Co-Consciousness and Integration: New Thoughts

It's Day Two of the Consciousness Cleanse. I did my morning routine and read the exercises, which I will do this afternoon. For anyone who’s been in a twelve-step program, you can understand the Day Two exercises as a mini-fourth-step. My only concern with this is that I need to be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time. My fourth step took months. Debbie Ford suggests thirty minutes for the exercises. I’m going to try for an hour and make myself give up the thoroughness that I am sometimes obsessive about. (sometimes?)

I’m excited to be doing this process, and already feel shifts taking place inside me, just from reading the book and remembering to connect first thing in the morning. That said, I have something else, which is pressing on my mind.

I’m talking about the eight-year-old.

In my obsessive way, I've been exploring co-consciousness and integration for the last several weeks. I have been looking all around the internet and re-reading old message board comments I remembered seeing years ago, and writing long journal entries about these concepts.

This morning, I'm a guest blogger at author/therapist/blogger Mary Armstrong website. an excerpt from one of my blogs about the eight-year-old, on her website. The post is about the concepts of co-consciousness and integration.

Over the past few years, I’ve gradually been integrating lost pieces of myself, into the whole which I think of as “me”. This is not an easy process. It’s stressful and confusing, time-consuming and disorienting. It’s also well worth it. To have access to these parts-of-self which were previously closed off to me, is amazing. To be able to function from a place of wholeness instead of from only a fraction of who I really am, brings me a kind of peace I didn’t know was possible. It is allowing me to be more active and less reactive.

In any given situation, our actions and reactions are not only based on the current circumstances. In an instant, without effort, our minds take in our situation, categorize it based on past experiences, and then offer possible courses of action. If this didin't happen, each experience would stand alone, there would be no connection between what happened yesterday and what's happening today. It's necessary for us to exist in a time-line to have stored memories and use them in our decisions about what to do now.

For the most part, we aren’t aware of the process. In fact, it takes a great deal of effort to become conscious of this process, and even more effort to look at the suggested courses of action before moving into action. Moving forward without making a conscious decision is living reactively. Looking conwsciously at the situation and then deciding whether the messages from the past are warranted or should be ignored and then moving forward is living actively.

The more emotioanally charged your past situations are, the stronger your mind’s "suggestions" of action will be when they are triggered. If your mind categorizes your current situation as the same as something traumatic from your past, the “suggested” course of action may feel more like a demand.

For instance, if you are aware that there is something extremely hot in front of you, your mind is going to say, “don’t touch that.” If you move closer to the fire, your mind may begin screaming at you to move away. It may take a great deal of will and self-talk to override this message. If it was necessary to touch the flame – say to rescue someone else, or to keep something important from burning – you could override the message, but it would cause you a great deal of inner turmoil.

If you’ve experienced trauma, there may be unusual links inside you which trigger this same kind of turmoil. Personally, I am uncomfortable thinking of sunflowers, or dolls with eyes that open and close, and I panic if I think of something covering my face. (I actually drew in a deep breath just writing that sentance.) These may seem irrational on the surface, but because my mind has linked them to danger, it feels the same as the 'don’t touch it – it’s hot' message.

Before I began integration, I stayed in one aspect of myself most of the time. This aspect was unaware of a lot of the trauma and the links my mind had set up. I knew I didn’t like dolls or sunflowers or having my face covered, but I didn’t know why.

Because denying my past was a survival strategy I'd become used to, I didn’t look too closely at the why. I sometimes wondered about it, but the memories were not available to me and I moved quickly into another strategies. It is not possible to override the messages without looking at them closely, and that seemed impossible, so instead I would go into panic-mode. It left me feeling out-of-control, as if the world and my experiences had power over me and I had no power of my own.

As I’ve integrated the pieces of me which carried the memories attached to sunflowers and dolls and the hand over my face, I understand where the messages are coming from, I’m not afraid to look at them, and I can take that moment to decide how reactive I need to be. I calm myself down. I think, This isn’t really hot, at all. Eventually, I am able to put my finger right on that imaginary flame, and when I do I find that it can’t burn me, anymore.

So integration is the answer. Right? Well... it has been the answer that's worked for me, thus far, but then, we come to the eight-year-old.

I’ve lost count of how many pieces of my past have integrated into the person I think of as me. I thought I understood what integration looked like, for me. Although each one has been different, there were certain givens I’d come to expect.

The eight-year-old has been different from the beginning. She is much more complex; more complete. The other parts I’ve integrated were connected to specific memories, or specific ages. Despite her name, the eight-year-old is really not just eight. She seems to be made up of all the ages up until eight.

I think she is who I was before I became “me”. I’ve been trying to integrate her into me, when in reality I may have to integrate into her… and I’m not even sure what the distinction is. It feels very different in my head, but when I try to explain it, it doesn't sound different at all.

