Integration Therapy

It's been too long since my headmates and I had a healthy connection, and for the most part, I'm looking at the possibilities of integration therapy if things do not clear up. Now, I'm not looking to start up some big fight or rant, just looking for some healthy advice in this case, and some different views on integration. We really don't want to have to do this, if we can manage to find another way around it, but things haven't been getting better, so we're trying to get through.

So, integration therapy? Do's? Don't's? Inbetweens? Whatever you've got to say, I'm more than interested in hearing it.

Many thanks,
Ausse

I guess just start slow and make sure it's something you all (or the relevant people) want in order to calm things down. Forced integrations can be worse than in-fighting.

I would suggest looking into all the alternatives

Any chance it would be more useful if one or more of you walked out?

Well, Miniar, it would be helpful if any of us even knew what happened one another, but thanks.
I'm looking into as many alternatives as I can, and integration is definitely going to be a last resort.

The big question for us would be how much open and honest communication is there between you and your headmates? If you are going to find a solution to your problems with your headmates you will need that in order to get there. If that is the problem, then we would suggest first finding a person or people that you can trust to help facilitate that communication. In the end how far you get towards a solution is entirely on you and yours and how much effort you put into it.

I know where we were once as far as our relationships to the rest within, and where we are now. We doubt we would have gotten where we are now without someone who was willing to work with us so long as we also worked on things as well. We also aren't done yet. But the thing is it has taken a lot of work, and lot of communication and sometimes going over a point a dozen times to get here. To the point where we mostly get along and all that wonderful stuff.

Face

If you're considering integration, you need good communication first. Otherwise, I'd suspect the new you is going to have all kinds of unresolved baggage that might take a good long while to understand, let alone fix. "You'll" inherit all that was the separate individuals, except perhaps not all of the relevant memory about why it's there, and any given individual has internal blind spots as well.

Integration does not always work and can fall apart at a later date. This is not necessarily a permanent solution. The suggestion of walking out is a good one, IMHO, if you have truly irreconcilable differences and the people who agree to leave are capable of doing so.

I agree with Face that finding a neutral facilitator would be a good place to start. If you're already in conflict, I suspect that bringing up these very weighty solutions and trying to come to an agreement is not going to go so well as an internal conversation.

-Val

Integration is a solution, not a diagnosis.

By this I mean it's probably foolish to try it without all the information gathered. To that end I'd want to know how you came to be multiple, where you're one being that split or several that joined together (or a combination of both), what the reason for your multiplication was, and whether or not that reason is still valid.

For example, if you originally became multiple to deal with a psychic/mental/emotional injury - well everyne needs to get off their crutches, but if you go for a run while your leg is still broken you'll have a long hospital stay coming up. On the other hand if a friend moves in with you because they're getting building work done, it will only cause problems if they don't move out even when their house is finished.

Intuitively, I think if you were originally one entity who fractured then integration will probably be more useful, whereas if you were several entities who moved in together then walking out will probably be more useful - your mileage may vary, of course.

To answer that question, Archer, we don't really know how we became a multiple. It sort of just "happened", whether it was to help cope with trauma or something else, we just don't know. Communication ebbs and flows, but for the past six months, to almost a year, it's been gone. Our headmates have just seemed to vanish, even if a few are still remaining.
It kind of feels like a family being ripped apart by a divorce, or something of the sort. But we haven't been able to find a neutral facilitator, well, not without being considered insane. Though we sometimes do feel like we are falling apart, like a picking a jigsaw puzzle up off the table in one piece. I wouldn't call it a problem with the headmates, but then again, I haven't known what's been going for about two years now. Things just seem to be falling apart, and I can't get it patched, not to mention that I almost never hear from the headmates anymore.

Thanks for the input, though. It's helped. Thanks.

Without communication, I don't see how you could possibly integrate anyway. If there's no/poor communication, in what sense do you currently consider yourself multiple? Are the other parts sleeping? If you aren't communicating much, how do you know?

Regardless, if you feel things are at the stage that therapy of some kind will be useful (be it integration therapy or something else) then it seems like outside, professional help is what you're looking for. Getting a list of therapists (of whatever discipline) in your area who have experience of multiples is the next step. There is no issue of people thinking you're crazy. Fundamentally, so long as you take care of personal hygeine, hold down a job/do okay at school, and aren't involved in any kind of criminal enterprise or physically harming yourself . . . no-one actually cares if you're "crazy". "Crazy" is not relevant. The only thing relevant to therapists is whether or not you are functional, and so long as you're functional there is no danger whatsoever of men in white coats coming to take you away.

Archer Wrote:Integration is a solution, not a diagnosis.

By this I mean it's probably foolish to try it without all the information gathered. To that end I'd want to know how you came to be multiple, where you're one being that split or several that joined together (or a combination of both), what the reason for your multiplication was, and whether or not that reason is still valid.

For example, if you originally became multiple to deal with a psychic/mental/emotional injury - well everyne needs to get off their crutches, but if you go for a run while your leg is still broken you'll have a long hospital stay coming up. On the other hand if a friend moves in with you because they're getting building work done, it will only cause problems if they don't move out even when their house is finished.

Intuitively, I think if you were originally one entity who fractured then integration will probably be more useful, whereas if you were several entities who moved in together then walking out will probably be more useful - your mileage may vary, of course.

Thanks for this. What happened with us (not the OP) last night is that essentially while trying to go to sleep we started drawing out who we thought branched off from whom. This took three forms before it came to its fourth and final (for that period) form, where we were able to actually form connections between identities. Elsewhere recently I've been talking about -- in specific, one member of a group who we know internally as "the fire circle" (constituted by Adrian, April, Kagerou, and their immediate forbears -- Blaze and Fiore). The member I'm talking about, would be Kagerou.

