August meeting topics to keep talking about. Comment on any you like, or something else all together!
1) Integration: how does it work and feelings about it
2) Anxiety
3) Flashbacks
4) Therapist vacations
5) Acknowledging progress
6) Resilience
7) Healing in a spiral – how it’s circular instead of linear
8.) Dealing with loss
Hey, new look on the site! 🙂
Thinking about integration. Something that helped me a lot was changing my thinking about it from believing everyone needed to be blended together, or that one part could get to be in charge and everyone else had to do what they wanted. When I thought about integration in other contexts, like racial integration, for me i realized that it could be letting everyone have an equal role, and freedom to be themselves, but still be part of the whole. so that works for us. we’re all members of the same “group” or “person,” but we’re also individuals. i guess a big thing is that it meant that instead of trying to become blended, we worked on being okay with each part being different from the others.
one thing we learned when we were doing that is that the usual psychology definition of integration happened… to each individual part. like, some parts thought they were only about being angry, but then they discovered they were also about fixing things, and then the meaning of why they were angry a lot changed, because they were angry so that things could change. and then when they realized something like that, then they didn’t feel as angry, because it’s like the rest of us heard why they were mad, and they could just tell us something needed to be changed or fixed or something.
still dealing with loss it seems like. loss. loss. loss. it’s a very barren time in some ways. seasons – seasons come and go and change. this is a loss season.