I feel a bit like I’m the infecting virus.
She seems to be the one who was here first… doesn’t that make her more worthy than me?

The things which are triggering for her are the exact things I still can’t look at closely, and consequently the messages they bring up for me are very hard to override. When she is angry, I feel angry and the anger doesn’t easily subside even when I know it is about something from the past and not about what is happening right now.

When she feels slighted, I feel an intense sense of failure but at the same time, I feel very defiant. Her message may be, I need. Mine is, I have to meet that need but I don’t want to.

I know this eight-year-old part and I have to be completely open with each other if we are ever to get past these old trauma-based triggers - and I'm not the only defiant one. She is fighting this as much as I am, even though she is pretending that it's all my fault.

I haven’t really been discussing my obsession with co-consciousness versus integration with my therapist, until today. It may seem like a surprising oversight. So much other stuff is going on and I send her so many emails but sometimes I just don’t seem to get the right pieces out there and she will say, in the kindest way possible, "you should have brought this up sooner." Unfortunately  I don't always know what is most important, and that’s probably because I am reacting to the messages being triggered by current situations.

You see why I need a consciousness cleanse?
I see that I’ve been reconsidering my position on co-consciousness, but I am aware that I am doing it out of fear – which is exactly what I’ve seen in others. I’ve felt as if integration was the more functional choice and avoiding it in favor of some kind of agreement between parts-of-self was going to be confusing and distracting. It’s interesting, to me, that now that it feels like I am the one who may be lost in the mix, I am much less willing to move into a full integration. And this feeling - this fear of being lost - is not based in reality because as I've gone through this process nothing has been lost!

The idea that she is the "real me" is bringing up a lot of stuff from the past, and so I am aware I am being reactive in not moving forward with integration. Logically, I understand that we are both real. I know that we need each other and that we are truly two sides of the same coin.

Emotionally, I feel as if my sense of being real or valid is being threatened, and this is something that's come up again and again, in therapy. Although I've worked with old messages of "I'm not real" or "I'm not important" quite a lot, it still seems to be screaming in my head, right now.

So, I am trying to override this particular “don’t touch-it's hot” message. I’m trying to get myself to walk into the fire, and accept integration with the eight-year-old, whatever that takes. I am also allowing myself to hold back until I feel more comfortable. I've had many years of separateness. I am still here, and so is the eight-year-old. I can give it time to unfold.

Holding back rather than pushing my way through is a huge step for me. It shows that I am looking closely at what's happening and so when I do proceed it will be actively and not reactively. Patience is what I need right now - for myself, for the eight-year-old - for the “us” which I'm hoping will one day simply be me.

*****

Keys to Integration

A day of chaos. It isn't the first, not the beginning, but the culmination of a few weeks of inexplicable turmoil. Even now, trying to describe what’s been going on is sending me reeling around in several directions.
Where to start...?

Often, I've written about things after the fact. It’s quite different to be in the middle of it and try to blog. By giving you the retrospect view, I believe there is one fact that has not been obvious – and that important piece of information is this:

When I am beginning to integrate a part of me, I am unaware that it’s happening.

 So, for the last few weeks, what was I aware of?

• A general sense of unease that was growing each day.
• Blocks of missing time that were increasing in length and number almost daily.
• An increase in the amount of support I needed from outside of myself.
• Overreacting to situations.
• Being completely aware I was overreacting but unable to stop it.
• A growing sense of panic.
• A sense of impending doom.
• Emotions that had nothing to do with what was actually happening in my life.

So, how do I define integration?

1. I accept the concept of the “inner child.” There is a part of me that was formed in childhood that stays with me, forever.
2. I accept the concept that my current situation can sometimes trigger emotions about a similar situation from the past,. This can cause me to overreact or react in ways that I might not if I were able to be completely rational about the current situation. I believe this happens to everyone – not just people with emotional issues. Someone complains that you made a mistake and a forgotten event from your childhood is triggered somewhere in your subconscious. You don't even remember the teacher who wrote a bad grade on your paper and how you felt you didn't deserve it, but the unresolved feelings come up in a similar situation. The anger and frustration from the old situation makes you react strongly to the situation of the present.
3. "Compartmentalized memories" is concept I accept. To some degree, everyone pushes some things into a side pocket of their brain (like the forgotten school paper I spoke of above.)

When you put your keys down because you are distracted by something else, and then can’t find them later, where did the memory go? You eventually track them down, and then think, "oh, yeah, the phone rang right when I came in the door." You answered the phone, unconsciously put your keys down, and you know you did it but you have actually setting them down.

Where did the memory go?

