Do you ever find yourself saying or behaving in a way that takes you right off track from who you believe you are and want to be? As if you got in your car one morning to go somewhere beautiful and someone held a gun to your head and said, “No, drive straight to hell and no U turns!”?

You get up, you connect with yourself and centre, you know your purpose, you feel inspired and you’re on it. Twenty minutes later you are sabotaging your relationship, doubting your business opportunity, breaking your healthy diet, shouting at your children, procrastinating on living your dream.
What happened? Who is this person?

Our ‘Self’ has been hi-jacked by a sub-personality within us. Think of yourself as a whole cast of different personalities, The Joker, The Cook, The Grumpy Goblin, The Lost Kid, The Mischief Maker, The Entrepreneur, The Lover, The Dreamer, The Troubled Teenager. You know yourself, you know you have different aspects of yourself, and whether you like them or not, these are your sub-personalities. Parts that make up the whole. (Just to clarify this is a metaphor not a description of Multiple Personality Disorder or DID!)

I have what I call a “Cast List” of mine, I know their names and their behaviours. More importantly I have learned what their motives and qualities are, what they want and what they really need. Why is this important?

When hijacked it is important to begin negotiations with the hijacker. To find out what they want. What they want and what they need, in the case of internal hi-jack, is often different. We need to know our cast if we want to be the Director.

Why do our sub personalities hi-jack us like this? Because we have ignored them, don’t know them, don’t see their perspective, their views, their needs. We think we are better than them and haven’t time for them, then they threaten mutiny! Each time this happens and I explore, I discover that the real rabble rouser is a little gremlin in there called Fear, he starts small and he winds the sub personalities up! Fear, for example, that we will be overlooked, rejected, attacked, humiliated, is always behind a hi-jack.

I give you one example of my own, not too personal, just a bit! One of my personalities is a cheerleader, complete with pom poms and American accent. She’s so positive and chatty and loud and full of herself. I really did not like her, as she wasn’t very British, wasn’t restrained and was generally irritating and disturbed the peace. If I ignored her long enough, she would have moments of breaking out and talking and talking about herself and afterwards I would retreat into embarrassment, “Why did I say THAT?”, “Why didn’t I just shut up?”. So I had a meeting and a long dialogue with this irritating part of myself to find out her qualities and her needs. She is my wonderful publicist now, after I discovered that she had a fear I would not be heard, that she had a need to get my voice and my inner thoughts out there. She helps me with my blog and adverts and Facebook page. I love her enthusiasm and energy. By giving her space and a job she is able to meet her needs and I’m still the one in control.

It’s important that I am at the steering wheel, not my sub personalities, because I am the one who holds the whole picture of where we are going and why – this is my deep inner voice, the central ‘I‘ the one one that experiences what I call soul urge and inspiration, the part some call their ‘higher self’. Yet I am driving my destiny with a mini-bus load of sub personalities who all need various things (control, justice, order, love, freedom, fun, security, admiration and so on). We are in this together.

In order for me to remain the driver and not to be taken over in a mutinous hi-jack, I have to learn to listen to their needs. I have to respect them rather than hide them. Integrating and working with all our personalities is about becoming our true, unique self. Following on from other posts, we can only embrace and become who we are, and this may mean making friends with parts of us we don’t like too much and finding out more about them. Perhaps we can’t ever, “Live without fear”, but maybe we can befriend it.

That way the true self or soul steers us, rather than the rabble.