AI defines integration as the process of combining separate parts into a unified whole. The term is used by many authors in the sciences and humanities as a state of cooperative balance among diverse elements that produces health and wellbeing. It is also historically the wished-for state of “bliss” that has been longed for by marital partners throughout the ages.
But usually those partners have no awareness that this bliss requires allowing into consciousness realities, memories, feelings and experiences from their pasts that their brains have safely tucked away as unbearable. As I have written before, a significant piece of attraction between intimate partners is that the painful and trauma-laden memories, feelings and experiences that their brains have kept disconnected from conscious awareness are highly similar. Couples have a secret nonconscious “pact” with each other to maintain their disconnection from parts of their pasts, reinforcing that focusing all their painful feelings on their present relationship is more bearable. They gradually give up on the wished-for bliss, opting for a distant stalemate, instead of working toward the integration that their brains were offering up when they met.
The skilled neurodynamic couples therapist knows how integration changes relationships and is focused from the beginning of treatment on helping discouraged and hopeless partners experience the bliss of becoming whole together. Becoming whole means putting parts back together–parts that had been “forgotten,” banished from consciousness because of the fear and pain they inflicted on young and vulnerable minds. The therapist knows that helping a couple work on integration together creates ultimate intimacy–the kind of intimacy that grows out of experiencing in each other’s presence the deepest, darkest places within those vulnerable child minds and supporting each other during their painful and scary discoveries.
Because these are painful and scary discoveries, most couples come to treatment primarily asking for skills to stop their conflicts. They have no awareness of the promise of integration, because they have no awareness about the parts of themselves that are generating the conflict. We offer a safe space for them to reconnect with those parts and give them a voice. Once we help them experience the integration path to bliss, they are surprised to find that it is far better than simply being conflict-free. They learn how to recognize the difference between conflicts and disagreements–conflicts are about disowned parts that are pushing toward integration, while disagreements are the everyday differences of opinion or needs that are normal in close relationships and relatively easy to resolve.
In couple relationships in which integration is being consciously pursued, the need for conflict gradually disappears. The couple is free to use the energy previously consumed in repetitive conflicts to pursue their individual and joint life interests and dreams as a genuine developmental team. Rather than focusing solely on the wish for bliss, the informed couple tackles the hard work of integration in order to produce that longed for state of a unified whole.
Next post: Tackling the hard work of integration