To have an integrated self is to find balance within all aspects of your life by integrating the parts of you that you once abandoned. Self-integration is the core objective of shadow work. In a nutshell, we can’t live life to its fullest if we only half show up.
Self-integration is the process of harmonizing different aspects of yourself such as thoughts, emotions, values, and behaviors into a cohesive whole. This means to thrive in all aspects of 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. You may be aware of what’s lacking, and you may not be.
For example, if your emotional health is great but your social life sucks, this leads to an unbalanced life. In some areas you’re doing well, in others you’re not showing up fully. The result? A lopsided life experience.
Think about it this way… if the rest of your body is fine but your arm is broken, you can’t just brush it off and get on with your day while focusing on what’s going well. I mean, you can try, but it probably won’t translate the way you think it will. Your arm is an integrated part of your body, so the whole body suffers.
Wellbeing is an ecosystem, so when one component is dysfunctional, it brings down the collective.
Therefore, it’s important to find a balance amongst all dimensions of your life experience, external and internal, to discover inner stability and equinimity. It is only from here that you can feel the way you deserve – whole.
What does it mean to be an integrated person?
Humans are naturally divided creatures. We have different parts of ourselves that conflict with one another. Instead of working synergistically, a lot of energy is spent battling with oneself. The energy spent on internal warfare, instead of directing it forward to a common goal, is a waste and doesn’t serve anyone.
Separation comes from denial, resistance, and suppression. Sometimes we do this consciously. At other times, it’s an unconscious process. Separation of the self often happens during childhood through 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.
Being integrated means being unified in all aspects of your life, internal and external.
This means your mind isn’t 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 one another, rather than competes.
Being disintegrated causes problems because each aspect of yourself competes rather than work 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 among your values, beliefs, thoughts, and emotions, you end up being fragmented. Self-disintegration can lead to all sorts of issues in your life including:
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Mental health issues: Self-disintegration often leads to mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, instability, and inner turmoil.
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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.
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Relationship problems: Self-disintegration can cause you to project your inner conflicts onto others which leads to conflicts. This instability can also make it difficult to form and maintain healthy relationships.
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Lack of direction: When you are not in touch with your core values, you may struggle to find purpose, or have clarity on where you’re going in life. This can lead to feelings of aimlessness and a lack of motivation.
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Low self-esteem: A fragmented sense of self often results in low self-esteem. You may feel inadequate or unworthy, and constantly compare yourself to others rather than focusing on yourself.
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Inconsistent behavior: Self-disintegration can cause inconsistent behavior and an incongruency in your behaviors and attitudes. You might have mood swings or act differently depending on the context, which isn’t in alignment with your true feelings.
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Increased vulnerability to external influences: Without a strong, integrated sense of self, 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.
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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 overwhelm.
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Impaired productivity: A stable and integrated sense of self is essential for being productive. Self-disintegration can make it difficult to innovate, perform effectively, or pursue passions.
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Spiritual disconnect: If you’re on a spiritual path, self-disintegration can result in a feeling of disconnect from your beliefs and practices. This can lead to a lack of fulfillment in their spiritual journey.
Finding peace in your imperfections
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 – not knowing the slightest thing about talking with others or dating. It wasn’t 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 weren’t 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 – that was to act in a way that aligned with who I wanted to be, but it wasn’t who I wanted to be…
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 – 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 being myself.
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 a 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 an integrated self is – to feel balanced amongst all dimensions of your life experience. No neglecting, no overcompensating. You’re a functional person who isn’t 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 equilibrium in your identity, 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 have a more integrated sense of self, you need to first recognize what you are good at, and what you aren’t.
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 or 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 a 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 don’t 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 you’re supposed to be.
On that note, self-acceptance also plays a critical role in developing an integrated self. By being fully present with your experience of consciousness by allowing everything to organically surface (including the thoughts and feelings you don’t 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 self, 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. It’s not always easy to show your true colors, especially if you never had.
Healing trauma for an integrated self
Self-disintegration can be a mechanism to avoid pain.
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.
We’ve 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 won’t develop DID, however, it illuminates what can happen when we become so disintegrated that we don’t recognize the other facets of self at play.
You may not have had to spit off, but you may have some unaccounted trauma that is impacting a part of your psyche, without realizing it’s 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 a trigger – a mechanism that shows you someone is touching a sore spot.
In this sense, when someone triggers you, they’re doing you a service. They’re bringing up something that was otherwise hidden from awareness. When you get triggered, you can either 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, it’s completely normal to feel these emotions. This is where you want to recognize if it’s 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.