Humankind has paid a price high in suffering in the pursuit of the illusion that we have a single personhood, a unitary self. When we cling to the promise of having a unified inner world of feelings, thoughts, and desires, it results in experiencing our conflicted nature as pathological. Being conflicted is not disturbed. The human condition includes having conflicting motivations and irreconcilable thoughts, feelings, needs, and desires. The disparity of our desires and motivations is tied to the nature of the self. When we understand our disparate nature and accept with compassion our inner conflicts, we can harness our inherent disunity and actualize our broadest potential.
Our sense of self, of being a person, is primarily an experience of having a unity of character, mind, and purpose. We are most likely to experience a disruption of that unity when struggling to make decisions or take actions while being pulled in opposing directions. This conflict is not a dysfunction in our self; it is actually the self in action, making evaluations of disparate situations and circumstances in our life. This evaluative function of the self strives to arbitrate between inherently conflicting drives and motivations that we experience as powerful emotions such as guilt, shame, anger, and fear, as well as a complex feelings of excitement, anticipation, joy, pleasure, and contentment. These emotions are the evaluative currency of the self, assessing and appraising the relative merits of our conflicting needs, motivations, and desires.
These inner conflicts associated with making important choices in life are often manifested as ambivalence, a feeling of being of two minds. Such varying perspectives often feel as if we are composed of a multiplicity of selves, each with its own values or moral justifications. These divisions in our identity are fueled by the psychological functions of dissociation and selective forgetting. From a psychological perspective, the sequestered or separate expressions of the self reflect the state-dependent model of consciousness—as our states of mind shift so do our perceptions, including our self-perceptions. These shifts in states of mind are a reflection of the multiple moods and motivations that are part of our evolutionary, psychological heritage. Generally, underlying these shifts in states of mind, there remains an enduring fundamental sense of self. This enduring sense of unity is the self in action, generating a sense of personhood even when there are pressing divisions in our needs and desires.
Throughout the ages, even today, there is a deeply-held belief that our self ought not be divided. That our deep self, or soul, if in proper order, would make the choice without any ambivalence or disquiet. Having multiple moral demands pulling us in multiple directions can be agonizing. We often struggle with making a decision, expecting to resolve our inner conflict by coming to some unifying moral position and a coherent resolution. Yet, ambivalence or regret may remain, even when we have made our choices and moved forward.
The conceptualization of multiple self-states, as inherent in our psychobiological nature, raises the question as to whether anyone can obtain a self-unity. Also, how are we to navigate a moral, value-driven, emotional landscape, with a multiple-self? And, with an acceptance of disparate motivations, each with a valid claim on the self, how are we to ever determine what is right, moral, or truly the greater good? These questions raised by the lack of unity of the self are avoided when we act as if the self is a coherent unity and we attain to having one-mind. The struggle then shifts from managing an inherently-divided self to one of working toward uncovering our unitary, good self. Paradoxically, when we accept our disparate and conflicted nature, we can experience a sense of unity that contains our shifting states of mind.
From the wisdom of prior ages, we can learn that love and compassion are emotional tools that the self uses to reduce the conflict inherent in our diverse needs and motivations.
Socrates, accepting the diversity of desires, held that caring for the soul includes regulating the multiplicity of desires through ethical behavior. Plato famously asserted a unity of the soul as a manifestation of the Ideal. Saint Augustine utilized the love of God as leading the divided self toward unity with God. For Aristotle, reason as the distinguishing human attribution, could be used to unite irrational desires, resulting in the right kind of judgment: reason would heal the division of the soul. More poetically, the Greek dramatist, Aristophanes, saw Eros as the longing desire to find the lost half of our self. This from estrangement from the self fueled the romantic calling for love as that which makes humankind complete. Eros was seen as the experience of longing for the reunification our self.
Love as a force for unification of the self is a recurring theme in the wisdom of the ages. For the Ancient Greeks, Eros was the unifying force of love. Saint Augustine held Divine Love as the source of unification of the soul. Being loved by another person has long been seen as a force for the unification of the self. Meaningful emotional relationships, in which we feel another loves us for who we are, can enhance our sense of self unity.
Love and Reason may not be able to change our divided nature, but may be able to help us accept with compassion our divisions, conflicts, and struggles, leading to a greater capacity to Flourish, even when struggling with our nature.
Compassion, like love, is an essential aspect of a caring relationship that can help us flourish, even when we are conflicted. Being in a compassionate relationship affords us a sense of being loved for who we are. We feel valued as we are, conflicted and ambivalent, not conditionally for our goodness. Our essence is held as a valued object of caring. Compassion affords us an experience of being lovable, in a manner that transcends our limitation, conflicts, and incongruities.
Interpersonal compassion gives rise to our capacity for self-giving compassion. Being held by a person compassionately helps us develop the capacity to hold our self compassionately as we come to see ourselves as we are seen. With self-compassion, struggles with our disparate desires are less painful and conflicted. Compassion is the emotion that soothes our pain in the face of other, troubling emotions, helping us to remain aware of our painful feelings. In the presence of compassion we can reflect upon our diverse, and conflicted emotions, allowing us to come to understand the needs and motivations underlying these distressing emotions.
Read More: Emotions are Information
The disparate nature of our emotions and motivations reflects the complex demands that arise from living in social groups. Our various emotional patterns and motivations arose because they added to the evolutionary adaptation that group membership required. These emotions and motivational patterns have evolved into a forms of social intuition. Social Intuition Model, developed by Jonathan Haidt, identifies five basic intuitions: care and nurturance, fairness and reciprocity, authority and respect, in-group loyalty, purity and sanctity. These intuitions gain specific content from our culture, but each represents a predisposition for holding strongly-impassioned beliefs within each of these semi-autonomous, psycho-evolutionarily-developed intuitions.
Read More: Social Intuition and Moral Judgment
Acting From an Understanding of our Nature Leads to Flourishing
Understanding the diversity and force of our intuitions helps us manage our conflicted and disparate motivations. Moral psychology is the field of social science that integrates our understanding of human nature with moral beliefs, in order to help us each flourish. Research in this field explores how the self functions as a supra-ordinate arbitrator of motivations, selecting between normative and psychobiological determinants. This arbitration of competing desires is the primary task of the self. And arbitration between conflicting motivations emerges when we have a degree of emotional self-coherence that can tolerate disparate, situationally-determined emotions.