If you have experienced trauma, (and all humans have) you are not one. You have parts, or alters, with their own personalities and beliefs and way of being in the world. These parts don't just exist in your mind. There are parts of your spirit that have been split off as well.
Your ability to integrate and oversee these personalities is what determines how well you function in society.
Jesus teaches us that if we are not one, we are not his. Normally we think that that means being one with other people, but it also refers to being one within ourselves and our individual parts.
These parts, these alters, need to be gathered and reintegrated after trauma so that you can be one. Today we're going to talk about integrating those parts and bringing them back home.
What are parts, what are alters?
We're going to talk about four different things.
- What are parts, or alters?
- Why do we have them?
- What do we do about them? How can we integrate them?
- How to process and integrate the parts.
What are parts or alters? I'm using the word interchangeably.
Parts are essentially different parts or aspects of ourselves as human beings. Everyone has them. It's a normal part of having this existence in a human body.
It simply means that, you present in your physical body as an integrated whole. But what happens behind the scenes is actually different parts of you, different alters, acting and taking the stage.
Why do you have parts, or alters? Are parts only from trauma?
The first thought is that it's simply the way we are made.
According to psychology, we are made of these parts. Bessel van der Kolk, in his wonderful book, the Body Keeps the Score, (a fantastic book for processing trauma), says,
“We all have parts. Right now, a part of me feels like taking a nap. Another part wants to keep writing. Still feeling injured by an offensive email message, a part of me wants to hit reply on a stinging put down while a different part wants to shrug it off. Parts are not just feelings, but distinct ways of being with their own beliefs, agendas, and roles in the overall ecology of our lives.”
Faith systems and religion also talk about these parts. In The Science of Getting Rich from Wallace D. Wattles, he talks about how to create abundance in your life. His explanation of why we have these parts is that the formless stuff of which all things are made is intelligent. It is stuff which thinks, it is alive and is always impelled toward more life.
In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, in both the Doctrine and Covenants, and in Chapter 3 of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price, the term that's used is intelligences.
Intelligences are basically parts of spirits before they're made into complete spirits. Or sometimes it's thought of as the spirit before it comes to earth. Intelligence is associated with light. God has more intelligence than any of us do because he is more complete and has more light.
So we are simply made of these different parts.
If you've done any intuitive work with yourself to tune into your body, you can see that different parts of your physical body, your organs, your glands, even just different parts of your body have their own intelligence and their own way of communicating with you. So it's simply the way that we are made.
However, parts can also come from trauma. We all have trauma. It's just a part of normal life. We all, as a human being, experience individual trauma as part of our lives. There's also collective trauma in societies and cultures.
If you think of all of the world wars, or any of the smaller wars, these are collective traumas that happen. The Great depression in the United States was a collective trauma.
There are also your generational patterns that you've inherited. If you have generations in your family that have experienced abuse and trauma, you have inherited that trauma as well.
And then the last place that we get these parts from with trauma is what I'm going to call intentional trauma. Satanic ritual abuse, or SRA, is a form of abuse that is done to intentionally create alters in individuals so that those people can be controlled and used for evil purposes. Those parts or those alters can be brought forth when a certain personality type is needed to do or perform a specific task.
How you can gather or integrate your parts after trauma
We have all these parts. Do we need to do anything with them? Well, not necessarily. If you feel like life is going great and you're functioning just fine in society and you're happy in your relationships and with everything, there is absolutely nothing that you need to do. You only need to address this if you feel like you're really struggling.
If you feel like you've had generational trauma patterns, if you've experienced trauma yourself that you're fully aware of, if you're simply having patterns or experiences in your life where you are really struggling, it's very likely that you have some underlying part integration that needs to happen.
There are two systems that I'm aware of. One of them is fairly popular right now. It's called Internal Family Systems (IFS). And again, in this same book, the Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk says “Every major school of psychology recognizes that people have sub personalities and gives them different names.”
