Not integration but blending

Gosh, Shaeff, I'd like to hear more from you, if you're willing. We love your analogies and how your mind works.

The analogies actually make very useful and subtle distinctions for my/our own experience. I'm getting ready for work and will just add a quick comment but I have a feeling there will be others before I return.

Where I start to fall down in my understanding is in the difference between co-presence and co-hosting. Are these not the one and same thing?

There is a difference in general parlance. We in my system are now looking at co-hosting as applying to a broader period of time, but that's not the only definition. If there are two alters who are effectively out most of the time and running the show, calling most of the shots, directing the life, that's what we're looking at for co-hosting. They wouldn't necessarily, and in our system wouldn't be out at the same time, though they would be entirely co-conscious.

Co-presence in the both-there-but-unaware-of-each-other would explain how sometimes a little will come into the body at the same time as someone else and there is a minor skirmish, for example, over what the hand is doing. So the hand reaches out for something, as if one alter is saying "I want to grab that" and the other is saying "wait, what's my hand doing, come back," and the hand-arm gets stuck sort of in mid-air in a mild tug of war.

Now John and Jonathan both feel they wrote much of the above. So we're not sure what the heck that is? Co-operative co-presence? No, we don't want to go adding a new bogus definition to the pack. Okay, John, that was you, I rarely use the word bogus. The distinctions are quite useful in pinning down what's happening. We have a subjective experience but aren't entirely clear why it's happening that way. Terminology leads to normalizing this confusing "disorder."

To return to the original topic, perhaps the distinction between integrating and blending is this: in blending one alter imposes thoughts, feelings, behaviors on another alter (usually the host) but holds back their self. In integration there is complete sharing, nothing is held back.

Shaeff's post made me think. In my opinion there cannot be any watertight classifications for describing how alters influence you and how they surface. It's impossible to say when something stops being something and becomes something else. In the end, how things really take place in your mind evades words, descriptions and labels.

When I first joined this forum, I did it because I finally found a possible explanation to something that had happened to me, and it was a big relief for me to join other people who have experienced similar things. After a while, I caught myself trying to reconstruct and explain my own experiences according to various classifications and roles I had read about here. I don't know about you guys, but the theoretical approach doesn't always help me to understand, sometimes it confuses. Therefore I believe that at certain point defining and classifying becomes redundant.

Yeah, when I notice that I've experienced something according to an article or theory, it's relieving to know that it has been recognized an documented before. But then I start thinking about what the purpose of all theory is. Is it to diagnose people reliable so that they can get help in therapy? Is it to help therapists to work to help their patients? I hope it is.

-- Thu Oct 27, 2011 4:54 pm --

Una+ wrote:To return to the original topic, perhaps the distinction between integrating and blending is this: in blending one alter imposes thoughts, feelings, behaviors on another alter (usually the host) but holds back their self. In integration there is complete sharing, nothing is held back.

I didn't see your post before my last post Una, it took me so long to type it.

This makes me wonder, can integration mean that instead of taking turns in executive control, instead of passive influence and everything in between those two, all the insiders can be together and aware of each other without becoming just one identity? I've seen posts where people say they are afraid that their others will disappear in integration, but that sounds like losing a part, while I understand integration as regaining a lost part.