If you forget someone’s birthday, even though you know the date and meant to send a card, that is another form of a “compartmentalized memory?” You obviously have the knowledge somewhere… but it wasn't available at the time you needed it.

And in accepting the three premises above, it seems to me a good way of  understanding dissociative disorders. From my own, personal experiences, I could never doubt the reality of DID because its real and present in my life, but seeing a logical explanation helps me understand it on another level, and maybe it will help you understand as well.

So, the last few weeks have sucked and it only dawned on me yesterday that all the chaos is because I've been bringing home another fragment of my inner child. "She" is "me" and always will be... and now I have access to more of those hidden pieces of my past.

What Integration Means to Me

Once again, I'm deleting the text that I will be using in my memoir. I've left the image and the comments
~Shen 2-21-12

Gains in Therapy

After I sent the first Alternate Hand Writing I'd done to my therapist, I regretted it. It seemed too strange, too “crazy” and I was afraid she would judge me in some way. This has been a common fear throughout therapy. I was judged so relentlessly growing up, that it’s hard to remember that my therapist has never judged me at all.

As I fretted over what her response to my left/right writing would be, a memory popped into my head out of nowhere. It wasn't a new memory, but for some reason it seemed to have a lot of new emotion attached to it. Maybe it's because I didn't acknowledge my feelings much, as a child. I let them build to the breaking point and the, often, I dissociated from my life. Emotions were a pretty foreign thing to me. Mostly, I didn't acknowledge my feelings at all until I reached the breaking point, and then I often dissociated.

But in that moment so many years later, after doing the left/right writing, I felt anger, indignation, sadness, and resentment all pounding in my head, together. I had to keep reminding myself that this was progress. It sure wasn't fun and it would have been easier to just avoid them in one of the myriad of tried-and-true distractions I'd developed in my life.
But I didn't.

The image is of the Resources, the protective side of me, the nurturing side of me and my "Spiritual Core Self" as described in the DNMS process. The Resourses are holding the two dissociated parts that I felt inside, that day, They are (I am) keeping them (me) safe.

At the same time, it felt as if the Resourses were keeping "me" (the part of me that most often feels like me) safe from the dissociated parts. It was like setting a boundary with my own memories and feelings, so that I could put the work on hold until my next appointment with my therapist.

This is something that has been a real struggle for me - trying to work on things when it is time to work and put them aside when it isn't. And this is a small bit of encouragement that I will not always have to wallow helplessly in every feeling that emerges.

Images and Tools

A Brief Reprieve

For more than a week after Father’s Day, 2008, I had the longest string of good days I had experienced in years. We got two puppies, that week, I spent a lot of time with my children, and I felt generally happy and full of energy. My journal entries were all positive and incredulous, with an underlying fear that the fall would come.

Back to Work

The big drop in mood did indeed come, and a rush of reactive, memory-induced anxiety came along with it. I say memory-induced not because I remembered something specific, but because I was aware that the feelings I was experiencing were not about anything that was currently happening in my life. I knew that they were driven by things from my past.

This understanding was, in itself, a big step in the right direction. In the past I had always viewed my moodswings as something beyond my control - something that happened to me sometimes, often out-of-the-blue, for no apparent reason. Understanding that these mood swings were caused by something felt like hope because it meant I might be able to find the cause and be in control of my life in a whole new way.

One tool I've used a number of times to help me figure out what part of my past is triggering my present anxiety is “Alternate Hand Writing”. Briefly, the idea is to talk to the part-of-self that is being triggered, whether it is a dissociated part or just a set of memories from the past.

With the dominant hand (for me this is my right hand), I ask questions. The questions are directed at the triggered part-of-self as if this was a separate person. With the non-dominant hand (my left hand) I answer the questions.

Every time I've tried this, I would have a nagging doubt in the back of my mind as to whether any answer to my questions would come. I needn't have worried. Almost always, the answer popped into my head soon after I switched the pen to my left hand. It felt almost mystical or magical, the answers almost seeming to write themselves.

This is a tool anyone can use, any time. It can help you identify what you're feeling and why. I've included examples in my memoir, "Through the Tiger's Door".

Opening the Door to Me

As my life becomes more my own, I find myself creating much more hopeful images. Here are a few I created during the Summer of 2008.

The comments below are about both the images here, and the text I've deleted (2-21-12) as I continue to write my memoir.

Dissociation and Fear of Integration

From what I've seen and heard, the word "integration" is often feared by those with dissociative disorders. I understand. The first time I read about the concept of integration, I was terrified. I feared two things:
what I would remember and what I would forget.

But like so many things I've feared in my life, it was unnecessary. I've recently begun integrating those lost pieces of myself and I have NOT lost and part of myself. I have found myself.

I hope you do, too.