Developing agency and defeating antiwill

Every self contains multitudes. It can be helpful to sort these elements of self into defined parts. This can help you conceptualise these competing and contradictory bits of you.

One distinction that’s been super helpful to me is the child and parent, the maiden and knight, the experiencer and the agent. Separating out the part of me that has preferences, suffers and enjoys, is subject to life, has allowed me to tease out the part of me that ISN’T passive.

I’ve struggled for a long time with agency. I felt like I had none. I felt like all my strength of will, when applied, was met with an internal opposing will that completely negated it. Applying will, then, increased emotional tension without affecting my behaviour at all. This caused a lot of suffering. What is wrong with me, I’d think.

However, once I conceptualised these two parts of myself, everything began to make so much more sense. The part of me that hates being cold isn’t the same part of me that’s getting out of the warm bed. The part of me that’s twisted up in self-hatred isn’t the same part that wants to love away the self-hatred. I knew the mind was incoherent before then, but I didn’t realise how useful this can be. The child can stay rigid, it can stay whatever it is. I can just use my imagination to build out a parental (that is, loving, virtuous and agentic) perspective around my atrophied agency.