Pem: Homepage

Written by Pam

This page, and its subpages, deals with my integration process and with my journey since. It has taken me a long time to feel confident in the integration because it didn't follow anything like the pattern I expected and because I don't always act integrated. Yet I believe myself to be all one person.

My integration process

In November and December, 1997, a lot started to change. During the fall, I had been coming to feel that whether I wanted it or not, a loose integration was developing, and I tried to find a way to describe this as a flexible collective rather than as any loss of identities (see The Whole and the Sum of the Parts).

Just before Thanksgiving, I experienced a real breakthrough for one of the parts who was still very active and separate; the three-year-old, whose father had just died. She came to trust my therapist and let him reassure her. She was also able to bring his reassurance to some of the other parts as new memories would come up.

Towards the middle of December and into early January, my memory work began to spiral down towards really feeling the pain and powerlessness of the abused child. In mid-January 1998, as I struggled with a memory, I felt a locking together of hands inside me (not people holding hands, just hands), and I was able to say to the memory "No! It's not my fault." I think something important happened when those hands linked together. I see it as a further step in the integration that had been developing gradually; a step that happened not as an end-product of therapy but as a tool to give me the strength I needed to be able to let out the pain of the abused child and change the messages I was given.

The thing that matters to my healing is being able to take on the pain and violent feelings I experienced as a child, not integration. But it seems that, for me, this thing I find myself calling integration is part of being able to walk through those feelings. I have written about trying to understand Integration?!

My continuing journey

After a few months, my grief over the integration faded and I found I felt regret when I dissociated to get at a hard issue, though I did find that worked best sometimes. As I began to settle into the integration, after the first grieving, I found two principles that helped me. One was that integration is a set of choices, not something that is over and done. When something came up that was hard or separate I chose to try to find integrating solutions rather than moving towards seeing it as separate in order to understand and comfort. In some sense that gets at what is really hard--seeing feelings as separate is a good way to avoid being overwhelmed by them and when they are all me I need more skills to keep from getting submerged. The other principle that I identified was that I needed to reach out and make an effort to express and listen to the feelings that no longer got expressed by separate alters.

For some people, I think those just fall into place, but for me they were in danger of being repressed again if I didn't make an effort to express those parts of myself. During the spring of 1998, I worked through a period where it seemed like the best thing wasn't to worry about how integrated or dissociated I was, just to use all the tools I have (both the integrated and the dissociated ones) to try to survive facing the central pain.

I've written a page about that process that I call Sysiphus. At the end of July, I began to feel that I was coming to the end of the Sysiphus process, and I wrote a brief page trying to visualize the next step, called loud . During the fall of 1998 and the spring of 1999 a lot more change happened. Some pieces of the story of that journey are on a page called finding the center.

Now I would say that, for me, integration was first a change in attitude and understanding--I began to believe and feel it is all me. Sometimes, I still speak with a child's voice and feelings but that is just as much me as my more usual voice. I wish I could explain that better. In the late spring and early summer of 1999 I felt like I was pushed back and forth with different issues: working again on feelings from my father's death when I was not quite three, facing a pattern where I seemed to cope well with everyday life but it was because I punish myself inside, and dealing with feelings triggered by my son's eye muscle surgery, including my own worst impulses (The Shadow). I went to a workshop on mother issues and started a page on my mother and me. All these pages have triggering material and Christian issues. In the second half of September 1999 I felt that a further integration occurred, and I am still trying to make sense of that.

next: What it Means to Me to Be Multiple