Richard Schwartz is the individual who developed internal family systems. Bessel says, “At the core of IFS is the notion that the mind of each of us is like a family, in which the members have different levels of maturity, excitability wisdom and pain. The parts form a network or system in which change in any one part will affect all others.”
And Bessel says, “the IFS model helped me realize that dissociation occurs on a continuum.”
According to IFS, they're “not just passing emotional states or customary thought patterns, but they're distinct mental systems with their own history, abilities, needs, and worldview.” Because they're locked away inside, IFS calls them the exiles.
In this case, I'm just referring to all of these as parts, not distinguishing between an exile and a part. I would call them the same thing for my purposes and what we're talking about today.
The next system that I've just recently become aware of, specifically for dealing with multiple personality disorder is called Behind the Curtain by Keith Redford, and he has developed a system for integrating these parts.
Now let's talk about what do you do about these parts. This was a very cursory overview of parts, but I want give you some stories of how they can be integrated.
You don't have to go see a therapist necessarily. You may or may not, and this is not medical advice. I'm simply sharing my experiences. You need to do what you decide is best based on all the information that you can find for yourself.
Gathering parts (or alters) is something you can do yourself
I want to share you a story of a recent experience I was blessed with to gather a huge number of these spirit parts that needed to be gathered and returned.
This is my role. I fulfill the role of gatherer.
This last week, my husband has been struggling a lot with some physical issues, and I’ll share a story of gathering some of his parts. His job is very physical. He does appliance repair. He was having a lot of troubles one day this past week and wasn't comfortable driving, so I drove for him. We were at one of the stops.
It was absolutely gorgeous day and I thought, well, I'm not going to sit in the car. We were by the Mississippi River. I went out to stand by the Mississippi to see what I could gather for a story. If you're familiar with the Midwest in springtime, it is very often extremely windy.
I'm standing on the banks of the Mississippi and my hair is just blowing all over, whipping against my face, and I do my best to pray and get myself settled to see what this land has to tell me and what I can gather that will help bring others onto Christ.
I get myself a little bit settled to begin and the spirit speaks to me first. "There are many who wish to be gathered, and there are many who wish to be saved."
It's taking me a little while to get into this space, and as I start to do so, the guardian of the land comes up first. He comes just to my right where I'm standing. And he's skinny and small compared to all of the other guardians that I have seen so far. He doesn't seem to be that much bigger than I am, and he's a little gruff as you would expect, because he's there to protect the space and he's not sure yet what my purpose is.
“Who are you and what do you want?”
I say, “I am here together.”
“Oh. Yes. I see that. Okay, very well, then.”
And then the guardian is gone. Apparently there are other things that are more important to attend to than me.
It takes me a few minutes to feel confident and comfortable gathering a story, and I spend some time getting myself into a good mental space. As I was doing so, I heard someone say, “What is she waiting for?” That was a good cue for me to go all in.
As soon as I decide that I’m ready to receive, I see that I’m in the middle of a battle. Right in front of me, men in armor are fighting with swords. I don’t hear the sounds of the battle, I only see it.
Someone says, “It’s dangerous, get out of here,” but I feel no fear. I simply wait, knowing that I am here for a purpose, and that that purpose will soon make itself known.
I see the guardian of the space come back, and this time he's in armor and he's right in front of me and he is joining this battle.
Then, two young children come up to me. I am guessing they're about eight years old and they come and stand by my side, one on my left and one on my right, and they ask for me to help get them out of there.
I'm not sure where I'm going to take them, but I know that the best place to take a spirit or to help a spirit that you don't know what to do with is to bring them to Jesus, because he knows what is best for everything and everyone. So as I take them, I see behind me to my right, there's kind of like this open space, this open door that goes into a walkway that goes behind me and up.
The space back there is white and light and beautiful. I put my hands on their shoulder blades and we turn and we walk up into that space and I take them into this beautiful white light. I come back down to return to this battlefield, and as soon as I get here, it's like I'm standing to this entryway.
It's very clear now that there's a door and there's this very clear passageway going up to the space where I just took these children and it's all white and light and beautiful up there. As I stand there, this, it's actually like this door is open away from me. There's a big white door with a doorknob on it.
