Integration?!

Written by Pam

#1: Steps in my journey

When I first started working with my current therapist, he said something about integration as a goal, and I said: "I can't picture that, that is on the other side of the mountain." Then we laughed that I was assuming there was only one mountain to cross first, and my therapist never brought up the subject again.

It was only after I began to know and love my parts that I decided I didn't want to integrate, and that was an important statement of my caring for them. I didn't want to integrate, I/we wanted to give all the parts (alters) the love and life they deserved. (I've written about not wanting to integrate at : The Whole and the Sum of the Parts.)

In the fall of 1997, I began to talk about integration. It wasn't that I came to identify that as my goal, but rather that I began to feel that it was happening whether I wanted it or not. I struggled to define a model that would be more comfortable for me--that somehow my parts could be linked together in what I called an assemblage, but then would pop out as individuals when they needed to communicate.

Now I think that I have integrated in a more radical sense, though it is too soon to be sure. I have been trusting my process, and it has led me into a radical change in my system (my therapist confirms that he sees objective change, but he leaves me completely free to name it for myself).

At the moment, integration is the best description I can find for what I feel. I don't see that as a victory, more as a loss (I desperately miss the voices), though I trust my process is taking me where I should go. I certainly don't see it as meaning that I am close to finishing the process; there are surely more memories to come and I have hardly started to touch the feeling like I am bad, not to mention that I have no idea how to express different feelings except by switching. But recent experiences with memories (below) suggests that, for me, this new form of my system, whatever it is, will help with those things.

I'm struggling with understanding what my system is now and how it works. Some therapists differentiate between integration (full co-consciousness and cooperation) and fusion (not having alters any more), but I've been suspicious of that change in definitions. I don't have good skills yet at accessing the things that used to be held in separate parts, so I can't define how it works for me very well yet. But I heard someone once say that integration involved taking a group of marbles that used to each be in a separate bag and putting them all into one bag. I liked that definition at the time, but that isn't how what is inside me feels right now. Instead of the separate marbles that used to be there, I feel I have inside me a continuous piece of cloth, though I only know how to pick up one part of that cloth at a time. I'm going to have to struggle with this more, because I really need to make some sense of where I am at in order to be able to find new ways of being to match the changes inside.

#2: An incident on the road

Caution--The following includes an abuse memory (not explicit)

Week of Jan. 19, 1998. I had been very triggered by something that happened last week--my husband had forgotten to take our son to his piano lesson Wednesday, then my husband (who is ADD and had car trouble that day) got mixed up and showed up at the wrong time for a make-up piano lesson he had arranged our son Friday. I was angry at my husband at first on Wednesday, but it triggered some other overwhelming feelings and I ended up screaming in the bathroom (not screaming at my husband, just screaming). Friday it triggered me straight into despair--I didn't see how I could go on living. Some corner of rational mind knew that the piano lesson wasn't that important, but that didn't touch the feelings. Monday, in therapy, I was finally able to get to what was behind the trigger (I had tried last Thursday, but I couldn't get there). I got a memory of sexual abuse and punishment.

In the memory, I was being punished, lying naked on a cold floor and being molested occasionally. I could feel in the memory that it was safer just to believe that I deserved to be punished and not remember what I was being punished for. But I pushed to remember, and what I remembered was that I was being punished for was failing to please sexually. Then, something different happened--while I was still on the memory level I fought back.

What happened next wasn't what actually happened in the past, but what I did yesterday when in that memory. After a great struggle to get the words out of my mouth, I started to talk about how it was not my fault, that it was not that there was something wrong with my performance but it was his body that didn't do what he wanted it to do. I said (crying because I knew it was horrible for a child to be saying this): "G**-d*mn-it, I'm good at ...sex!"

I've always done something to change memories when they came up, but mostly it has been finding a way to comfort the one with the memory, not fighting back the way I did this time. And it was also revolutionary that I went through the memory speaking in an adult voice, not a child voice. I think that has to do with the integration that I have sensed and been so confused by. As I struggled to get the words about it not being my fault out of my mouth, I suddenly felt a linking together of hands inside me (and it wasn't like they were separate people joining hands, just hands). I needed the strength of my parts woven together in order to be able to believe that my abusers lied.