#integration

[thickramen]

Fusion: What it is, and what it isn't!

Fusion is one of those things about CDDs that is extremely misunderstood. You'll see people saying that fusion kills your alters, or that you can fuse from traumatic/stressful events. Neither of these things are true.

In order to understand fusion we need to understand integration. Integration, in the context of CDDs, is the breaking down of dissociative barriers between alters, and fusion - in its most simple terms - is the final step of integration.

How does integration work?

Good question! As I've already stated, integration is the breaking down of dissociative barriers between alters. Integration can happen in a lot of different ways. Trauma processing, headspace visualization, and pretty much anything that improves system communication, understanding, and cooperation cause integration to happen. And when you think about it, that's just what integration is. Or more accurately, it's what integration does. It breaks down maladaptive dissociative barriers and improves overall functioning within the system. Fusion is the final step in this process.

So, what is fusion?

Fusion is when two (or more) alters come together and become one. It happens when the dissociative barriers between the two (or more) alters are completely dissolved and the alters involved are cooperative and compatible with one another (Fusion will not happen if an involved alter wants it to not happen). Basically, fusion brings two (or more) alters together so closely that they become one in the same. So really, it's the opposite of losing or killing your alters, it's bringing your alters closer together.

Why can't fusion happen due to trauma/stress?

Well, that lies in the nature of CDDs and the nature of fusion itself.

CDDs, at their core, are coping mechanisms, we know this. Alters form to protect you from the inescapable trauma you endured as a child. Stress and further traumatization worsen CDDs; they split more alters and builds up dissociative barriers. And as we've already covered, fusion is the opposite of that. That's why you can't fuse due to trauma/stress.

Fusion is healing.

[corinescorner]

Fusion versus Integration: Are They Truly the Same?

First, what are they? Fusion is a process where two or more system members combine to form a single, unified identity. Integration, however, refers to the process of increasing communications, cooperation, and understanding between system members by lowering dissociative barriers.

The purpose of fusion is recovery. It can be partial (involving only some members) or final (where all members fuse into one.) It's a result of interal work and/or changes in system dynamics. Fusion could also not be final, and you're still able to split a new member.

Integration's purpose is also recovery, just a bit different. Unlike fusion, integration does not require members to fuse into one identity. It involves healing dissociative barriers and reducing internal conflicts.

Integration can improve quality of like and functionality while still not being a singular identity. Some integrated systems often describe feeling "whole," not beacuse they're one, but because they work together as one. There's a sense of connection and shared understanding, even as the system members' identities stay intact.

Why does this matter? Not all systems seek fusion, some value their system/plurality and do not view it as a condition to be resolved. Integration provides and alternative for systems that want to work together better while mantaining individuality.

They're both very personal processes, and both very valid ways of healing.

[valcksys]

if I see people mix up fusion and integration one more time…

INTEGRATION IS WHEN YOU LOWER AMNESIC AND COMMUNICATION BARRIERS BETWEEN ALTERS THIS IS A GOOD THING AND YOU SHOULD BE WORKING TOWARDS THIS NO MATTER YOUR RECOVERY GOAL

FUSION IS WHEN 2+ PARTS BECOME ONE PART

THESE WORDS ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE THEY MEAN COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS

[afriblaq]

What"s your suggestion?

[flock-talk]

These two tried to properly play fight today which is the first time I’ve seen them really reciprocate that style of play!

It’s a bit hit and miss as you can see them take frequent breaks and politely tell eachother off when it gets a bit overwhelming. They did a great job of communicating without escalating and regulating themselves decently well for their first attempt at such a rigorous play style!

[laika-of-the-stars]

We're finally getting therapy for our DID, and it's. Relieving, but also terrifying. I love our therapist, though, she comforted us when we told her how scared we were to lose one another via integration. She said something to the effect of "The goal isn't to make everyone into one big blob, it's to help them let go of their burdens and give you access to their gifts, their joys," and that. Is not a way we've heard it phrased before, so it was really comforting.

I'm still terrified of being the new host. I'm still terrified what healing means for us. I'm still terrified that we'll never love ourselves. I'm terrified that I'll remain unrecognizable to myself. I'm terrified. But I know we'll only continue to feel miserable if I don't do anything.

We've been having some hard switches today, so I hope next week gets here soon.

[subsystems]

Final Fusion Misinformation

You might have seen people saying something like this before: "studies find that final fusion only works 12.8% of the time." When I was pursuing final fusion, people in the community threw this 12.8% at me to try and discourage me from my desired recovery. After all, what's the point of pooling all of my time & energy into pursuing final fusion if it has such a low success rate?

