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Humans are inherently divided creatures, often caught in a perpetual inner conflict โ Not always with the world around us, but within ourselves. The biggest wars rage on within us, battling with our minds, our demons, our traumas, our emotions, and our thoughts.
Imagine if the energy spent on internal warfare was directed to a common goal. How much easier would life be?
As long as weโre in a constant state of conflict, weโre not efficient. Not only are we inefficient, but we also stir up a lot of negativity and reduce our quality of life. Imagine stepping on the gas while bogged in the mud. All youโre going to do is burn out because thereโs an underlying issue that needs to be resolved before you can hit the gas with your spiritual evolution.
Well-being is an ecosystem, therefore, when one component is dysfunctional, it brings down the entire collective. Disintegration is caused by denial, resistance, and suppression. Sometimes, we disintegrate consciously, and at other times, itโs an unconscious process.
This is why self-integration is a crucial stepping stone for anyone on a personal growth journey. Without it, youโre going to spin your wheels and exhaust yourself doing so. You will spend your energy on internal conflict rather than working together to progress in your life.
Therefore, itโs important to find a balance amongst all dimensions of your life experience, external and internal, to discover inner stability and equanimity. It is only from here that you can feel the way you deserve โ whole.
What Does It Mean to Be Self-Integrated
Self-integration means finding balance within all aspects of your life by integrating the neglected parts of you and perceiving every aspect of yourself as an integral facet of the collective. Self-integration is the core objective ofย shadow work, and we canโt live life to its fullest if we only half show up.
Think of self-integration as the process of harmonizing different aspects of yourself, including your thoughts, emotions, values, and behaviors, into a cohesive whole. Harmonizing yourself allows you to thrive in all dimensions of your life without ignoring, suppressing, or denying who you are.
Unless all parts of you are oiled up and the gears are spinning smoothly, your life experience will fundamentally lack in some way. If one gear is jammed, it will disrupt the entire system.
For example, if your emotional health is fine but your social life sucks, this leads to an unbalanced life. While a lopsided life experience may not be your primary concern, a poor social life will adversely affect your emotional health, even though seemingly unrelated on the surface level.
Think about it this way: If your arm is broken but the rest of your body is fine, you canโt get on with your day and focus on whatโs going well. I mean, you can try, but it probably wonโt translate the way you think it will. Your arm is a part of your body, so the whole body suffers if one part of your body is dysfunctional.
Often, we live our lives broken, neglected, traumatized, and unbalanced. We donโt like particular parts of ourselves, and we suck at other things, so instead of fixing whatโs broken we focus on whatโs not.
This is not a good idea because you need to view yourself as a collective.
Being self-integrated means being unified in all aspects of your life, internal and external. This means your mind isnโt scattered, nor have you abandoned any part of yourself as a result of conditioning or influence. You love all areas of your life experience and thrive within them because each area compliments the others rather than competes.
Being disintegrated causes problems because each aspect of yourself competes rather than works in synergy. Each part of you functions as an individual rather than a team, which leads to imbalance, conflict, and turmoil.
Imagine a project team where each team member pursues their own goals without considering the overall objectives of the project. Instead of collaborating synergistically, they end up working against each other. Tasks are duplicated, deadlines are missed, and overall productivity suffers because each individual is focused solely on their interests rather than the collective success of the team.
Your mind and emotions work the same way. When there is no cohesion, you end up being fragmented. Self-disintegration can lead to all sorts of issues in your life, including:
- Mental health issues: Self-disintegration often leads to mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, instability, and inner turmoil.
- Poor decision-making: A disintegrated sense of self can impair your decision-making abilities. You may struggle to make choices that align with your true values and desires or feel conflicted when making decisions.
- Relationship problems: Self-disintegration can cause you toย project your inner conflictsย onto others which leads to conflicts. This instability can also make it difficult to form and maintain healthy relationships.
- Lack of direction: When you are not in touch with your core values, you may struggle to find purpose or clarity on where youโre going in life. This can lead to feelings of aimlessness and a lack of motivation.
- Low self-esteem: A fragmented sense of self often results in low self-esteem.ย You may feel inadequateย or unworthy and constantly compare yourself to others rather than focusing on yourself.