As I'm standing there, more people than I can count come running through it. It's like a stampede of spirits. But instead of looking like actual human beings, they're all kind of like brown. It's like I don't actually see clear features of a human, and they all come and they stampede through it to escape the fighting and the space that they're in.
I step in behind them, and as I do that, the door slams shut and the energy behind it is like a wave on an ocean. It pushes me and I go flying through the tunnel. I fall down onto my hands and knees as I come into this space where everyone is.
I'm so overpowered by this. I don't even know how to describe the feeling, but I'm so overpowered by it that I just want to start crying. I hear a voice tell me that I've done good work.
As I came back and pondered on this later, the Spirit said, “you saved my children.”
I know that this seems odd, but it is very real and I have been given the blessing on this day to help save some of God's children and to bring them to him and to bring these parts, these altars to whatever place where it is that they need to go. Because for some reason they have been unable to get out or to find freedom, and they needed to be rescued and shown a way out.
Visualization to gather parts or alters after trauma
As I am standing here still contemplating this, the Spirit speaks to me again and says, “all are being gathered and all are being rescued. This was a rescue mission. Remember back in your early days when parts of you had to be rescued and gathered?”
I started learning energy work about nine years ago now, in part to heal my own patterns of generational trauma. One of the things that I did, or as I started doing that process was I had a lot of my own parts that had to be gathered, and I did it in the same way intuitively through visualization, which you can practice and try to do and learn for yourself.
I remembered that when I was doing these types of things, I had a specific spirit guide who would help me often, and we would go to different places to regain and bring back parts of my spirit that had been lost and needed to be integrated back into me.
Sometimes I was able to go with him and sometimes I was not because it was too dangerous and he would come back. And sometimes he would have to go to a spiritual hospital, and I would as well to receive additional healing before those parts could reintegrate with me.
As I pondered all this, I just started to cry again because the spirit was just testifying to me of the beautiful nature of this work that this is the reintegration of souls that have been split for some reason, that I now have the opportunity to go help and bring these parts and gather them back in, and that there are others who do the work to help them heal that they might need.
Gathering your parts or alters without reliving the experience
Like those with Internal Family Systems and Keith Redford's Behind the Curtain work, you don't have to have experienced intense trauma to have parts as well.
Like I mentioned, my husband's been having some physical troubles. He's been having a lot of problems up in his neck area, especially his upper cervical spine.
I did some work for him last week and I integrated parts of him that had split off at age 5 and another part at age 17. I always start my healing work with a prayer and I went in and allowed the vision to come to me, and I followed the visualization to do that healing work. And these parts, I didn't even have to know what the specific trauma or experience was that he had that led to that separation. (You can book your own healing session here.)
He didn't have anything that came to him. The beautiful thing about this is you do not have to relive any past trauma to have this integration, you simply have to have a desire to be complete and whole, and to let the spirit guide you as you do the work. Regardless of what your challenges might be, if you are able to visualize, this is one way that you can reintegrate these parts.
A simple exercise to start healing your parts or alters
If you want some additional resources, this wonderful book, the Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is fantastic for healing and also Peter Levine's work. Both of them do a lot of somatic or body integration type of work because one of the things I've learned is that this trauma is stored in our bodies.
Speaking about it, if you have the memory, may be helpful, but more often what is more helpful than talking about it is allowing the sensations in your body. Riding the wave of those sensations in a place where you feel safe to do so, allows the natural response to the trauma to be completed. The trauma cycle needs to be completed.
And it's stored in your body. You can't complete a cycle by talking about it. Like I said, talking may help, but you have to complete the cycle by allowing your body to physically finish processing the hormonal cycle of that stress and that fear, and whatever those emotions are.
If you need a place to start, sit with what your body is feeling and see what it is telling you. It is always communicating to us because our body is made of intelligence.
Having parts or alters is a normal part of the human experience. It may or may not cause a noticeable issue in your life. If you have experienced trauma, you are guaranteed to have parts or alters that need integrating.
