Polarised Selves and Flipping

Polarised energy, polarised selves and flipping

These pages and opposite selves are Based on Dr. Hal Stone and Dr. Sidra Stone’s basic psychic laws, See page 15 in ‘Embracing Each-other’.

For each energy state or self within you there exists an opposite energy or an opposite self. Often one is outside of you, other times both are inside you. You cannot get rid of either one of them and if you try to disown one it will find other ways to come back to you in order to maintain energetic balance.

For example Disowning and disowned selves are both controlled by the law of energetic balance. Polarised opposite selves are responsible for much of the unbalanced behaviour in our lives.

How do polarised selves develop?

One of the results of childhood abuse is that we tend to do very wide swings between one side and the other because that's the only way that young children know to react to fear, pain, guilt or shame. They don't have the ability to reason logically to deal with abuse and trauma so they operate like a seesaw that is not properly balanced. The result is called a flip.

If you find yourself suddenly changing your behaviour or the way you protect yourself suddenly going all the way from one side to the other without stopping to consider the results, that means that two polarised selves are fighting about the best way to deal with a problem. This is often called a flip.

Flipping is an indication of a traumatic or abused childhood.

Whenever a grown-up shows this behaviour pattern, that is flipping from a long way one side to a long way the other you can say with 95 percent certainly that they experienced some kind of traumatic or abusive childhood. Now if this sounds like you and you find yourself doing this, you're still pretty normal, the trouble is flipping seldom works very well. The outcome is often bigger problems rather than better solutions.

Abused in childhood, confused in adulthood

The worse the trauma and the abuse in childhood the greater the suddenness of the flips in adult hood and the further apart the two opposites positions will be. For example you might notice a pattern where someone flips regularly a year at a time from celibacy to extremely promiscuous sexual relationships and back again.

A pattern of regular flipping is telling you that your inner child is still trying to resolve some of the serious issues in your life, but trying to do this in a child’s way. Unfortunately, it’s also a way that will never fix things, and often it will end up making things worse in your grown-up life.

The answer is for your grown-up side to recognise what is happening and then take over the job of resolving the problems. You will know when this happens as you start to display more moderate behaviour instead of the more extreme flipping.

Hal and Sidra Stone’s See-saw (teeter totter ) Model

Hal and Sidra Stone talk about a teeter totter which we would call a seesaw. They describe as an analogy how one self, the dominant or primary self is so heavy that the seesaw gets stuck in one position with the overweight self holding its end down on the ground. Meanwhile the polarised opposite self lacks the weight to get any movement at all. It is stuck up in the air on the other end of the seesaw or if you’re reading this in America, the teeter-totter.

A flip occurs when the weaker one suddenly goes on a high energy program while the previously strong one unexpectedly finds themselves on a weight reduction program. This by the way it is usually the result of the overweight primary self failing to do its job properly and provide its usual level of protection.

Suddenly the energies are reversed. Four example a previously responsible hard working individual goes on an extended holiday without a mobile phone or any form of contact. The previous doormat becomes a rebel. This by the way is the theme of the archetypal movie “Shirley Valentine”. It’s a great favourite for doormats, because they watch fellow doormat Shirley suddenly doing a flip. She’s had enough of being a doormat she buys a one-way ticket from London to a Greek island, where she proceeds to break all the rules and have a wonderful time. That’s a classic example of a flip, but be warned. I now have seen several cases first hand where doormats after watching the movie decided to “do a Shirley Valentine” and create their own real life flip. Flips, like these seldom work out successfully in the long run even if they do in the film. They are too sudden and the changes are so extreme that they often affect other people negatively as well. The original primary self that lost out does not like being stuck in the weak end of the seesaw. It usually engages the help of other selves like the rule maker and the inner critic to point out all the damage that the flip is causing and subsequently organises a counter flip back to the original state. The doormat goes back to controlling husband asks for forgiveness and ends up being more of a doormat than previously. The promiscuous party player discovers that they’ve lost their friends and flips back to celibacy again.

There is a better way to balance polarised opposites

As your self-awareness grows and your grown-up part learns to sit in the middle and manage these opposites you begin to experience more gentle swings. It’s not a rigid 50-50 balance but more that the see saw that goes up and down as one self or the other becomes the stronger and more active one and the other one relaxes temporally. This allows the the grown-up selves to deal with different situations in different ways that produce different but beneficial results each time.

I like to think of the grown-up, aware adult version of the seesaw as it swings gently and changes to deal with each different situation. I also see a picture of the seesaw as much better constructed now, with a much more solid centrepoint on which to balance. That centrepoint is the grown-up part which as awareness grows can take over from the opposites and opposing polarised selves.

The grown-up aware adult sits between the opposites, listens to them both, feels both their energies, and then makes a balanced choice which may be not so much the original black and white “one way or the other” but rather a compromise.

When you disown an inner self this law can have an extremely powerful effect:

1. Whatever part of your personality you disown, will turn up again and again in your life or in other people around you. The more you feel strong negative or positive energy towards them, the more likely their personality reflects some of your disowned parts.

2. Your disowned parts can also turn up in the same way in animals, mechanical and electronic objects or other things around you.

3. The more you hate, judge, reject, or try to disempower something outside you, the stronger the chance it reflects a disowned part of your personality.

4. If you overvalue, obsess over or feel you cannot resist someone or something, it is equally likely this reflects a disowned part of your personality.

5. Each time this happens it is a chance to learn another lesson about your selves and who you really are. However, you will only see this when you are ready to learn that lesson and can step back far enough to see what the lesson is really about.

6. Until the day you learn that lesson you will continue to attract into your life people, animals, mechanical and electronic objects or other things that you will continue to hate, judge, reject, over-value or feel you cannot resist.

7. Judging, rejecting, overvaluing or being unable to resist people, objects and things that turn up constantly around you, means you are attributing greater value and importance to those items than to yourself. As long as you treat them as if they have some kind of power over you, you treat yourself as less powerful than they are.

8. All this takes up a great deal of time and energy you could be using to become more aware, more conscious and more adult.

Corollaries

• If you don’t like yourself (and your inner selves) then you’ll find it hard to like other people. The more you like yourself the more others will like you.

• The degree to which you are uncomfortable with your own inner selves reflects the degree that you will be triggered by other people’s selves.

• People who cannot be open and honest with themselves expect dishonesty and deception in others.

• If you feel free to be who you really are then you will be comfortable with others who feel free to be themselves, even those who are very different from you.

• There are always things within us that we really need to change and this is usually an area where we have problems. The aware adult state is the only position from which two people can safely share this kind of information with each other.

• The better you are at receiving positive or constructive criticism from others and owning the parts of it that are true, the better you will be at sharing the same kind of message with others.

• The harder you find it to look at and deal with these issues in you, the harder it will be to talk as an aware adult to others even about things they really might need to look at in themselves.

• One way to deal with another person whose primary self is strongly out of balance is to let them know that as your grown up aware adult side develops, you too are able to connect to a similar unbalanced self or energy, within you, even though it is normally disowned or hidden. But now you can deal with it in a moderate way.

Feedback - please e-mail me John Bligh Nutting - at nutting@growingaware.com

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