I am ecstatic to announce the launching of Self Expressions: a free website for Part Artists to share their work and communicate with each other. Part Artists are people who represent the various parts of themselves through visual art. Many of these artists understand their internal landscape through the ideas described in Internal Family Systems Therapy, founded by Richard Schwartz, Ph.D. Read the rest of this entry »

Passive Aggressive Pattern Description

If you have the Passive Aggressive Pattern, you tend to act in a way that looks like you are agreeable and pleasing, on the surface, but in the end your behavior either hurts people or frustrates them. You may only be aware of your surface desire to please people. You may even realize that you’re afraid of not pleasing someone, especially your partner.

The clue to help you realize if you have this pattern is when people you are close to regularly get frustrated with you or feel hurt by you. You may feel wronged when this happens. You may even say to yourself, “I’m doing my best to be nice and agreeable, but my partner doesn’t seem to get this. She keeps getting on my case for doing things that upset her. But I don’t have any idea what she is talking about.”

If you have a Passive Aggressive Pattern, there is an unconscious part of you that is resentful and perhaps defiant. This part is irritated at how much you kowtow to what your partner wants. Or it may be angry at her for things she said that resulted in your feeling undervalued or unappreciated. But you don’t feel that you have any right to be angry or defiant, so it all goes underground in your consciousness. You act in seemingly agreeable ways, but you add a little mean twist to your behavior that frustrates your partner. Read the rest of this entry »

You have probably been reading the articles and stories I have been sending out over the last six months on various patterns, capacities, and dimensions in the Pattern System. Now I will be offering a six-week class that will cover the major interpersonal dimensions.

The Pattern System is a systematic way of understanding your personality in a way that can lead directly to psychological healing and personal growth. It also helps you to understand other people-why they respond as they do, what makes them tick. It gives you a much more detailed understanding of yourself than other personality systems. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a story about another one of the interpersonal patterns in the Pattern System and the corresponding healthy capacity. This is one of the patterns I will be covering in the upcoming class.

Controlling Description

If you have the [Controlling] Pattern, you often need to get your way, or be in charge of people and situations. You may frame situations as power struggles or opportunities in order to come out on top. You are more concerned with protecting or defending yourself than connecting and cooperating with others. You tend to be bossy, demanding, or feel entitled with a sense that everything revolves around you; and have blindness to other people’s needs. You generally gravitate toward and excel in environments where competitiveness is necessary. However, even in such environments, it isn’t very effective to ignore other people’s responses in an effort to be in control. Read the rest of this entry »

Defiant Pattern

You tend to rebel against people in authority by resisting or fighting against what they want from you, whether it is actually bad for you or not. You tend to oppose people by being rigid and confrontational, and this often leads to arguments or power struggles. You feel like people are trying to control or dominate you even when they aren’t.  You then get angry and defiant just for the sake of being right. Of course, it is healthy to oppose an edict that really isn’t good for you; or one that is imposed in a high-handed way. But you tend to think that everyone is doing this, or at least all authority figures. You haven’t learned how to distinguish between when you really need to defend yourself from being dominated, and when you can let it go. Read the rest of this entry »