Personification is a specific form of realization. In this mental action we connect our experiences with our first person perspective. It means we introduce the concepts of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’ and ‘myself’ to experiences of the past, present and expected future. I experienced painful things. They happened to me. My family treats me that way. Now I will take care of myself.
.
Problems with lack of personification in trauma
In trauma we tend to lose our first person perspective. That is when we experience symptoms of depersonalization and derealization. The things we link in synthesis are not getting properly linked to us and therefore they feel numb, estranged or unreal. Abuse can feel like it happened to someone else and we just watched. Body parts can feel like they don’t belong to us.
We disown our own experiences and history by removing our ‘I’ from them. But there is no healing for experiences we don’t own.
.
Self-esteem grows when we accomplish things, feel our own sense of agency, and integrate that into our personality. As long as we dissociate ourselves from our ‘I’ and ‘mine’ we won’t own our successes either, they won’t feel special or real. We don’t even realize how good we are.
We might have low motivation to take care of ourselves because we don’t relate to that ‘I’, so why feed her. If we disown our own needs, we will not take care of them. Elemental basics get easier when we re-connect.
A lack of personification also shows when other people’s emotional states become our emotional states easily. We connect their experiences with our first person perspective. That is often called ‘highly sensitive’ or ’empaths’ but it really is enmeshment and feels overwhelming.
We need personification to live as an integrated person which will reduce suffering in many areas of our life
.
.
Personification
It is best to start with connecting our experiences with our ‘I’ in the present.
We can mindfully notice our sensations and body parts and how we live inside that body, how everything connects and that it is ‘mine’.
A common exercise invites us to greet our own body parts every morning, saying something like ‘Good morning my fingers, good morning my wrists, good morning my arms’ etc. That could be supported by touching the body parts to create sensory stimulation. Speaking out loud will make us look foolish but hearing it with our own ears helps with the realization. Whenever possible we can add a ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my or ‘myself’ to the things we notice and synthesize.
.
Then we can practice acting on that realization. When ‘my’ stomach is empty ‘I’ feel the motivation to feed ‘me’. Our actions change, become more responsible and directed toward helpful goals.
Befriending our body is a huge part of getting out of chronic depersonalization. More practical info here.
A sense of ‘mine-ness’ does wonders for our self-esteem, social interactions and the way we set boundaries. It makes life happier and can change core beliefs about us and the world.
.
.
Our Ts can support us when it comes to adding our ‘I’ to our trauma history. Often it starts with using first person words when sharing about trauma. ‘The’ abuser becomes ‘my’ abuser. ‘The’ body ‘my’ body. Then healing can become ‘my’ healing too. A lot of pain can come up with the realization that it was really us in that situation, that these are our experiences we made. This is part of serious trauma processing and not to be underestimated. When we link the elements we talked about in synthesis with our ‘I’ they can be integrated into our life history. We can include them into who we are and put them in proper relation to the rest of our life experiences.
.
Ts can encourage speaking from a first person perspective, but they shouldn’t push it too hard. It needs quite a lot of integrative capacity and being forced to do it can easily get overwhelming and even retraumatizing. These are huge realizations to accomplish. Don’t try this without a T.
.
.
.
The problem with personification in DID
In DID we disowned our ‘I’ quite successfully by creating many first person perspectives who synthesized different experiences and by then separating them from each other. Parts of the personality vehemently insist that they are someone entirely different from those other parts. Trauma happened to the others. We don’t realize that what happens to one part happens to us all. Fear, shame, hatred, disgust or mistrust keep us from accepting that we could have anything to do with the experiences of other parts. It is especially hard for controlling EPs and ANPs who are invested in not knowing that they are vulnerable or traumatized. We all end up missing out on big chunks of experiences that would help us to put the big picture together and integrate the trauma. That way we can end up with different sets of realities, a recipe for disaster.
Parts act on their limited reality and understanding of the world without the interest of the whole system in mind. Conflicting goals and actions can lead to great chaos and low functioning. As long as we act like the system is made out of completely different people we are stuck. Without the others no part has full access to all that is needed to live a complete life. To be able to take care of all our needs we need to accept that some of them are held by other parts of our system and that those things they carry belong to the system as a whole and not just them.
.
.
Personification in DID
The challenge is huge, so we have to start small.
Most parts start out with a strong ‘I’ containing only their fragment of reality. The goal is to move to a ‘We’ by including the other parts and what they know. It starts with realizing that the inner voices and other intrusions belong to us. They don’t come from the outside, they are part of us.
When we approach other parts with compassion and curiosity we can learn more about their first person experience and share some of our own. Communication helps us to know more of what makes up ‘us’. Then we can start acting with our first person perspective and theirs in mind. That is how over time we strengthen a ‘We’ that can begin to feel more connected, less foreign and more like we know who We are. It is best to start with everyday life and work on our needs and our goals.
.
.
When we get to trauma work it will be a great challenge to listen to traumatized parts and realize that what they share happened to the whole system. Nobody has to feel alone with the experience anymore, it is shared. It is also over and traumatized parts can learn that too (more about presentification).
A sign of personification is when we can acknowledge that it happened to ‘me’ instead of saying it happened to a part of me. What happened to one part happened to ‘me’.
When we link and differentiate our experiences across parts, time and situations, we create a new understanding of our personality that developed from those experiences. With access to important life events we can make sense of the things that define us as a person. We become more complete when we can be all of us at the same time, but live and act in the present.
.
That way we slowly move away from the ‘We’ and back to a sense of ‘I’, but this time it doesn’t just mean a dissociated fragment of a first person perspective, it means an integrated perspective that includes the experiences of other parts. Things didn’t happen to parts, they happened to ‘us’, a system that is an ‘I’. We are not just oriented in time and space but also in our identity.
At this point some experience spontaneous fusion but that is not exactly the same as integration. Others live with a good sense of themselves in different ages and states inside and access what is most appropriate in the given situation. When proper DID Ts speak about making integration a goal, this shared first person perspective with all parts linked and in healthy relation to each other is what they mean. I hope it becomes very clear at this point that neither killing parts nor mashing them together is part of integration. Nothing is lost, only the sense of self changes and becomes bigger and more complex and complete.
.
All this is why it is so incredibly important that therapists do not insist that dissociative people speak of themselves in the first person singular. They will come to that eventually. But if they are not supported to develop a sense of ‘we’ then they will be stuck in their dissociated first person perspective and never get anywhere. The path to an integrated ‘I’ leads through ‘we’ country. There is no skipping that, the realization needed to jump from dissociated ‘I’ to integrated ‘I’ would be way too big for anyone to manage and it cannot happen without building connections inside.
.
.
A word for those who feel triggered now:
I know that some people with DID are highly invested in keeping their first person perspectives dissociated and if that is your plan for your life it is your choice and nobody can take it from you. I am just sharing about elements of integration. Why bother reading articles on integration if you already know you reject it. Nobody is forced to walk that path.
Everyone else who is honestly interested I want to encourage to seek as much integration as you can. It will reduce conflict, dissociation and the feeling of being torn inside and increase functioning, self-esteem and flexible responses to life and stress. The answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ can only be answered through personification and having an answer makes life less complicated.
.
.
.
[There is a whole chapter about this in ‘The Haunted Self‘ (Nijenhuis, van der Hart, Steele) if you want to look it up for yourself]
Leave a Reply