- Inconsistent behavior: Self-disintegration can cause inconsistent behavior and incongruency in your behaviors and attitudes. You might have mood swings or act differently depending on the context, which isnโt in alignment with your true feelings.
- Increased vulnerability to external influences: Without self-integration, you are more susceptible to external influences. This can lead to adopting beliefs, behaviors, and lifestyles that are not truly aligned with your authentic self.
- Chronic stress and burnout: The inner conflict and instability caused by self-disintegration can lead to chronic stress. Constantly grappling with a fragmented self can be exhausting, leading to burnout and feeling overwhelmed.
- Impaired productivity: Self-integration is essential for productivity. Self-disintegration can make it difficult to innovate, perform effectively, or pursue passions.
- Spiritual disconnect: If youโre on a spiritual path, self-disintegration can result in a feeling of disconnect from your beliefs and practices. This can lead to aย lack of fulfillmentย in their spiritual journey.
How Do People Become Disintegrated?
Disintegration often happens during childhood with conditioning as you adopt certain beliefs, behaviors, and norms and chop off all the bits sticking out to fit into this ideal. Without awareness of these adopted or reinforced beliefs, they root deeper into your subconscious and manifest into more severe problems.
For many years, I hated who I was. I hated my skinny figure and buck teeth that were ridiculed in school. I hated my social skills โ not knowing the slightest thing about talking with others or dating. It wasnโt until the end of high school that I hit a tipping point. Something must change because I was getting sucked into this pit of despair, and things werenโt looking up either.
So, I learned to develop a persona. Over the next few years, I gobbled down every personal development book I could find and started acting the part. I learned to play the game โ that was to act in a way that aligned with who I wanted to be, but it wasnโt who I wanted to beโฆ
Over the years, I became pretty good at it too. I became so good at wearing a mask of confidence and positivity that I forgot how out of alignment it was with my true self. A deeper, wiser part of me was telling me to chill out and be congruent, but another part of me โ driven by my desperation to be normal – wanted nothing to do with the person I once was.
So there was inner conflict.
I found myself living a better life, at least a life I thought I desired, but at the same time, I wasnโt feeling any happier. I still felt desperate. I still felt like I was lacking and that something was fundamentally wrong with me.
The truth is that I abandoned a part of myself to fit into this box of who I should be. I discarded the traits and characteristics that were authentically me, in an attempt to crawl out of this hole.
It wasnโt until later on that I began reintegrating the abandoned aspects of myself to find a happier balance. One where I developed the skills I needed to thrive, but I was also comfortable in my own skin.
Self-integration is to find a happy balance within your identity and to act in alignment with your true identity, not a mask. If you wear a mask, you form aย shadow self, which is the neglected side of you that longs for recognition, but never sees the light of day.
Someone might be strong and assertive but rude and lack compassion. Another person might be kind and loving but timid and insecure. Some people will be highly logical but not even remotely intuitive, and vice versa. Likewise, others might be overserious or overplayful without finding the right balance between them.
Even though some positive qualities are prevalent, they either overshadow or oppress others. This makes you a lopsided person who fares well in some things but lacks in others.
This is what self-integration is โ to feel balanced amongst all dimensions of your life experience. No neglecting, no overcompensating. Youโre a functional person who isnโt missing any core ingredients to create a wholesome human experience.
You want the full package.
You want wholeness, and to get it you need to find equanimity with your mind, thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. This is a process and not a single act. Everyone can become more integrated.
Why You Need to Be Aware of Self-Disintegration
Disintegration can occur from being pressured to ignore or suppress aspects of yourself. To self-integrate, you need to first recognize what you are good at, and what you arenโt.
By identifying your strengths and weaknesses, you will know what to integrate. Identifying traumas, painful memories, and characteristics that have been repressed is the first step toward self-integration.
Perhaps you were told to be tough as a child, so you repressed feelings of anger and sadness. Children are often shunned for expressing themselves, and this results in them suppressing aspects of their identities.
Children are especially vulnerable to disintegration because they have a lot of pressure to fit in. Until conscious efforts are made to heal, the individual will not have an integrated sense of self until they start working on themselves.
