Can one who is fragmented, ever truly become whole?

Why do you see yourself as fragmented? You are whole. All of the pieces of you make up the whole you.

There is no actual fragmentation, in my opinion. You have a feeling of fragmentation, but feelings are not real, and if these feelings are strong enough to be interfering with your daily life, I suggest you seek counseling.

I’m guessing you experienced some kind of trauma, and no the after-affects are still making ya shake, inside at least.

Time, championship and bravery are good antidotes for this kind of thing. Time, because healing is not something the FexEx over night service can deliver. The more damage and fragmented pieces there are, the longer it will take to sew those pieces together again. Championship, for accountability and so you don’t feel all alone in your cracked world. Finally, bravery because you will have to face yourself with this. No one else will glue the pieces back together – only you can do that.

And no, fragmentation is not the final stop. If every man and woman were in pieces, as you describe it, nothing would ever get done. Nothing would progress.

Yeah. Just defrag.

Just because one has no scars doesn’t mean they’re whole – same goes the other way, just because you feel fragmented doesn’t mean you’re not whole – it’s just the way your whole is – in pieces.

I see it as different pieces of the self that, in some circumstances, contradict one another. I agree that all fragemts are a part of the whole, but like a puzzle, do they always make one complete?!? That is where I am at. I do not feel complete… though I have fragments that comepletely make me up. I dont know if that makes any sense… they just do not all fit to make me feel whole.

@Holden_Caulfield whether you feel complete (whatever that means to you) isn’t about all the pieces within you…it seems that you won’t feel whole no matter how many fragments there are and that you have some other issues

@Simone_De_Beauvoir does that mean that I have missing puzzle pieces?!?

I’m going to echo what @pdworkin and @Simone_De_Beauvoir have written in that I don’t believe a person can exist fragmented and if you do have feelings of disconnect, even in situations where you think you should be feeling happy, loved, satisfied, etc. then those are issues you can get help with. If you think you don’t experience things as others do in similar situations or to the same extent then believe me, you can be re oriented.

The human body is not computer. yes, you can recover. it just takes time and patience.

@Holden_Caulfield What do you feel is missing? A sense of purpose in your life? Something else?

My friend used to say he was at peace with his pieces. (Smart guy.) So maybe that’s the best some of us can do and, like @Simone_De_Beauvoir said, the only kind of whole we’ll ever be able to approach. It’s pretty banal, but like a lot of banal things I think it turns out to be true sometimes.

I empathize with you here, and the sense of fragmentation can be a very real-feeling mental state. But you shouldn’t worry about its being unhealthy (unless it interferes with daily life, as someone’s said). You may be a little different than others this way, but it’s not unhealthy. When you say the pieces of your self contradict one another, I think you’re just exhibiting a heightened sensitivity to the multiplicity and complexities that exist in every human personality, including your own.

How old are you? I’m inclined to believe this occurs more often in young/er/ish people who are, like, products of a very fragmentary postmodernism. But at this point I’m just extrapolating.

FTR, I’m 20 and I feel like I know exactly what you’re talking about. If that helps.

I don’t know.

@Holden_Caulfield About your pieces contradicting one another: The human mind is capable of holding 11 contradictory trains of thought at once. So, that is not unusual.

I stuggle with so many contradictions in life… I feel like I cannot find myself. I just want to be whole!

@Holden_Caulfield: are you able to brainstorm like in school where you make a bunch of subject bubbles and then expand on each later? Do your parts add up to being at least 50% positive? Breakdown the things about yourself you can work, hone or get help with.

Correcting fragmentation is quite simple. Just run the defrag utility or iDefrag, if you’re on a mac. Should be done in a few hours. And your spirit will have a much better read/write speed.

It is an illusion that we are consistent in all our thoughts and feelings and actions. If we can function and live with ourselves even when aware at some level of our lack of complete integration then we do not disintegrate.

If you feel you cannot function, you can learn to adjust to your complex, inconsistent nature with the help of individual or group counseling. A good therapy group can help a great deal to put your experiences into a more normal context.

“Fragmented” and “whole” sound more symbolic and poetic to me. They don’t provide enough information to say anything useful. To answer, I think people have to look inside and see what images and memories these words bring up inside themselves.

For me, this brought up the image of multiple personalities. It also brought up an image of a person who has endured so much in so short a period of time that they don’t know where they are going or which way is up nor how to keep various aspects of themselves together. It’s like being hit by rockets from all directions, each one dislodging parts of oneself that float around one, as if in outer space. But they are just far enough away that they are out of reach, and you have no source of propulsion, so you can’t round them up. You can only watch those parts get further and further away.