This gets a bit difficult to talk about because I have not read all that much on Chaos Magick and thus the entire creation-of-constructs thing...well, it seems like it applies. But I don't have the vocabulary or the full concepts to make sure. Plus it seems that the Chaos Magick current has...gone more underground than it was (where "Current 144" would generate more relevant hits than "Chaos Magick"), or at least I haven't been seeking it for a while. I should have one community-input source I can check, at least.

Anyhow. What I was doing last night was looking at my system from the perspective of assuming that some of my system members may actually be external spirits -- or fusions of Host, or Body Name (whom I'll call N. [Nina? weird, that just came to me]), with external spirits. If we start with my consciousness from the ground up -- we get Body/Body-Consciousness (physical stratum, and ego), Host (spiritual emanation), Nina (first coalescent identity)...and at that level we have four other separate spirits who come into the picture. These are: Fiore, William, Bell, and Codice. Which...from the names, is oddly sounding like magical groundwork (emotion, will, spirit, knowledge, in that order).

Moving on from that somewhat bizarre point...um, let's see. Given this, William may have contributed to the formation of Mark -- our in-house artist who communicates via image, without words. Bell, who started as an external spirit, seems to have at the very least "downloaded" a copy of himself into my mind, so we can refer to Bell1 (original) and Bell2 (organic), who may or may not be the same entity. (Throughout the rest of this post, when I say Bell, I mean Bell2 unless otherwise indicated.) ...And yeah, I did just make the connection with someone I know speaking about having seeds of bodhisattvas implanted in one to help one (Adrian has toyed with the idea that Bell may be a bodhisattva, and we have no contraindications of this.) Codice, named after a bookstore, has no current descendants that we know of. Fiore seems to have become Kagerou.

At the time I met all of these spirits, my life was pretty upended; I'd just entered sixth grade, which would have made me 11. This was the time that the sexual harassment and peer abuse started (including what might possibly have been sexual assault -- we know for a fact there was one instance, but there may have been more), plus we were living one level below someone who would beat his female partner, whom I could hear through the floorboards while trying to sleep. And our sexual assault guy lived close enough to see into my bedroom window. So...not so great energy going on there.

Fiore was an emanation who would do things like pretend to be Bell1 (who was at the time in a romantic involvement with Host) and then make his face melt off. I got the point that this could have been to try and train me to tell spirits apart by feel rather than by appearance...at the time, however, it just made me feel unsafe and scared.

Having the knack I do for taking elements of something feared and through familiarity making them less scary, I took elements of Fiore and created Blaze. It didn't become clear to me before one or two nights ago that Blaze was not the second incarnation of Fiore, but rather a self-generated mimicry of him. As I said elsewhere recently, Blaze ended up splitting into Adrian and April...but that wouldn't be until college. Right now we're still in 6th grade.

I thought for years, even though I was afraid to even think Fiore's name, that Blaze had safely contained him. But during college I did have the occurrence of someone who would front and laugh to himself, fairly certain that everyone thought he was "a sweet little girl." This...was the second resurfacing of Fiore, though I named him after a certain anime character I knew of at the time (before I saw how spectacularly idiotic the anime was). I'm fairly certain it had to do with feeling unsafe on the street. (Fiore's first resurfacing happened in high school, where we nearly got into a fight because of some very ill-conceived handling by our peers.)

We (I am guessing from our earlier system map, Blaze, April [at the time going by "Rose"], Sparrow and several different attempts at bringing Bell1 back which resulted in three related identities we collectively referred to as "Thorne") quickly reined in this emanation with the understanding that if he did something to get the body in trouble, we would all pay for it; so it was in all of our best interests to make sure that he didn't screw up our life. Because he, so we thought, could leave the body -- we couldn't. And it was the body that would be punished. Hence the pragmatic but effective approach of staying on the right side of the law...

It was around this time period that we started looking into dark spirituality, to acknowledge what we then thought of as our "shadow", and by keeping it in the forefront of our mind, prevent it from overtaking us...though really, I didn't understand then that what was happening with our "shadow overtaking us" essentially had to do with being caught off-guard by PTSD flashbacks...

Anyhow, it is Kagerou who has been presenting...an opportunity for improvement, at this point in our life. I mentioned the possibility of integration of this aspect elsewhere on this board, recently...Kage is the one whom our "viciousness" has been contained within, who we thought may need to be integrated back into Host in order for Host to be complete. (It's been said here that if I take away the innate capacity of anyone to do anything, even a bad thing, it robs them of their humanity.) But looking at this now...

We are uncertain as to whether Fiore, William, Bell, and Codice...are actually emanations of us, or are legitimately outsourced. I was thinking outsourced until I came up with the possibly elemental-type correspondences...meaning that Fiore or Kage in essence are not necessarily essentially dark, but that they are very much connected with the primal emotional level of things. And it could just have been that our primal emotions have thus far predominantly been of pain (which I suppose 14 years of depression will do to one), and then there's the rage and creep factor that has psychically protected us in times where we've been uncertain of our physical and emotional safety.

Either this, or it could be that for some reason we came with our own little package of spirit helpers, one of whom is dark -- counteracted by Bellchime.

If you imagine yourself as just as bad as anyone who would confront you, it tends to even the psychological playing field. But then you're also left with...not feeling very good, essentially. Whenever I tap in to him, he's suffering. I can't hold him in pain all the time, it's not humane. He needs to be healed, even if that means losing our protector. And if taking away his capacity to be at peace (by not healing him) is what I'm doing, I am also essentially robbing Kage of an ability to self-define, which is, in my circle, robbing him of his humanity.

But how would I heal someone whose pains I can't even fully recall? (Maybe he could fully recall them?)

Without the pain, I wonder who he would be...

-- Adrian