How to Integrate Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) Host Personality

People with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) typically have an "innocent" host personality who was spared from the abuse. The host personality is the part that most people with DID identify as "me" when they enter into therapy and begin to heal from their traumatic past. The host personality interacts with the world most of the time, with other alter parts taking over when triggered by a perceived threat of more abuse. This is why people with DID report that they "lose time." After the host personality integrates into the core of the person's spirit, he ceases to lose time and stays co-present whenever another alter part emerges. Here is how to integrate a Dissociative Identity Disorder host personality.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Accept that the part of yourself that you have always viewed as "me" is an alter part. Your host personality is an alter part that split off from the core of your spirit, just like your other alter parts. This is a very difficult step to work through, but accepting this truth is a huge leap forward toward healing from DID.

2. Comfort your fears. After you accept that your perception of "me" is really a host personality, you will likely fear what integration will mean to you. You might question whether you will cease to exist after you integrate. Tell yourself repeatedly that you are part of the core and that integration means that you will stop losing time. Also, you will have access to all parts of yourself for the first time in your life. Instead of "dying," you will learn what it truly means to live.

3. Engage in yoga and meditation. Yoga and meditation provide you with tools to help encourage your spirit to integrate. Yoga helps bring your focus into the present moment and helps you feel more whole. The deep breathing involved in yoga will help you to stay calm as you move toward integration.

4. Accept painful truths as they emerge. You cannot integrate into the core until you accept painful truths about your history. The reason your host personality was separated from the core was to stay "innocent." You must lose that illusion of innocence in order to heal and integrate. After you have accepted all of the "big picture" painful truths that have kept you separate, there will no longer be a need for you to remain a separate alter part from the rest of your spirit.

5. Choose to integrate into the core. This will require a leap of faith that you are going to be OK. Consciously tell yourself that you are ready to integrate. If you have already faced at least a general awareness of all of your painful childhood truths and truly want to integrate, you will experience an amazing shift of self-perception. You will feel more "full" than you ever have inside of your body. You will also feel a deep sense of peace that you have never experienced. After this shift, you will stop losing time because your self-perception will take place from the core rather than from the limited perception of an alter part. Even though you might still have other alter parts who have not yet integrated, you will stay co-present whenever those alter parts emerge.

6. Grieve the loss of innocence. By choosing to integrate your host personality, you are choosing to give up the illusion that any part of yourself was spared from the abuse. You will lose the ability to pretend that someone else experienced the abuse and will face that you, as a lone child, suffered all of it with no help from anyone else. However, you will face these truths against the backdrop of all of your life experiences, which makes this much easier to face. Allow yourself to cry and grieve these losses.

Tips & Warnings

• Finding a qualified therapist with experience in counseling people who have suffered from similar abuses is an important part of healing from child abuse. Your therapist can provide you with additional tools to help you integrate your Dissociative Identity Disorder host personality.
• The reason you fragmented your spirit is because you suffered nearly unbearable abuse. Healing from the abuse is extremely painful. Do not attempt to integrate your Dissociative Identity Disorder parts until you find a qualified therapist with experience in counseling people who have been severely abused.

Resources

• Understanding Integration

[grace2244]

on 11/22/2008 This article is well done. The terms of the psychological profession include fusions and blendings and mergers which make it confusing. As survivors, we don't use these terms. Having the different terms though allows to differentiate when two or several parts merge/blend together versus many alters which would be viewed as an integration. It's been my experience that an integration is a kind of beginning for new healing. So I have had more than one. Each has brought me to a different place of clarity and ability to embrace more of life. Integration is a good thing and, admittedly, a scary thing. Only because it is an unknown. But it's healing. Healing is good. Some therapists view fusion as the final integration. I don't think I've gotten there yet and don't know what it means...