Roles

The social roles we play.

Never forget that you’re just playing a role. In effect, your identity isn’t fixed but fluid and continually changing. It’s just that you’re often not aware of it.

In other words, if you take your existing role too seriously (i.e. “breadwinner” of your family), to the point that it becomes fixed and all consuming, your life can feel like it’s literally over if you somehow lose that role.

I came to see that my job was just a role that I was playing—an important role, of course, but not what defined who I am.

Paul Slakey
Everything Connects: Cultivating Mindfulness, Creativity, and Innovation for Long-Term Value
  • Roles Help Us Feel in Control

    For the necessities of living together require agreement as to codes of law and ethics, of etiquette and art, of weights, measures, and numbers, and, above all, of role. We have difficulty in communicating with each other, unless we can identify ourselves in terms of roles— father, teacher, worker, artist, “regular guy,” gentleman, sportsman, and so forth. To the extent that we identify ourselves with these stereotypes and the rules of behavior associated with them, we ourselves feel that we are someone because our fellows have less difficulty in accepting us— that is, in identifying us and feeling that we are “under control.”

    Alan W. Watts
    The Way of Zen
  • How Our Monstrous Fears Are Really Just Trying to Protect Us and Our Treasured Needs

    By exploring the motivations and fears of each part, you’ll gain insight into their protective roles and the underlying needs they seek to meet.

    Discover Your Parts with the Internal Family Systems (IFS) Journal on Rosebud
  • Valuing the Needs of Your Roles Within Your Inner World

    Rosebud’s IFS guided journal is a powerful tool that brings the benefits of IFS therapy to your fingertips. Developed in partnership with certified IFS therapist David Coates, this journal provides a structured framework for exploring your inner world, helping you identify and understand your various parts, their roles, and their underlying needs.

    Discover Your Parts with the Internal Family Systems (IFS) Journal on Rosebud
  • Paradoxically Rejecting the Role of “Changer” to Change Roles

    Perls’s own conflict with the existing order contains the seeds of his change theory. He did not explicitly delineate this change theory, but it underlies much of his work and is implied in the practice of Gestalt techniques. I will call it the paradoxical theory of change, for reasons that shall become obvious. Briefly stated, it is this: that change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not. Change does not take place through a coercive attempt by the individual or by another person to change him, but it does take place if one takes the time and effort to be what he is—to be fully invested in his current positions. By rejecting the role of change agent, we make meaningful and orderly change possible.

    The Gestalt therapist rejects the role of “changer,” for his strategy is to encourage, even insist, that the patient be where and what he is. He believes change does not take place by “trying,” coercion, or persuasion, or by insight, interpretation, or any other such means. Rather, change can occur when the patient abandons, at least for the moment, what he would like to become and attempts to be what he is. The premise is that one must stand in one place in order to have firm footing to move and that it is difficult or impossible to move without that footing.

    The person seeking change by coming to therapy is in conflict with at least two warring intrapsychic factions. He is constantly moving between what he “should be” and what he thinks he “is,” never fully identifying with either. The Gestalt therapist asks the person to invest himself fully in his roles, one at a time. Whichever role he begins with, the patient soon shifts to another. The Gestalt therapist asks simply that he be what he is at the moment.

    Arnold Beisser, M.D.
    The Paradoxical Theory of Change
  • Integrating Our Compartmentalized Roles

    If alienated, fragmentary selves in an individual take on separate, compartmentalized roles, the Gestalt therapist encourages communication between the roles; he may actually ask them to talk to one another. If the patient objects to this or indicates a block, the therapist asks him simply to invest himself fully in the objection or the block. Experience has shown that when the patient identifies with the alienated fragments, integration does occur. Thus, by being what one is—fully—one can become something else.

    Arnold Beisser, M.D.
    The Paradoxical Theory of Change