Blending is an act where dissociative barriers are dissolved for a limited time so that the experience of one part mixes with the experience of another. They experience a temporary unity of self and they can move apart again intentionally, as they wish.
During the first phases of our treatment we want to avoid blending like the plague because it leads to confusion, overwhelm and a sense of losing control. We are not ready to integrate the experience, it just makes us feel insane. When we blend accidentally, we use an unblending tool to support our dissociative barriers.
Things change as we recover. Once the trauma memories are mostly integrated there is little reason to stay separated. In our effort to create a new life for us in phase 3 of our treatment we can sometimes experience that parts are naturally starting to overlap and integrate their experience. It becomes harder to tell who is fronting and who is co-conscious, but not in an uncomfortable way. The mind has a tendency to heal and to reunite and we might slowly lose our sense of separateness. Our conscious awareness integrates into one. Fusion is often misunderstood as one artificial act where parts somehow melt into each other. Modern DID therapy views it as a removal of all dissociative barriers between parts that results in one integrated sense of self. Nothing is lost.
Before we try blending
We need to understand that in most cases blending is an end-game tool. A guesstimate of 90% of the people who come here will not need it within the next few years. It is meant to give us a fuller experience of life and improve cooperation to the point where we act as one instead of working together. You don’t start playing Stardew Valley with access to the Forge. Don’t try to skip to the end of the journey. The volcano mines will spit you out without the additional stardrops (capacity). Blending only starts to make sense when we have the capacity to integrate the experience of another part and that means that we need to get the trauma out of the way. Nobody can just unite with a trauma experience and think that it will be fine. Difficult feelings can be ok, but the parts who blend should be generally fine, grounded in the current reality and stable enough to cope with each other’s experience.
By the time we can think about blending we are already familiar with sharing. Sharing smaller units of experience with each other prepares us for blending, in a small way. We learn how to assess if we can cope with small amounts of sharing before we ever try to share all our experience at once. We can build up to blending by sharing more and more categories of experiences at once to avoid surprises.
If we want to blend with younger parts, we need to prepare them that the body is an adult body and that they will get a new awareness of what that feels like. Especially having boobs can be a weird new experience, nothing can really prepare them for that but we can talk about it so they know what to expect. Other changes in the body should be addressed too. Co-consciousness alone does not prepare them and when they front they usually stay in a trance-like, depersonalized awareness of the body where they overlook details that don’t belong to their self-image. There is no hiding it when we blend.
Possible tools for blending
Imagery and trance states
The traditional and a bit old-fashioned way to blend parts is to imagine that parts stand facing each other. Then they can start to move closer together until they end up stepping into each other. Their boundaries arent’ solid anymore, it is more like ghosts sliding into the same space where they both exist together and mingle. I believe that this kind of imagery led to some misunderstandings of somehow ‘eliminating’ parts. You can’t eliminate neuro networks that make up parts. You just connect them into a much bigger neuro network. It will have a different shape and create a new experience that is not one or the other, it is more complex and built from one and the other. That is why I believe that it can be helpful to imagine that the blended part looks bigger than the single parts it was made of. The same way that parts stepped into each other they can also step apart again. This is not an attempt to fuse, it is just an experiment that can be ended at will. Parts move backwards, away from each other and separate again.
Hands
We can use our hands to create a symbolic sensation that can help us with blending. Like you know it from other hands exercises, each part picks a hand and moves their awareness into their hand. I like to cup my hands into C-shapes and then put them into each other like I am trying to create an S shape and pull them together by closing my hands. If you look at it from all sides it should look a bit like a ball of hands with arms attached on opposite sides. Then I firm my grip. One hand is holding on to the another hand that is holding on to it. It becomes impossible to tell which one is holding which. When we focus on the sensation, the hands start to blur and it becomes hard to tell where one starts and where the other one begins. The way that the fingers touch (remember that fingers can stand for different categories of experiences we want to share) makes it impossible to tell the difference between touching and being touched. If working with hands comes easy to us, this is a highly effective way to blend quickly. It doesn’t work for everyone and symbolic work in general is not everyones cup of tea.
The body connection
We have already introduced Synchronization as a possible access to blending. We pay attention to our body sensation at the same time. Then we share our body sensation with each other and overlap our awareness of our senses. Since we connect to the outside world through our senses, that makes it possible to blend a whole bunch of perceptions at the same time. Emotions are patterns of body sensation. If we share that sensation, it will share our side of emotion. And we attempt to be mindful and focus our thoughts on our perception of the body or the outside world to make it easier to blend our thoughts. Don’t think too much, just be there. This is the first way I learned blending and it is still my favorite way because it is slow and gentle and (I believe) it won’t work unless we are ready for it. We start with an integrated perception of the world and then continue that process with our inner experiences. Being firmly in the body at the same time and as one is a pretty powerful experience of grounding and it might just be my favorite feeling in the whole world.
You can find the EMDR tools for blending and fusion over here.
Personal experience with blending
I have been experimenting with blending and I have done it with older and with younger parts. I usually feel a sense of fullness, of being real, of the world feeling very real. My vision is clearer than ever, without blurring, the world seems noticeably brighter. Body awareness is strong, natural and it feels surprisingly solid, heavy and alive. The general sense of aliveness can remind of being high on stimulants when one has never felt whole before. Depersonalization and Derealization are completely gone. Before that, I was not aware that I always have some level of DP/DR because I was never without them. The real world is a lot realer than you think and so are you.
It takes less effort to be. That one is hard to explain, but dissociation uses up a lot of energy and without that constant drain it becomes a lot easier to move through life. Life actually isn’t as hard as it feels, the constant dissociation is. Sometimes blending makes sense to save energy.
When we blend with younger parts there is usually a sense of being pretty big. Having arms and legs that are this long feels a bit foreign at first but not bad. I recently had a kid complain to me that we gained so much weight. While it didn’t hurt, she was surprised, and no, she had not noticed it before when she fronted alone. She never did it without some leftover dissociation to keep her from sensing it. Not being dissociated feels good to us. We feel more powerful, we have more clarity and the sense of realness leads to a bit of euphoria. We have never felt that real before. I know there are people with similar experience (check out MultiplicityandMe talking about how it feels to be fused). I don’t deny that it can feel different when it is done prematurely. That is why you don’t rush into this.
Blending is a preparation for fusion. I personally believe that it is impossible to imagine what fusion would be like and that is especially true for systems who have not even gone through trauma work yet. You cannot describe what chocolate tastes like if you never had it. And even if you had it, a description of the experience would not allow others to have the same experience when they hear it. I always advise not to listen to fantasies of people who have not gone through properly prepared fusion and have no experience with blending. They are making things up without having any experience worth sharing. Do listen to those who have fused or who are actively experimenting with blending. It can give you a better idea of what fusion might be like. It still won’t make sense to you because you lack the felt sense of it but at least it is not a fantasy of someone who is scared. I use Sharing very regularly. I have only used blending with 3 parts so far and we usually just blend 2 parts at a time and not everyone at once. I am currently trying to stay blended with a very advanced (former) trauma part just to see how long we can make it work. It is normal for it to fall apart when we meet stressful situations that are still too big to handle without dissociation.
I am the first to admit that not many of you will ever use this tool. I think it is still important to teach about it so that you have something you could work towards and to introduce the steps that will get you there. Sharing comes first. But later, blending is really cool.
There is an older article from the ISSTD training about this here