Although I don't know where exactly this "low success rate" idea came from, most people I know explain that The Plural Association introduced it to them. This would make sense, because this nonprofit frequently states that final fusion has a 12.8% success rate on their webpage & resources. Here's some examples:

(Source)

(Source)

(Source)

Now, here's the thing:

This is at best a misquote & at worst purposeful misinformation.

The study that is linked here does not say that final fusion is only successful 12.8% of the time, or that only 12.8% of DID patients achieve final fusion.

In this study, a handful of DID clinicians are interviewed about their patients. It says that 39 patients terminated their therapy. 25.6% of those patients said that they reached a successful resolution in their therapy, they no longer needed it. 12.8% of those no longer needed therapy after full fusion, 12.8% no longer needed therapy but didn't fully fuse.

This is not a success rate. This does not say how many patients achieved final fusion. This is just a reason behind why some people left their therapy. The percentage is the same for people who did and did not achieve final fusion.

Here's the exact quote from the study:

(Source)

I have no idea how anyone can take a look at this and misconstrue the 12.8% to be about how successful final fusion is. It's possible it was just a misunderstanding, but I have trouble trusting that as The Plural Association has cited this study multiple times, including writing a whole article on it, yet continues to misconstrue final fusion as only being successful in 12.8% patients when that's just, blatantly, wrong.

Please reblog & spread this! Final fusion is horrifically stigmatized and fully fused systems are subjected to frequent harassment & misinformation about their recovery choices. It's not okay, and we should hold nonprofits like The Plural Association to better standards.

[carpethedamndiemdejavu]

- James Joyce (in a letter to Nora Barnacle Joyce)

[system-of-a-feather]

Alternative System Mind Mapping Method for Communication

[DISCLAIMER: This is not a professional or scientifically or anything really backed method, this is something coming solely from peer / personal experience.]

In regards to an anon ask earlier, I was thinking about it and one of the ways we've approached improving communication - particularly internal - in a way that is a lot less prone to flooding or dealing with trauma or anything too overwhelming - is by approaching it following the concept of Memory Webs

I haven't read up on them recently, but "Memory Webs" were a thing that our AP Psychology teacher in highschool made us do because the AP Psych test was term / jargon heavy. Memory in the human brain has been shown to be HEAVILY associative and the ability to remember and connect things tends to rely on following a "web" of connected topics, ideas, concepts etc from one idea to the next.

So in our AP Psych class, she gave us these GIANT books for Vocabulary Webs that we had to slowly work on, each of which required 6 other vocab words / related concepts, a summarized definition, and an image to represent it. By doing this, you added 6 cues to recall the word (increasing the chance you'd remember it), a visual cue, an episodic memory of working on it, and a definition - all in all improving how connected the word is to other concepts in your brain and making it easier to recall it.

I personally like to look at DID and our parts in a similar manner sometimes where the large issue is that a lot of the nodes in the web of associations are either disconnected or connected through a hard-to-find and/or small chain. In that sense, parts struggle to be held together because they are not associated concepts. It's hard to reach other parts because the dissociative walls (which in our unsubstantiated opinion is less a 'wall' and more so a lack of reinforced neural connections, so I would call them dissociative caverns) keep associations from forming

As a result, alternative to more traditional ways of mapping your system and parts, a method I've liked to internally visualize systems and navigating system dynamics is through a memory web manner. (I actually have never done it physically cause the Ray part of my brain - also the most prominent part writing this rn - rarely liked to front if he didn't have to and did a lot of stuff internally)

Here's a bit of a breakdown using six of our parts if any of you want to try it out.

We personally like it because it strips a lot of trauma and stress off of it and makes it a lot more of a positive and present engaging activity. For the purposes of this, I'll be using the free online app of Milanote cause we've used it before for OC associative webs and I think it'll do fine enough. (Honestly it actually might just be a good way to log alter information now that I'm looking at it if you are at a place in recovery where keeping track of that physically helpful)

So we can start by dropping down the parts we want to include in the form of boards

So from here, we have a bunch of disconnected parts. However, we find that a lot of these parts have things that mean a lot to them, that illicit a strong emotion or reaction from them.

Some parts may lack it more than others (often in our case trauma holders and/or trauma locked parts) and that's okay and to be expected. This is a visualization method and if there isn't much connecting a part that is 100% okay.

For demonstration sake, I will now add bubbles around each part of things that were pretty early apparent that each individual liked.

Also for the purposes of how I know our system works and how I plan to do this, I am actually moving Riku to the center and you will all see why Riku is such an S tier center point with this model

So you can see some connections forming.

