Talk about integration – your experience with it, or your feelings about it.
New Landscape ~ DID/MPD Support Group
New York support group for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) / Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
Talk about integration – your experience with it, or your feelings about it.
I think I’ve decided that integration is something that may or may not happen TO me. It is not something I force or try to do. It will just happen in some unique way that makes sense for my system.
I don’t know that I’ve had much happen in the integration department lately. I know there are a few faint looking figures in my “house” – like they are see through. I believe these 2 are fading out – or fading into others, or into me. Not sure. But I am sure that it’s some sort of change, or integration.
one thing i’ve thought about a lot is the idea of integration in terms of wholeness, becoming a whole person. within my system, this seems to happen to individual parts–the more they are defined from the other parts, the more they are able to gather the separate parts of themselves. so it’s like, parts who had seen themselves, and been seen by others, as mostly focused on, say, depression… then they find aspects of themselves that are not depressed, and kind of gather that into a whole.
there’s a lot of resistance in my system to the idea of integration in the traditional sense, of becoming a single person living in this body. some of it is that there are ways, when things are working, that being multiple is a definite advantage. and some of it is that there is just more of me-as-a-whole than really fits into a single personality. parts who have radically different opinions about things (thank heaven we largely agree politically, but pretty much anything else is up for grabs).
i have parts fade in and out, parts who are around a lot for a while, then not as much.
and there’s a lot of… braiding is how i think of it, parts who spend a lot of time out together, but are still their separate selves. and it’s interesting how particular combinations of parts will be different. i guess it’s kind of like if you had those lenses with colors on them, and depending on which lenses you were combining, you’d get different colors, but the lenses themselves are still separate, and can combine with any of the others.
just some thoughts.