This is a pretty lonely world. We are born into families who are there to love us and to nurture us, and if we are lucky, we learn to feel secure when we are with our parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. They provide a safety net for us and help us learn which behaviors are acceptable and which are not. Their responses are the cues that help us to develop social skills.
Later in life, we are not held in the family in the same protective way. If our parents have been able to acknowledge our emerging maturity, then we are more and more on our own to make decisions, to figure things out, to plan, and to work at what we value. The freedom to choose is good and natural, but it removes us from the childhood cocoon.
However, we never really leave our parents and those we are close to. Their ideas, adages, and phrases remain with us for our entire lives. Karl Tomm, a well-respected family therapist has posited that the notion of an individual as a closed, self-contained unit, is an illusion. In fact, he believes that we incorporate into ourselves bits and pieces of all of the people in our lives who have been significant to us. He calls those parts of other people that become parts of us too the internalized other. When we remember what our mother would have said in a current situation or what our father might have quipped, we are hearing in ourselves that internalized other.
Likewise, we spread ourselves around to all of the people with whom we have significant relationships. They may say, “I remember your saying…” Or “when I am upset, I think about what you would tell me to do.” This he calls “the distributed self.”
Karl Tomm uses those concepts (or at least did when I heard him several years ago) to help couples understand how their spouse is feeling and what motivates him or her to act. When I saw him working with the concept in a case demonstration, I was unbelievably impressed. However, what touched me even more was the spiritual aspect of his theory. It helps me to understand how we human beings interconnect, how people we love never really are gone because they reside in us, and most of all, how important it is to be careful about what we say or do to others. Our words are uttered in a moment, but their impact can last many lifetimes.
