Accepting Differences ~~ Honouring Oneself ~~ Embracing Commonalities
How to be in relationships? We
are surrounded by relationships in our lives, whether we are at work, at play
or at home. We may have been challenged
over the last few months as we have attempted to perhaps spend more time than
usual with our loved ones, or spend time with others in a very different
context. Even when we are seemingly
alone, our relationship with ourselves is always present.
Having completely changed my living situation recently, I have loved
(and been challenged by) discovering and accepting differences between myself
and those I live with. It has been a
discovery process that is held in a context of our united desire to remain
respectful and accepting of our differences.
A helpful tool has been looking at our personalities through the lens of
the Persona Grata work, where our personality is characterized by a unique
blend of six or seven birds or animals representing archetypes. By using this tool we have been able to look
slightly more objectively at our personal preferences and tendencies. The objectivity seems to allow us to notice,
talk about and accept our differences more readily and enable us not to fall
into defensiveness.
However, when we begin to differentiate from others by noticing our
differences, it can be easy to focus too much on those differences to the
extent that we feel separate from each other in an isolating way. We are wired to seek to ‘belong’ and our
tendency is to find others who are ‘like us’ in order to attain that sense of
belonging. This then can lead to exclusion
of others when we prize what makes us (who we have defined ourselves as
individually or as a group) tick above what makes others tick. So how do we honour who we are and also
honour others?
This is where the Persona Grata work, or any other way of looking at
ourselves as made up of parts (subpersonality model in psychosynthesis,
Internal Family Systems model) is really useful. When we can accept ourselves as a blend of
different parts with various priorities, strengths and weaknesses, and really
get to know these parts, we become enabled to step forward in our awareness and
activate our personal will to at least listen to all parts of ourselves and
make our decisions from a place of objectivity that is aligned with our
purpose, meaning and values (like a parent guiding a family or a conductor
leading an orchestra).
In turn, once we can do that for ourselves (for the most part, nobody is
perfect!), it becomes more possible to view our community, our country,
humanity or all life on this planet as being composed of different parts with
various priorities, strengths and weaknesses, to listen to those parts with an
open mind and hopefully to find ways to honour those differences from a
perspective of ‘the whole’ rather than the part. Questions I have found helpful are:
What is this part trying to express?
What does this part need?
What do these parts have in common?
What can we hold as a common, overall purpose, meaning and value?
BY JEANETTE JONES
