Becoming Whole, Again.
I remember how I felt the first time I watched the 1976 film Sybil (played by Sally Field), about a woman who suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, previously Multiple Personality Disorder). It was my first encounter with the concept of DID and I was completely enthralled. It became part of my drive to study psychology. I couldn’t comprehend how a person could have 16 different personalities that were completely separate from each other, even to the point of not being aware of each other. This fracturing of the self as a concept was incredibly intriguing to me.
What fascinates us often tells us something about our own internal life.
I’ve been on a journey of healing over the last few years, and I’ve come to discover a critical aspect of that healing is learning to accept and reclaim parts of myself. While I do not have DID, I do believe there are parts of myself, my feelings, and thoughts, that I have pushed away or disconnected from at different times in my life. This is a kind of dissociation, and here is the thing; I think we all do it to a greater or lesser extent.
When we are young, we splinter off or push out of consciousness parts of ourselves the world tells us is unacceptable. By world, I mean parents or peers, or even more broadly, our culture. This submergence of parts of ourselves is a survival tactic; we conform because we need people to survive and if we do what is acceptable, we get to belong, we get care, love, and community. However, what may have been adaptive early on in our lives, can become the cause of suffering later in life when what we need to survive, or thrive, has changed. These early strategies become the bars of our own mental prisons.
For example, when I was young, I learned I would be more acceptable if I did not want. I learned this lesson in two ways: wanting or desiring things would often lead to painful experiences of loss or disappointment, but additionally, being without desire, being selfless, was something that would help me gain prestige and acceptance in my family. Over time, pushing away wants turned into not knowing what I wanted. Not being able to hear myself and my needs. Or even when I was able to know, I would still subvert what I wanted in order to be acceptable. I am no longer in a situation where being accepted requires my submission, quite the opposite, but old survival strategies are hard to part with. Overtime, this survival strategy cost me; instead of prestige and acceptance it led to resentment, disconnection, feeling invisible and purposeless.
We also splinter when we try to push away experiences that cause us to feel uncomfortable. It is human to not want to suffer. We organize our lives around trying to avoid discomfort, and that includes the discomfort of experiencing our own pain, sadness, grief, anger, guilt, shame, disappointment, or fear. Emotions, including negative ones are natural, adaptive, parts of us, yet many of us run from those parts. Running away has also become easier. I believe culturally we are becoming increasingly intolerant of difficult emotions and have designed many ways to numb or distract ourselves from them: social media, pills, alcohol, even the frenetic pace of life for example. Avoidance is a short-term strategy. Over the long-term it hurts us. As we’ve been running from ourselves and our difficult emotions, rates of anxiety, depression, and mental illness, have increased.
Over time, I have become increasingly convinced the journey to healing is one of reintegrating, becoming whole, again. We were born whole, our nature knows what it is and what it needs, but in our journey through life we splinter off parts of our nature to survive. If we truly want to LIVE, however, we need to bring our true parts back together.
Reintegration, or becoming whole, is not truly a new idea. Even way back when, Freud believed a lot of our struggles came from repressing, or pushing out of our mind, painful thoughts, desires, and emotions. Making the unconscious conscious is a goal of therapy. However, I don’t think it’s important just a way to heal; I think becoming whole is critical if we truly want to THRIVE.
In her book, The Way of Integrity, Martha Beck explains the Latin root of Integrity, intere, means “intact”. She says to live with integrity is to be one thing, whole, undivided. When all our parts are working harmoniously together as one thing, when we are not fighting ourselves at any level, we are in psychological, moral, physical, and spiritual integrity. And when we are in that place, miraculous things happen. She says:
“When you experience unity of intention, fascination, and purpose, you live like a bloodhound on a scent joyfully doing what feels truest in each moment.”
Well, I want to joyfully do what feels truest in each moment.
When our body, heart, mind, and soul are not aligned, when we don’t live in our truth, the opposite happens. I love how Beck put it: she said our “soul withers.” We lose our sense of purpose, we get sick, we suffer bad moods, turn to addictions, and our relationships and careers fall apart. In fact, Beck believes, when we suffer, it is a signal telling us we are not living in integrity. Suffering is trying to get us back to our truth. Interestingly, according to Beck, so is self-sabotage!
Becoming whole again, I believe, means facing all the things we pushed aside. It means tuning into ourselves and listening to what our bodies are telling us, what suffering is telling us. It can be hard, and it requires courage. We will have to face the emotional experiences we dread because they are our guide back to ourselves. Suffering will tell us something about what we need and where we want to be or not be. Sometimes we will have to make hard choices; choices that people around us, society, culture, even loved ones will push back against. We might lose them, or we might develop deeper truer connections. But, in the end, we will find ourselves whole again.
What does it feel like in our bodies when we are living in our truth? Beck says truth makes us relax our muscles, and every lie makes us tense our muscles. She says you know its truth when it makes you feel free. “It will taste of freedom.”
That to me is the most beautiful promise of becoming whole.