this need is unmet, it can turn into addiction, namely codependency. We all need others but a secure person is not dependent on others or their environment for their own well-being. They are mature responsible adults who feel worthy, secure, and content regardless of what others think of them.

I have spent my adult life trying to murder this part of me since it has given me hell. No matter how much hatred and disdain you have towards yourself, it does not make it go away. That’s not how it works, but I didn’t know any better. This part of me was constantly chasing relationships to feel secure, but it never worked. People come and go and there’s no stability in that, so I was living chaotically. Jumping from one relationship to the other, constantly running away from myself, trying to escape by any means possible, hoping someone would rescue me. Looking for a parent to take care of me because I never learned how to take care of myself.

I went to the extreme and tried to remove it from my psyche during a Vipassana retreat and became suicidal for a few years after that. The anxiety I experienced in my mind became so overwhelming at one point during a triggering experience in adulthood that my mind snapped and I developed a psychosomatic disorder. The anxiety transferred from my mind and into my back.

I felt like I lost myself because I became dissociated. At the Vipassana retreat, deep in meditation, using my mind, I pushed my back out of myself (this is not Vipassana; I did my own thing, how I was capable of this, I still do not know. It was black magic of some sort). I began to hallucinate. Red bubbles the size of golf balls came out of the backside of my body. It was as if I was peeling myself out of a mold. The mold was the anxiety, visually in the form of the red-hot golf balls. I figured, if I could eject this from myself, I would be liberated.

I was dead wrong. As I pushed the red balls out of my psyche, I lost the energy and faith that I had the ability to do so. I crumbled. I was exhausted. It was as if I pulled the plug in the middle of the process. One of the balls in my back, directly behind my heart, was half in my back and half outside of my back. When I gave up, the ball split. My unconscious was half outside of myself, the other inside myself. This ball became the new psychosomatic sensation. Before, it was just a dull ache in my back. The ball began to fizz like carbonation throughout my body. It drove me insane. To say it was uncomfortable would be an understatement. It was an OCD nightmare.

This part of me was my identity and now it had transformed into a thousand little bubble pieces fizzing throughout my being.

It didn’t stop there. I used my mind to reduce these bubbles into microscopic megapixels through observation. They never disappeared. Just became smaller. “I” as I knew myself to be shrunk into basically nothing. I was living in hell to say the least.

Deep down inside, I knew this is not who I was. I knew it was a response to trauma, but it happened at such an early age that it was all I knew myself to be. I didn’t know myself, but I knew the person I was wasn’t me either. In a way, I had no recollection of my true self, but that understanding became the calling to find out.

Imagine standing alone with a camera in the middle of a field. The horizon stretches equally in every direction. You put the viewfinder to your eye and you zoom all the way in so that the image you’re seeing is tight and small. The further you zoom in, the more detailed and isolated the image is. This is a narrow view perspective on oneself and life.

Now imagine what happens when the same person zooms out all the way. A 180-degree landscape appears. If you have a 360 camera, you become everything, which I believe we all truly are. My understanding today is that self appears to be a single point in time and space, but within that single point, its true essence is both nothing and everything. The more we let go (not reject) of who we think we are, a larger perspective reveals itself. This, I believe, is the cornerstone of transforming from self-centeredness to God-centeredness.

SOLUTION

I learned this from Allen Berger’s (PH.D) book emotional sobriety which was based off of Bill W, co-founder of AA’s excerpt on emotional sobriety.

The gist is to become aware of our dependency. It is our expectation that people and the world are responsible for our own well being. Status, relationships, success etc. When our expectations of the outside world aren’t met we react and suffer.

Once we become aware of our expectations and dependency of the outside world for our stability we can begin to change.

The transformation occurs from relying on our approval or disapproval from outside to understanding that it must come from the inside.

This is a practice of course and can take a lot of time. For me, this is what I’ve been seeking. This is emotional sobriety. The book is amazing and I encourage you to read it if this subject matter seems valuable to you. This book applies to everyone, not just people with a substance use disorder.

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