Since we have gotten a few asks recently about this topic, we decided to answer them all in one go as a separate post. The simplest version of the topic/question is this: We had integrated down to three people, but now we suddenly have more again - are we okay and does that mean something new and traumatic happened?
First of all, thank you to the individuals that felt concern and wanted to check that all was well- we appreciate the care. ❤️ We want to reassure you that we are okay, and that no it’s not a result of new trauma. We also wanted to explain what IS the cause of it because this end stage of DID treatment is pretty much never talked about anywhere much less for systems that were at any point polyfragmented. So this is sort of a unique teaching opportunity.
When we were at our biggest system size we had lots of alters and fragments that formed from multiple sources - meaning that they held material that hadn’t split from just one other alter but several. And when we worked on integrating all that, not everything went back where it came from. Which in some cases was fine, but in some cases meant that things x or y person needed back in order to heal something where over in left field with person z etc. I am not sure if we actually included this in our post about going down from five people to just three, but that was not the result of two pairs of people integrating. We had this wild (and amazing but now very difficult to comprehend) moment of being chaotically and unsustainably but nonetheless experientially ONE person. For a couple of hours. This wasn’t our brain attempting to sustainably integrate us into one whole identity. It was our brain attempting to pour everything into one pile temporarily so it could sort everything into better order than it had been in before and reunite all the materials related to a given issue into the same unit. A few hours of this process and our brain distilled us back into a non-unified self, in the form of three people. Now here is where things get interesting.
As the process of finally being able to make sense of our history and piece memories together clearly went on it became clear that some of those issues were much better able to be dealt with if they were further distilled. So we didn’t split to deal with new trauma. And our integrations didn’t fall apart to return a given person into x specific alters who had integrated to form them. It was a third completely different process. It felt like a flowing and branching, not a breaking or cracking.
Integration in the final stage is not always quite the same as it is when you’re just trying to literally comprehend what your life consisted of as a whole in the first place. For most of the healing process it’s two or three things combining and then those combining and those, etc, always building into bigger and bigger components. But in the final stage (and on rarer occasion in isolated instances of earlier stages, for a small section of a system) it’s not so static and one directional. Because it’s not just about assembling your life. It’s also about actually understanding - really understanding- how it all fits together. You flow together and apart, and together again and apart again, each time more coherently- almost like weaving something, that’s how my friend who has been fully integrated for a couple of years now described it. Now that I’m at this stage too, I find it’s a very fitting description.
I am not sure how many times this will happen (the flowing apart some before flowing back together) before our mind fully recognizes the pattern that will let us take the final step, but I do know that at the moment we are at the extreme ebb of that and should expect not to get any bigger than this again unless some new trauma occurs to disturb things (which, luckily, does not seem especially likely). I’m not sure exactly HOW I know that, it’s almost like a physical feeling in my brain of “Okay this is as far as I stretch then I have to turn back and go inward toward oneness again.”
We’re still reorienting ourselves to where we all fit in relation to one another - not quite being equivalent to any specific alters (with maybe two exceptions) that previously existed, we have to establish that from scratch. We can’t make any assumptions. So thank you to all our followers being patient with us in terms of our organization of info about ourselves in the interim. It has been strange but also wondrous, as it has given us the opportunity to see ourselves differently, to break molds of trauma induced associations with how we saw ourselves - almost none of us are the same as any specific identity we previously possessed.... and yet the sense of coherence of self and clarity of life narrative is so much stronger than we have had in most of our life. Each of us carries certain threads of our collective experiences - both traumatic and non-traumatic- that can now finally be looked at through eyes that don’t bear the blindness of preconceived notion. Oh sure trauma still BLURS it a bit, of course.... but having been combined and then distilled back out the way we have has neutralized many of the things that made it difficult for us to see our lives clearly. And I think that is perhaps THE primary thing that will give us the key to becoming permanently whole in the long run.
I hope that anyone who read this found it informative and educational about the rarely discussed end process of integration, and again I want to thank those who reached out expressing concern. We will definitely be posting more about the final stage of the integration process as we get a chance to reflect on it more deeply and can find the words to describe and express this strange but wonderous Journey to our Self.
