The Whole and the Sum of the Parts

this page last modified 10/2/99

caution: discussion of integration/fusion

March 1997 reflections on integration:

I do not consider integration [meaning complete fusion of the insiders into a single personality] to be my goal--at most I would say that is on the other side of the mountain and I cannot see it from here. I think it is a dangerous goal--if my goal was for the insiders to go away then I would be saying that I didn't want them around, and they need more acceptance than that. In fact, my goal at the moment is for the insiders to get stronger egos, because they need to do that in order to be able express their feelings. I don't really think of them as fully separate, but I do think they need to express themselves in their own ways.

A couple of months ago I would have simply said that my goal was to let down the barriers--all the parts would still be present but there would be free communication between them and no amnesia. Trouble is, there aren't enough hours in the day to consult everyone about everything.

I sometimes like an idea put forth by a person on Voices of Kind who is a Ph.D. psychologist with analytical training and DID herself. She said she believes that the problem for people with DID is not that we have such a variety of ways of acting in the world (because everyone is childish sometimes, or consumed with sadness, etc.). Rather, the problem with DID is not being able to move smoothly and appropriately between the different ego states (which according to this theory aren't fundamentally different from the ego states everyone has).

I'm not fully convinced by that model, but I'm looking for an alternative to the usual assumptions--one that makes the insiders less rigidly defined. A lot of people talk about sudden, dramatic integrations and even involuntary integration. I don't think it will happen that way for me (rule one of this business--never say never). Because the borders of my insiders aren't so fixed that they either exist or don't exist.

I need the feelings and ideas that my insiders have that I don't have--I certainly don't want those to go away. So the question is, when I am more healed how will I experience them--as continuous parts of me or still as insiders with their own voices and names? A couple of months ago, I would have said I would experience them still as insiders, because once I have named those parts that will be an easy way to keep track of them even though they aren't walled off any more.

Since then, I have experienced more overlapping or blending of what I conceived of in August 1996 as separate adult parts. They used to write about the collective as "we," and now they are much more likely to use "I," refering not just to the individual part but to the adult collective. That collective can move fairly smoothly between the feelings of the different parts without having to stop and switch. In other words, for daily life I experience it as a kind of unification of the adult parts. However, if I want to stop and think or write about my feelings, I still name the parts or write in different colors. The adult insiders have become a technique or metaphor I can use to understand my feelings better, instead of being the only way I have access to my feelings. I think this might be a stable pattern--acting like a unified system most of the time but identifying distinct insiders when I stop and think about my feelings.

A picture done in spring 1997:

I made a picture for my therapist that said HELP, and then one day I got angry at him and tore it apart.  I left the pieces sitting on the floor that day, but he saved them for me.  I took them home the next session, and several weeks later I started incorporating them into a new artwork.  I wanted to show the concept that I didn't want to simply put the pieces of myself back together, because lots of positive things had grown up in the spaces between the pieces.

Sept. 1997 reflections on the idea of a core self:

I think there are at least three different concepts that can be called a core self.

One is the idea that there is a birth person, and then when whenever something horrible happens that birth person creates an alter to hold the pain or cope. That model tends to lead people to go figure out who is the birth person, and fuse the alters back into that birth person. One problem is that sometimes people try to follow this path and then conclude that the birth person is too damaged and that is impossible. But my objection is to the implication that sometimes gets expressed that one person is real and the others are "only alters" (self-hypnotic inventions).

The Jungian concept of the Self (capital S) is something entirely different. It is the higher power inside and me at the same time. In that sense, my own experience is that I do have a single core Self that is somehow the potential sum of the parts. The members of my system do know we are part of "one person", but I think that Self always remains a potential in the background--it isn't a core self in the sense that is "the real me" in any practical way. That is, it isn't the one everyone else should fuse with or the one whose opinions count most. Also, I do know people who feel strongly that different alters are separate people all the way to the point that they have separate souls (I have one friend who had an alter who chose to be baptised as herself). They would probably not feel that they have a single central Self in the Jungian sense.

I would like to see a third model, where the person I was born to be actually split up into pieces, each of which has a part of the the original (and each of which is an expression of the Self). I feel like I do have the pieces of a puzzle that could fit together, but I like the way the pieces have been able to develop their different interests and their ability to take care of each other and have become more than fragments. Therefore, I choose close cooperation as my goal, not putting the pieces together into a single whole.

I do think that NDA (not diagnosed with anything, or "normal") people have different aspects of their personalities, that they could name and talk from if they wanted to (the mother vs. the professional, for example). When some of those parts are holding great pain, and they have developed high walls between them, then you have multiplicity. I need to heal the pain and lower the walls, but I can still have parts (and still talk to them and call them by names if that is useful or comforting for me).

continued | back to top | being multiple | my system | self-diagnosis | therapy

home | pam | pem | female-female abuse | book reviews |