Some key things you can take from this visual that also applied to earlier stags of how we connected

Lucille and Riku are and have always been pretty darn connected, they go back as one of the longest duos and were split almost as a pair to deal with academics

Chunn and Ray have a very shared interest of "I don't want to do anything leave me alone"

XIV literally was just a piece of shit early on and didn't have any immediate HARD connections with anyone largely because he never was interested in actually engaging in things he liked in a positive way as his "favorite emotion" at the time was "being pissed off"

Lin - an originally trauma stuck / loop - is very very poorly associated with anything that isn't overtly trauma related (and that is saying something cause Vocaloid is trauma related) and thus has very few connections to other parts

So looking at this though, there are a few things that have some similarities between parts. What you can do is make plans to try to foster the interests that you do have and try to generalize it a bit more to also encompass what interests other parts have. So lets engage in hobbies a little more - explore a few concepts that mean a lot to parts independently - and find some more generalized version of those hobbies

(forgot to add easy listening to Ray's and "only wearing monochrome*" to XIV's earlier) (*there are a lot of nuances and caveats)

Damn, look at that. It's messy and ugly to have in a 2D form. I absolutely hate it, this would be so impossible with our whole system. But HEY, it's very connected - and that's the goal.

Compared to the previous one, you can see how easily it can be for one part's interests to start to drift into another. Because they are largely and strongly associated features to each part, they are a lot more accessible when engaging in their shared / associated connections and interests which makes it easier for the them to stay together near the front, stay associated with one another, and work with and communicate with one another.

Of course anyone following this blog goes "Where tf is Birds" and that I left out because it would ruin the point of the web as it actually is one of our traditional "you are around the system a lot? okay pick a bird" which serves to 1) be a fun system culture thing 2) be a means of welcoming a part in and 3) helps establish a foundational connection; we do the same with music but with music its a lot more elaborate and I probably wont explain it for other reasons.

But overtime, by fostering interests that were already present and encouraging parts to broaden and generalize their specific interest a bit, you end up with a lot of overlapping associations that can greatly improve internal communication, co-fronting ability, and just general fluidity and easy of moving around the brain web.

It becomes a good way of trying to figure out what you can do to encourage and help build connections and associations between parts by seeing where things are similar / could have more overlap (combat and martial arts, different types of fashion, different types of music, different appreciation for arts, taking over the world, yada yada yada)

And you wanna know the coolest thing? When you step back from the whole web you can see certain things appear that stand out the most and have some of the most connections.

If you ever intend to go to Final Fusion, those are the things that will likely be the most prominent traits of your whole self

For us? [REDACTED BIRDS for the point of the demonstration], Music, Fashion, Taking over the World, Recovery and Healing, Buddhism, Martial Arts, Arts in general - they're all some of our largest traits that persist in almost all forms as individual parts, partially fused parts, and fully fused parts.

And the BEST part? Doing this didn't require us to touch trauma at all.

Of course in recovery that will come up cause PTSD doesn't ask permission, but its a very low stress way to help improve internal communication and engagement with one another.

[srisrisriddd]

True Life Integral

Life = ∫ [(conscious x bliss) ÷ time] Δtime

- Dr Devang H Dattani / Infinite SriSriSri DDD

Good Morning

Equation / Quote / Poem / Poetry / Quotes Of 

Bhagwan Sri Sri Sri

Doctor Devang H Dattani

Infinite SriSriSri DDD

Mathematical equation of True Life

Posted By TheBlissCity DDD Team

See The Media Photo Video For

Quoteoftheday

God Morning

#Integral , #life , #bliss , #conscious , #time  , #birth , #death , #TheBlissCity , #philosophy , #mindfulness , #DrDevangHDattani , #nature , #awareness , #InfiniteSriSriSriDDD , #quotes , #life , #art , #zen , #awakening , #quote , #spiritual , #photography , #Video , #meditation , #psychology , #poem , #poetry , #motivation , #inspiration , #quoteoftheday , #love , #words , #thoughts , #joy , #pun , #enlightenment , #health , #mental health , #consciousness , #good , #god , #landscape , #life , #nirvana , #tantra , #yoga , #experience , #photooftheday , #panorama , #lake , #underwater , #fishes , #mathematics , #equation 

[reimeichan]

So like, breaking down dissociative barriers. Increasing communication. All good things, right? But how do you even do that?

Turns our "breaking down barriers" is completely the wrong way to go about that. I've been trying to take a metaphorical hammer to these fucking walls and instead of them coming down they just keep reinforcing themselves.

