Der innere Garten

Michaela Huber, born 1952, is a psychological psychotherapist, supervisor, and trainer in trauma treatment. Since its foundation, she has been the first chairperson of the German-speaking section of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation and co-founder of the Centre for Psychotraumatology in Kassel.

As a personality, we are not a monolith, not a consistent "I." Instead, we all know many different states of feeling and being that can change from situation to situation, and often enough we have trouble holding our fragile selves together. Our work ego can be very different from our private ego. Our "hurt inner child" can and must often be very different from the ego we show to our own children. How we deal with our own parents and how we feel about them will often be very different from how we feel when we have to give a public talk, and so on.

So if you have to change something in life, and there are many inner and outer opinions about it, it might help to perceive oneself as composed of many ego and emotional states; to pay attention to the dark, negative, "evil" parts of oneself, to respect them before one can change them; to learn to make them into "admonishers and warners"; and instead of fighting them, to cooperate with them wherever possible. It may also be beneficial to get relief, even if only temporarily, from current problems by setting up inner "depots" for them; to learn to distinguish between black and white, naivety and despair, zero or one hundred percent, ignorance or permanent brooding; and to experience that desired changes can also take place without the help of day-consciousness. Additionally, reassuring oneself of one's own abilities with imaginary methods of help and developing new resources can be very helpful, with "autohypnotic" imaginations being particularly useful.