Sometimes, boys are told that they must be tough orย grown up. Due to this, they block out their feminine nature and become disintegrated. They become unevenly balanced with masculine characteristics, which can evolve into toxic masculinity, a lack of empathy and understanding, and an aversion to anything deemed feminine, even though a healthy individual must have aย balance of both masculine and feminine characteristics.
Likewise, a girl who is told to be more ladylike might comply, but this is at the sacrifice of other natural characteristics that they have, which causes her to disintegrate.
Someone might feel pressured to fit in with peers and disregard their gifts and natural abilities. Instead of finding equilibrium, they suppress elements of themselves that donโt immediately serve their social relationships. Of course, disintegrating aspects of yourself might have helped you in the immediate future, but in the long run, this causes problems.
Becoming aware of your suppressed characteristics and what you lack is the first step towards integration. Once you recognize the characteristics that are out of balance, you can begin integrating the authentic characteristics that were once cut out of the picture.
How to Become More Self-Integrated
First off, you need to stop judging the traits, characteristics, and beliefs you deem to be inferior. As long as you judge aspects of yourself, these characteristics are going to remain hidden, otherwise, you will abandon them to fit into the box of who youโre supposed to be.
On that note, self-acceptance also plays a critical role in self-integration. By being fully present with your experience of consciousness by allowing everything to organically surface (including the thoughts and feelings you donโt want to experience), you will begin a process of integrating your shadows and naturally healing them.
Accepting your weaknesses might make you feel vulnerable, but have you ever considered that this vulnerability is a good thing? Instead of shoving these aspects under the surface to never be seen by the light of day, perhaps you should self-enquire.
Why do you feel vulnerable? How do these aspects of self cause you to feel vulnerable? How can you accept them as a part of yourself without perceiving them as a weakness?
Learn to express yourself fully, in alignment with your authentic self, without holding back. This can require some courage, especially if you have been deeply conditioned to be a certain way. Itโs not always easy to show your true colors, especially if you never have.
Healing Trauma for Self-Integration
Self-disintegration can be a mechanism to avoid pain or a form of escapism. Simply, to integrate yourself, you need to heal yourself. Disintegration often occurs from traumas. When people experience trauma, they split off from aspects of their identity as a protective mechanism.
Weโve all heard of the cases of individuals developing disassociative identity disorder, where they sacrifice a part of themselves to protect their innocence. One side takes the bullet for the other, leading to an extreme case of disintegration.
Again, this is an extreme case. Most people wonโt develop DID, however, it illuminates what can happen when we become so disintegrated that we donโt recognize the other facets of self at play.
You may not have had to split off, but you may have some unaccounted trauma that is impacting a part of your psyche without realizing itโs there.
By recognizing the events that caused you to repress aspects of yourself, you can gently encourage them to resurface. By recognizing these wounds, you can understand what sort of effect they have had on you and in what areas they have caused you to disconnect.
Self-Integration and Victimhood
Pay attention to your emotional reactions and how you feel in different situations. Irrational responses may indicate disintegration. This is the role of aย triggerย โ a mechanism that shows you someone is touching a sore spot.
In this sense, when someone triggers you, theyโre doing you a service. Theyโre bringing up something that was otherwise hidden from awareness. When you get triggered, you can eitherย project, which is what most people do, or you can reflect by looking into this emotional reaction and trying to identify why you feel so agitated by something so little.
Over-emotional reactions to things can also indicate that something in you needs to be addressed. This can come in the form of anger, frustration, hatred, resentment, jealousy, sadness, bitterness, and any negative state of mind. Of course, in some situations, itโs completely normal to feel these emotions. This is where you want to recognize if itโs just you, or if everyone else experiences the same thing.
When you have a strong emotional response to something, explore the pain rather than avoid it. There is no easy way to do this. I suggest meditating and exploring these feelings of pain when they surface, and this may help you flush out unresolved traumas in your life.
Think back to your childhood and uncover any blockages that you may have had by examining their cause and effect. Remember that the keys to self-integration lie in recognition, acceptance, support, and encouragement.
The more you practice bringing out your submersed qualities and characteristics, the more well-rounded you will become as a person.