Beyond Individual Object Relations

Working with Segments and Structures of the Personality

Working on object relations one at a time will never end. Our intent is to work with them enough so that we develop our understanding, skills, and capacities to engage more fundamental ego structures and personality segments.

Working in this way addresses many, many blocks at a time.

Three ways of working on personality segments and structures:

1. Work on the footings: Recognize and experience the rejection or frustration as you explore. Each footing contains many, many experiential building-blocks with a common element: frustration, rejection, fulfillment. In keeping with our examples, working with object relations contributes to the degradation of the entire footing. Once this concept is grasped, you can actually recognize the process in your psyche. While working on the effect, the bonding agent loosens the foundation where one pylon of the scaffolding supporting the self rests. As that support is undermined, the scaffolding compensates by redistributing the load-bearing to other pylons. This may lead to a sense of ruts and cycles unless you notice that the entire structure has shifted and what you’re interacting with has changed. Working with rejection and frustration will bring into consciousness the real state of affairs: the soul is, so to speak, disconnected from its true nature, and ego activity will never be able to replace or recreate the real. Landing in the reality of this shakes the whole structure loose.
2. Incorporate knowledge of the theory of holes and essential qualities into object relations work. You notice the balls of string are multicolored. This represents the individual uniqueness of our ball and its relationship to our developmental history with essential qualities. WHY? Essential qualities are part and parcel of the soul’s experience. Part of the flow of the soul is the continual effulgence of the essential qualities arising to inform and support the moment-to-moment experience of the soul. In the Diamond Approach, we work with essential qualities and the specific psychodynamics associated with our personal loss of conscious connection to them. This is where we get our first experiences of working consciously with object relations. Understanding the relationships between object relations and essential qualities helps to optimize work with our psyche. The scaffolding of the self is an attempt to recreate or imitate the wisdom and function of specific essential aspects of the soul. With time, you’ll be able to recognize and work with large sections of the structure (represented by the red section in the image below), or a ball of string, by identifying the ego activity attempting to replace the missing aspect. Working with object relations reveals how easy it is for the psychodynamic work to “lead” to spiritual states, which can result in a couple of challenges:

• The dualistic mind will associate this with cause & effect and organize a theory or strategy of how to “use” and “do” with this insight.
• One can develop a dependency or need for psychodynamic work that, in turn, makes experiencing spiritual states dependent on psychodynamic work.

Working on Personality sections involves:

• Recognize the specific ego activity and its function
  • Let’s use the word “angry” since our ball has so much red in it.
• Allow the whole psychic constellation associated with it to come forward into consciousness. Imagine a crisp, blue sky. You’re feeling fresh, open, and alive. You get angry. Familiar thought patterns and tensions associated with being angry arise. Your affective state changes the look and feel of the clear, crisp sky, your orientation to the future, and more. This is the constellation, the whole shebang. Suddenly, it’s like a cloud all around you, infusing you. If you catch the change quickly, you can shift back to before the shift and then shift back into the constellation. If you keep playing with this, you’ll discover amazing insights.

3. There’s a psychological concept that can serve us here. Another way the mind organizes and stores experience is through affective nuclei. Think of this type of organization like a big set of filing cabinets. Every experience involving anger is thrown into the anger drawer, and I mean “thrown” in. It’s not neat and tidy, it’s emotions! It’s messy like a ball of string because any particular interaction in our life might produce a stream of cards to be filed: irritation, anger, hurt, sadness,…The concept of affective nuclei helps explain the phenomena of being triggered and dumping a whole drawer of history into the present situation.

With the information shared thus far, we can employ a three-pronged approach to loosen our ball of string. Included in our awareness are:

1. Current object relation in play
2. Which pillar it rests on
3. The affective nuclei

Our goal is not to get rid of the object relation, the footing, or the affective nuclei, and we certainly can’t change history. What we do is bring the secret ingredients —presence and space— and let them work their magic. 

We bring the space through open and open-ended inquiry. It’s an orientation, a curiosity about the bug in front of you. The more we’re open, the more space awareness comes forward in consciousness. Even when we’re addressing incredibly resistant knots, openness does the work, not us. It may feel like we’re working our ass off to remain open, to get through resistance, denial, subterfuge, distraction, and the like, but loosening the knot is actually done by the action of space (read The Void, A. H. Almaas).

The more capacity we have (expansion of our energetic comfort zone), the more interest we have in space rather than what’s in the space, the greater the invitation for the optimizing force.

Affect is more fundamental to how the mind organizes experience than thoughts, concepts, and ideas. Affect gives meaning to the phrase: it’s not your experience that’s important, it’s the experience of your experience that’s important.

Affect and sensation dominated our early experience. When you see a frustrated, angry toddler, you witness an organism in its entirety displaying frustration and anger – all body/mind systems are flushed, energized, and discharging at full capacity. There is no internal mediating force holding the expression in check.

Opening up and following our affect will lead us down the rabbit hole to the full impact of the experience on our psyche. Trying to stay ahead of the experience intellectually simply adds to the mess or at least impedes the unraveling.

Being constantly reveals itself through the soul, the individual consciousness. The soul isn’t worried about the unfoldment. It’s not about figuring out or preparing for what’s next. It’s in the flow, it is the flow. Every moment is infused with knowledge, goodness, and awe, not concerns and anxiety.

In the rabbit hole is where we find the difficult knots, the ones we can’t pry loose. All we can do is bring the space and let it work its magic, shaking all hell loose.

Up Next..

Orienting the Work in Time

John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. His newest book, Nurturing Essence: A Compass for Essential Parenting, invites parents to discover the role essence plays in child development. He is also the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.

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