The Tower of Personality

From early infancy, we begin to construct the Tower of our Personality. Brick by brick, it will slowly become a vast memeplex - a conglomeration of ideas about the kind of person that we are. We like this type of food; this type of clothing; our political views are this way; for all these reasons; this type of person is a drag; this type is cool. And so on.

Yet, this ever expanding Tower of memetic selfhood is not constructed on firm ground. It is built on the terrain of our traumatised and conditioned awareness. The ground beneath our Tower is riddled with holes, gaps in our being.

And, in fact, the Tower has slowly built itself in a manner that serves to keep us from falling into all those holes inside of us. Our personality, on one level, is simply a work-around - a way of getting through the day without touching the wounds.

This Tower has been represented symbolically as Tarot Key 16.

In the Tarot key, the Tower is being hit by a bolt of lightning, which represents spiritual awakening. The falling figures represent our self-conscious and subconscious minds. But we don’t need that stuff here. What we’re concerned with is the ground underneath the Tower. In the version on the right, I’ve judiciously added a few holes, some gaps where you can see through, to represent the state of this ground.

So this is our state. We live in this vast Tower of our personality, which is a conglomeration of memes that co-exist and that have become who we are. Ideas and opinions that we hope will help us get our needs met and stop us from falling into the holes in our being.

One way out of this suboptimal form of existence is to seek the spiritual awakening depicted in the card above. Though, of course, the Tower may simply rebuild itself, as a more “spiritual” Tower afterwards.

Another, perhaps better way is to simply fill in the holes. But how do we do this?

Body-based therapy is a way to do this. Working with the body is not about asking the Tower to tell us its stories of how its childhood was. It’s not about patronising the Tower’s desire to narcissistically indulge itself through self-psychologising. We don’t mind about the stories that the Tower is telling itself. They are fine, and can sometimes be useful. But the important thing is that the gaps get filled.

The gaps are accessible via our muscles and body fascia. They are found in our shallow-breathing and in the lack of sensation in our lower back and our belly.

As we proceed along the journey with Bioenergetics and Reichian work, slowly the gaps become filled and a curious thing starts to happen. The Tower doesn’t become stronger. Neither weaker. It becomes fluid. We can be it when we need it and we can drop it when we don’t. It has also changed a little along the way. The stories it tells itself change. But the main quality that we now have is a sense of presence, of being moment-by-moment sufficiently aware that we can use our Tower when we need to yet not be used by it.