But, surprise! It's not a fucking wall and that's why hammering away has done jack fucking shit all. No, it's an ocean wave, and I'm supposed to just sit still and let the tide wash over me and engulf me from head to toe.

God, we really need to rethink how we talk about our experiences and stuff with each other. No wonder some people struggle so hard with understanding how to actually work together with the other alters in their system, or integrating aspects of themselves with each other. Most people tend to use the same few phrases that get passed around the community, which helps ease communication when we all know the basics of what we're talking about, but god does it really stifle the discussions we can have sharing what those experiences are actually like on an individual level.

Anyways I'm gonna stop thinking of working on internal communication and integration as "breaking down dissociative barriers" and instead think of it more as "letting a wave of internal experiences engulf me".

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The NYC Housing Authority's Alfred E. Smith Houses, in the Two Bridges neighborhood of the Lower East Side, opened in 1953. It was an early proponent of racial integration. Here, Black and White kids in one of the playgrounds, May 3, 1956.

Photo: Associated Press

[blqckooze]

Nova had a small vision while hanging out with Nebula, and this is what he saw(my version on the left) and @dragonfire1000 did the outline and small coloring on the left in their style! :D

[worldwidewet]

Can I have advice on how to advocate for myself?

I am one of the alters in a system, I think I front the most often after the host, and I have met a mental health professional I feel very unsure of.

I have developed some skills to stop and analyze situations before I act thanks to a DBT skill course, but I have currently only come to the "stop" and "notice I feel bad" stage in this analysis. Anything else feels fuzzy and difficult.

On one hand, he seems like he is genuinely interested in our general wellbeing.

On the other hand, in my opinion, he seems to be pushing towards integration without having us on board with that. I understand this is not necessarily bad, and that I am in a strong emotion right now, but it is setting off all of my alarm bells. I feel like he isn't listening. I feel like he doesn't understand. I feel like he is pushing us to talk about ourselves in a very specific way as to go towards integration. Some things that I can't put into words makes me feel like we are like a project to him, a problem to be solved, and that disagreeing would make him personally upset. I recognize logically that I could be wrong, and that my impulse to change care provider is just that, an impulse guided by a strong emotion.

Okay, therapy speak nuance over. Cancelling therapy forever. In self defence...

Basically, how do I figure out if this is a real threat or a perceived threat and how I should act in order to get to a place that is actually safe?

(I'm tagging this with different related tags in order to find help, I'm not claiming all these tags apply to me)

[flock-talk]

Toto learning how the snuffle mat works and being a very good boy giving newt space when newt comes closer to his forager to reduce conflict around the resources

[subconsciousmysteries]

"Integration is healthy and disintegration is unhealthy" is an overly simplistic, spiritual bypassing view to throw in the bin. I'm going to invite you to view it in a different way.

Integration is your heaven. Your light. It represents what you aspire to embody, but feel scared to embody, or cannot seem to embody no matter how hard you try. You do not have enough personal development, insight or healing to embody your integration type properly. False security is when you embody your integration type in a shallow way. You indulge in your integration type without having done enough healing to make the transformation secure, deep-rooted and long-term. You're reaching up to heaven but your roots don't reach down to hell, and so your extension is very short-lived. The excess branches you have grown to reach up to your integration type quickly die or worse, get infected, as your root system down in hell is not strong enough to sustain the tree. After periods of false security you are left with a lot of trauma, a big mess in your life, and you get pulled right back into your disintegration type's grip. You indeed can integrate in an unhealthy way... and you can also disintegrate in a healthy way. Keep reading.

Disintegration is your hell. It represents your natural stress response, your toxic coping mechanism, the thing you just really hate in yourself and in other people, your default way of overcompensating for your core type's missing pieces, your darkness. Inside your disintegration type is a wealth of secrets and wisdom that you need to uncover, including your wounded inner child. When we analyze our disintegration type and our own personal disintegration experiences, we learn a lot about ourselves. We can only learn what we are missing and what we need to work on from our disintegration type, not from our integration type. Healthy disintegration provides us the necessary foundation that we need in order to reach up towards our integration type. Disintegration is not something to be resisted the same way that cleaning your room and doing exercise is not something to be resisted just because it doesn't feel good. Conscious Disintegration is an essential part of shadow work. It is what Carl Jung would call "making the unconscious conscious".

-----

Integration and disintegration are definitely not the same. But they are also not black and white, "one is good and the other is bad". If you view it this way you are bound to bypass your necessary shadow work and end up in a cycle of false security and extreme disintegration.