INTEGRATION
The goal of this stage is to engage in the meaning-making process through conscious narrative and emotional integration. Making meaning of your wounds involves weaving together insights and skills from earlier stages to create new narratives that deepen your connection with yourself. Emotional integration requires accepting and allowing all emotions into your current experience. These practices prepare you for the next phase, transformation, where you’ll begin to discover how to align with your purpose.
We can talk ourselves through stress in ways that keep us healthy. And we can make meaning out of it all in a way that sustains us over a long career.
Brian Miller, Ph.D.
conscious narrative
How we think about ourselves and what we think about ourselves and others, guides our story telling process by creating narratives to help us to orient ourselves in time. Conscious narratives invites you see yourself as the author of your own stories. “You are telling the story of now, not living the terror of then (Miller, 2022)."
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One of our greatest powers is our ability to rewrite our narratives. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), is commonly used for rewriting stories and narratives. CBT modalities can help you see the connection between your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and reactions. ​
Storytelling is a process that focuses on the facts of the event or experience, while narratives, are how we make meaning of the stories. Antecedent narratives, concurrent narratives, and consolidation narratives, are considered to be the 3 stages of meaning making (Miller, 2022.)​
Antecedent narratives are created in anticipation of an event. These narratives include past stories that can both conscious and unconscious. In simple terms, antecedent narratives are your before story and include your emotional response, whether positive of negative (Miller, 2022).
Antecedent Narrative
Concurrent narratives are created through the continuous self-talk we engage in throughout the day. Concurrent narratives are the collective stories of our experiential engagement, meaning, we are actively processing and interpreting what is happening throughout the day (Miller, 2022).
Concurrent Narrative
Consolidation narratives is the process of making meaning of your experiences. It draws on both the antecedent and concurrent narratives to help you create meaning of your stories, and its sets the precent for future experiences (Miller, 2022).
Consolidation Narrative
Emotional integration
“You are telling the story of now, not living the terror of then.”
– Dr. Brian Miller
Check out this emotion wheel for a visualization of the vast spectrum of our emotions.
Being able to name your feelings is essential to emotional integration (Miller, 2022). Practices like self-compassion, awareness, radical acceptance, and conscious reflection are forms of mindfulness, or as Siegel (2009) describes, intentional and deep connection to self.
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Emotional integration requires radical presence which is the willingness to let painful emotions enter your awareness rather than avoid them. While we cannot separate from painful experiences, we can learn to integrate them, thus creating space for new narratives to emerge.
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Integration operates across multiple levels of healing. Cognitively, it helps connect thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It also supports recognizing the interconnectedness between your inner world and external experiences.
Integrating triggers in clinical practice
If you can begin to see your triggers as your best teacher then it can provide you with a new opportunity for meaning making of your triggers. Mindfulness practices such as self-awareness, conscious self-reflection, radical acceptance, and conscious narratives can be used to help you integrate your triggers.
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Psychotherapist and psychiatrist, Carl Jung, greatly contributed to the modern day understanding of alchemy. He states, "Alchemical language does not disguise a known content but suggests an unknown one, or rather, this unknown content suggests itself (Crellin, 2021)." I have interpreted this to mean that unconscious wounds will inevitably arise and once it is revealed, you can use it as an opportunity to create a parallel process for reciprocal healing.