Last Stop, Integration Station
How are you and your body making sense of things as we cross the threshold into the New Year?
Every word of this Substack is written from my heart to you, no AI. I let that make the pic below! ;P
“If you aren’t grateful for something, you haven’t integrated it yet.” He said with complete confidence.
My head lolled back onto a squish-mallow at the Christmas party. I had met my intellectual match in this guy who kept dishing out juicy concepts that I prized and picked apart like a kid in a philosophy candy store.
After diving in on shadow work and his and my own particular coaching infrastructures around guiding people into healing their deepest wounds, I’d made a comment about rewriting my own parenting, how I knew I wanted to unlearn the generational abuse that lives in my fascia and bones because “they got it wrong” and I was going to do better.
He pushed back. “Do you love yourself? Like obviously you want to keep growing but do you love who you are now?”
“Of course”, I replied emphatically.
“Then they didn’t get it wrong.”
Everything bumped and grated inside me. I felt queasy.
“No, no. That’s toxic positivity.” No one gets to silver lining my childhood trauma but me, I thought.
He went on to share a visceral story of his own to illustrate the point. I began to see what he meant, and in the days following this conversation, it’s been crystalizing. Here’s the catch. His life-altering painful moment was seven years ago.
I, too, have many of my own course-correct moments — one 8 years ago IFYKYK ;)
I’ve integrated them, I’m grateful, and humbled. They made me, and I can see that, and the pain of them doesn’t still ache in the pit of my stomach. It’s a distant memory.
It’s been INTEGRATED.
The difference here is that the core wound of mine in discussion is not something from the distant past that’s been laid to rest. It’s an active situation. It continues to get poked, the scab ripped off as recently as 5 days ago.
You can’t integrate something that’s still happening.
I’m all for this idea of finding gratitude for even our hardest moments in life. I fully believe in the ripple effect, that every single tiny and large thing shapes us and should be revered.
But when it comes to trauma, we can’t go around expecting to integrate something that’s still actively in process. This comes from basically every trauma training 101.
You can integrate a car accident once the PT has healed your neck and you have a new car and your breathing while driving is soothed, and peaceful again.
You can’t integrate a hostile government takeover while it’s still in effect. Ya with me?
Let’s back it up here and define “Integration”.
These are pasted from the internet.
“Integration:
Psychology: the coordination of processes in the nervous system, including diverse sensory information and motor impulses. “visuomotor integration”
Psychoanalysis: the process by which a well-balanced psyche becomes whole as the developing ego organizes the id, and the state that results or that treatment seeks to create or restore by countering the fragmenting effect of defense mechanisms.
Layman’s Terms: Integration refers to combining different systems, applications, or components into a unified whole.”
Integration is a process of taking the damaged, frazzled, or otherwise impacted pieces and putting them back together into a functional and optimal state.
People in the healing community often use the term when coming back from a deeply formative experience like a retreat. It’s also used to refer to the process of slowing down after a busy season to reflect and learn the many lessons you absorbed at rapid pace.
And, in the case of this conversation and my ensuing exploration, it’s referring to the processing and peace-making of relational traumas and other emotional wounding.
Integration takes TIME and can only be complete after the event or situation you’re integrating is no longer occurring.
I had taken his comment and immediately bristled at it because I presumed it was pointing at a flaw, something I had not done right to “fix” my trauma response so I could be grateful NOW. Ha! That’s not how healing works! In the last several days the real wisdom has become clear. This nudge is pointing me towards deep acceptance of the process and timing of integration.
Like all healing, it will happen in cycles and waves, not in a linear, clear-cut path, and my own boundaries to protect myself from further wounding will be the thing that starts the clock on the distance and time needed for integration to begin it’s magical mending of these messy jagged edges into the unified whole of future me! :D
My Somatic Integration Sessions: What and Why?
For years now I’ve been practicing and offering something I call Somatic Integration Sessions. The container is similar to the work we do in the 12 week Whole Body Communicator program, but instead of having the ongoing theme of relational healing and working through the full WBC transformation, it’s just a one-off where you get to dive in on supporting any big things you’re moving through right now.
Working somatically allows us to deepen our healing because all of our experiences live in our bodies. We can’t heal them from the top down when we lived them from the bottom up. Kapish?
While we can’t integrate an overarching relationship issue when it’s still actively ongoing, we CAN integrate micro-moments. We can support our bodies in feeling what’s needed somatically to bring our nervous systems the peace and strength needed to beget more peace and strength. So a Somatic Integration Session is ALWAYS A GOOD IDEA.
These sessions look so different person to person, day to day. Sometimes we spend the time exploring breath, your body guiding us into soothing anxiety. We may dive into a somatic Internal Family Systems session to address a protector part that is blocking you from the most aligned actions for your life.
A Somatic Integration Session is a wonderful tool to use at the end of a cycle, or beginning of a New Year to offer ritual to your experience of transition. If reading about this sparks something for you, Grab one here or gift it to a friend! They’re still discounted for the holidays!
Somatics changed my life, that’s why I do this work.
Today, I did a Somatic Integration Session with myself (before I saw my own therapist, of course!) I went to one of my favorite secret places in nature. I listened to my breath. I resourced with the strength of the mighty, whipping wind, meditated with the waving grasses, cried with the spatters of early rain, wept with the Earth. I hugged myself the way I needed to be hugged and gave myself space to think nothing at all, to simply be in the sea of sounds.
And from this space I found emptiness.
The deepest wisdom of all that’s come through these last few days is this;
True integration isn’t always about a huge Ah-Hah moment, or even being able to verbalize everything prettily. True integration is letting go, it’s peace, it’s space, it’s an emptiness from where the heaviness used to be so big.
That’s my profound truth to offer today. May it serve you as we welcome in this new calendar year and continue healing, onward and upwards. Love you.
P.S. I highly recommend resourcing with animals whenever possible. They’re the best somatic role models. Their embodiment continues to remind me that life can be simple and joyful, no matter what.
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Creator Corner Collective
I’m so thrilled to invite you all to the Whole Body Communicator Summit, January 17-19th free online! This part of my Substack is always about promoting others, and today I get to promote EIGHTEEN other powerhouse healing womxn and nonbinary folks. This summit is jam packed with workshops on everything from Human Design to Kinky Heaing, to Healing Money Trauma. We’ve even got a radical somatic dance party as our closing ceremony! I want you there and it is FREEEEEE!!!!!
It’s the best way to start your New Year with deep healing. You can attend one workshop or all of them!
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