Integration?!

last updated 2/3/98

#3: Integration as a Process

Integration isn't for me a once-and-for-all thing. First of all, it has been a gradual process of the parts working more-and-more closely together, until suddenly they weren't separate people anymore. And even that seemingly sudden change doesn't mean that I never feel like the feelings that are coming up belong to someone else, not to me.

When I am triggered or when I am struggling with difficult feelings, I often wonder whether I am just fooling myself in saying that I have integrated. What I am come to understand, however, is that integration does not mean that everything is different, but rather that I have made the commitment to make different choices. When I have experienced an abuse memory, I may, at first, want to comfort the abused child who is so hurt. But instead I make the choice to be that child, to feel her feelings and try to work those through by being her and all the other formerly-separate parts at the same time. And when I do that new things happen, like being able to get angry at my abusers.

I think that the integration becomes real by my repeatedly choosing to act on that basis. If it didn't work for me at this time, then I would make different choices, I would need the parts to be separate, and the integration would fade away.

#4: Philosophical Reflections

First, I think this thing that I am experiencing and calling integration is a tool, not a goal. It is a way of organizing together to be able to get at the big issues, which are things like feeling that I was born bad, feeling that the abuse was my fault, feeling worthless. This thing I am calling integration is a radical change--I experience myself very differently now. But it isn't the center of the healing process, it is just a tool.

You know what? 99% therapists don't really know what they are talking about at all when they tell you what integration is, because they haven't experienced it and they don't really know what it feels like to have people inside. I certainly don't believe therapists can only help with things they have suffered themselves, but having people inside is such a radically different experience that I think that people who haven't experienced it can never quite imagine what it feels like to be multiple.

It is also a subjective experience; there is a sense in which I cannot define how my mind works very well because I experience it through the filter of how it works. I can't quite clearly picture how my mind worked 6 months ago, because I am now seeing it through the filter of how my mind works now. In some sense integration cannot be defined because the two experiences are incommensurable (if you have read T. S. Kuhn, I am thinking of paradigm shifts).

The way I understand it right now (which may not fit for anyone else and may not be the way I understand it 6 months from now) is that the key definition of being multiple is that the people inside understand themselves to be separate people. It isn't like exagerated personality states, because having a particular set of feelings and a particular view of the world does not capture the feeling of being a separate person.

On the other side, the height of the dissociative barriers does not define multiplicity because I can have very low dissociative barriers and still have each part be a separate person or I can have repressed memories without being separate people. The key to understanding multiple personality is to understand that it really does mean having separate people inside. I don't mean that they have separate souls, I mean that each one has self-awareness and an understanding of him or herself as a person.

I had rather hoped that my alters would stick around as slightly-exagerated personality states. But what has happened to me feels quite different. They were people inside, and they aren't there, at least on an everyday basis, anymore. That is a tremendous loss.

To the extent that a person is the sum of that person's feelings and experiences, they are realer than they were, because now instead of seeing Three's pain as she blames herself for the death of her father, I now experience it. But in another sense, in which a person is defined by self-awareness as a person, they are gone. And it is that inner experience that I believe is the most important thing, not how I act.

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