ANd – Relationships – why are they so freakin’ hard? I feel like I don’t understand them or how they work, or how they are “supposed” to work.

we are excited AND stressed about the holidays coming up. the excited part is from getting to make lots of things and make presents and do crafts and cooking. the stressed is from not having much money, and trying not to let that make us get triggered to when i was a kid and we were poor and i did not get very many presents cause i was the one who would not make a big fuss if i did not and everyone else in the family would throw a fit so they got lots of things and i did not. mostly i do not NEED presents but it is still nice to GET presents. i am trying to remember it is better to give then receive but i do still want to RECEIVE! but also, i am making a lot of cool things and that part is fun and happy.

Thinking about integration. Something that helped me a lot was changing my thinking about it from believing everyone needed to be blended together, or that one part could get to be in charge and everyone else had to do what they wanted. When I thought about integration in other contexts, like racial integration, for me i realized that it could be letting everyone have an equal role, and freedom to be themselves, but still be part of the whole. so that works for us. we’re all members of the same “group” or “person,” but we’re also individuals. i guess a big thing is that it meant that instead of trying to become blended, we worked on being okay with each part being different from the others.

one thing we learned when we were doing that is that the usual psychology definition of integration happened… to each individual part. like, some parts thought they were only about being angry, but then they discovered they were also about fixing things, and then the meaning of why they were angry a lot changed, because they were angry so that things could change. and then when they realized something like that, then they didn’t feel as angry, because it’s like the rest of us heard why they were mad, and they could just tell us something needed to be changed or fixed or something.

My goal in therapy, for years, was to work through the stuff that was having negative effects in my life–the responses to abuse and all of that. I feel pretty confident that we managed to do that, and while the abuse didn’t disappear, it’s not been a major feature of things for me for the past year or two. Now, my goal in therapy is mostly to maintain the relationship, and to make sure I’m processing through things before they get to a point where they’re a crisis.