Our integration process

TheTriForce wrote:How do you get from 15 to 3? Did a selection of alters themselves decide to permanently blend with each other to become one? I'm trying to understand why this happens? Are the one's that blended all 'from the past' to make up one that represents a specific era of a person's life?

Oh wow, talking about that in English is going to be an experience Don't hesitate to tell me if I don't make sense.

In those past two years, we've been working hard to integrate our traumas, build a sense of inner safety and learn how to deal with stressful situations in a way that prevent forming new traumas (like, knowing whom to ask (internally and in the outside world) for help and support, taking action, not freezing or isolating ourselves, making sure our close friendships are 100% safe, thinking about our boundaries and enforcing them, making sure everyone in the system knows what is going on while it's happening, knows we're taking care of the situation and knows when it's over, etc.)

Last year, we encountered a few situations that were hard enough to create new traumas, but our adults parts put the vulnerable ones in their safe place and handled those situations with our new skills. This allowed us to have adapted behaviors, instead of having trauma responses all over the place. At the second those events were dealt with, we immediately shared the memories with all the system, so everyone could integrate them.

We also had one event that we handled so well, the vulnerable ones didn't feel the need to stay into their safe place, and were able to come back and witness the adult parts dealing with the situation while it was going on.

In the end, those events didn't become new traumas, and allowed our whole system to realize the past is really over, we can protect ourselves now, and we have the skills and knowledge to avoid forming new traumas. Our adults parts/inner parental figures are strong, in control of our life, they can, and will, take care of us and protect us.

This started a huge wave of integration. We didn't choose anything. It was just the consequences of feeling really, truly safe, and being able to consciously promote integration of traumatic materials from the past, and from the present.

A lot of our parts suddenly didn't feel the need to be hypervigilant all the time, to react immediately to new potential threats, etc. When starting to be scared, they just trust the adult parts to handle it - and now, most of them don't even really get scared anymore. Like, we can be stressed or a bit anxious, but with normal levels of stress or anxiety (for someone with ADHD) (unless we're tired, then the anxiety tends to rise up).

Feeling really safe, having their trauma resolved, their need met and just being okay with letting the adult parts handling our life mean the dissociative barriers just... faded away? Over the course of the last year, we went from 15 to 6, and over the course of the last month, from 6 to 3.

Half of the parts have integrated (or are currently integrating) with Daem, the other half with me. It's not really like a fusion. It's more like... having the dissociative barriers slowly fading away, our senses of self slowly blending together. It's so slow, we notice it only when it's half-done, because the behaviors/thoughts/feelings/etc of each parts involved stop feeling like "not me" for each other. It becomes "almost me", then "a side of me", then once the integration is done, it's just "me".

Daem and I are perfectly aware and grounded in the present, while still being able to access memories, feelings, etc. of the past. As not all of our parts are 100% integrated, we still can have shifts in our sense of self, but it's usually not strong and would be left unnoticed if we weren't used to pay attention to that sort of thing. This said, it can become stronger when tired and/or stressed.

Between Daem and I, however, the shift from my sense of self to his is stronger, as we're made to deal with very different things, but as we share a lot of things, shifting from one to another is smooth, it doesn't really trigger much dissociation.

The third alter left is holding our earliest and most sensitive traumas, the dissociative barriers are thick, working with him is really difficult, and progress are very slow.

To close the update, for the people who want to know, right now, we don't dissociate enough on a daily basis to still qualify for a DID diagnosis. Already in March, after our psych finished her training to be able to diagnose dissociative disorders and evaluated us, she told us while we still qualify for a clinical diagnosis of high functioning partial DID (ICD-11), we made so much progress over the years that, if it was needed for research purpose, we would not even reach the "DP/DR" diagnosis.

Now most of our system is integrated, we can't self-trigger dissociation anymore + our brain doesn't even use it as its main coping mechanism. It's nice because it means it's easier to stay grounded, but we also discovered we were relying a lot on dissociation to handle our sensory and chronic pain issues. Now it's not triggered until we reach a very high level of pain, we have to learn other ways to deal with that.

Also, I'm not sure if we still have enough PTSD symptoms on a daily basis to qualify for a PTSD diagnosis. We have like... one disruptive symptom every two weeks? sometimes even less, and for some of them, I'm not sure to know if it's PTSD or ADHD related. I still have to sort that out.

So... I think we can say that, after six years of knowing we have DID, we're finally reaching functional multiplicity.

Your english is excellent! I had completely forgot it wasn't your first language! ..sorry..hope that wasn't too much hard work with translation!

We feel safe when there are no demands and we feel in control of life... The Tinnitus and chronic & fatigue levels have triggered the dissociation for us alot in later life. Though I think the onset of peri-menopause + death of much loved assistance dog who had been our life for 15 years triggered it initially, after having a stable host for years.

We're not going to be able to eliminate them all (the issues) this winter especially with not being able to keep the heating on to relieve the arthritis, there's no cure for that or the Tinnitus.

We are working much better together though and everyone is trying to find the area's they would be best able to help which is partly why Yuna went back inside as she finds the Tinnitus so difficult to ignore its triggering more dissociation and others having to take over fronting when she's only been out a short time. Stress can make Tinnitus worse too and having autism too means much of life seems stressful a lot of days! It's a vicious circle!