What could create such a state? It matters. We’re not in outer space. We’re dealing with emotional trauma, and different traumas have different treatments.

Even in outer space, with no way of moving, there is a solution. One must create a center of gravity that grows strong enough that the parts start slowly accreting. That’s a nice metaphor (if I do say so myself) but what does it mean in real life?

I think it means find a kernel of self in what is left, and working on strengthening that core. Help it become more itself and gain more confidence, and the rest of you will start coming back together. Therapy can help. So can finding activities or interests that you focus on and build skill in. It almost doesn’t matter what the interest or skill is. What matters is strengthening something and making a center of gravity strong enough to attract everything else back together.

I don’t know. I’m just making this up as I go along. Pretty metaphor. Hope it helps.

@Holden_Caulfield oh, I think we all having missing pieces.

My son suffered a severe stroke a couple of years back, and his chances of ever becoming whole again (recovering his memory and physical abilities completely) are very slim. However, in the absence of physical damage, I don’t see why a person wouldn’t be able to recover, with the proper treatment.

As others have said, you cannot actually be “not whole”—but you can believe you’re not whole, and that does indeed produce problems. The main corrective action is to stop believing that, which involves learning to challenge those ideas: they are distorted thinking.

You always have been and always will be whole, it’s impossible to be otherwise. The realization of that is what takes the time, but when you get it, the game is all over.

According to the literature, not with all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.

I have learned much about fragmentation since one of my relatives is severely fragmented, what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). This may be you, Holden Caulfield, it may not be you—- you’d have to be professionally assessed to determine this. I gained some understanding about all of this when I took some courses about it for therapists; it greatly helped me to know how to relate to my former brother-in-law when a different personality would surface. ie. – If a young child personality would surface, I would talk to this young one—- his voice would be higher and I could tell from his use of language roughly how ‘old’ he would be. When this personality felt accepted and loved on the ‘outside world,’ then the personality might be ready to integrate into the main personality of my brother-in-law, which slowly leads towards integration.

Today, he’s becoming integrated and when I’d last talked with him it sounds like he’s about 80 – 90% integrated at this point, though he’s had a long road with much therapy and though his marriage didn’t last through the process. This type of severe dissociation most commonly occurs in people who have had major trauma in their lives before the age of 6 or 8 years old, which my former brother-in-law definitely suffered. (He was ritually abused when he was about four years old for an extended period of time.) Its been around 15 years for him since he’d first met some of the personalities and began counseling by an extremely well-trained Christian psychologist in this field a few years after that; I’m extremely proud of him (!) for the progress he’s made thus far, as is my sister (his former wife) proud of him!

So yes, it is possible to become truly whole, even for people who suffer from this type of fragmentation. Though, people can also feel and be ‘fragmented’ and not necessarily have different, full-blown personalities needing to integrate; in this case, it is even that much easier to become integrated, though the help of a therapist could get someone on the right track all the sooner. I have no idea what kind of ‘fragmentation’ you speak of, but I wish you well in becoming whole, Holden Caulfield, whatever your journey might be.

What do the religious views of his therapist have to do with the price of tea in China?

@pdworkin I think his therapist is a psychiatrist, not a psychologist—- I’ll have to ask him about that one. His therapist is extremely well-respected and acclaimed in the field of MPD/DID therapy by his non-religious and religious colleagues alike. His therapist also utilizes additional methods for integration which are commonly only utilized by people of faith in counseling.

Ok, here goes…

Many of the thoughts in our heads are products of our current train if thought being impacted by current observations that are interpreted through our subconsious mind to our current consious train of thought. these observations may be real world current circumstances or observations pulled form our memory (also having been originally processed by our subconsious mind)
We also all hold a world view shaped by our beliefs about everything from what color the sky is to the origins of life. All the factors involoved in creating a personal world view is an entirely different, albeit related, animal.
When the thoughts in our consious mind are in opposition to our world view we feel fragmented. This is a natural and healthy pattern, it is what allows a 2-cell fetus to develop into a consious individual. It’s a very intelligent design built into humans along with all other animals with a central nervous system. This “fragmentation” is a reaction to our mind noticing a critical difference between our world view and our train of thought. It triggers our mind to rectify the difference in our subconsious processes.
When we are infants we see a green apple.
In our world view, all apples are green.
Then the next day we see a red apple. We feel fragmented for a brief minute and we choose to either contemplate it or send it straight to our subconsious for our new world view.
In our new world view we see that apples may be green or red. Or possibly they are green at one time and are red at another. Our subconcious isnt’ that picky, it will register it one way or another, probably which ever is simplest. Our subconsious has a lot to do and doesn’t have time for complex analysis. If it has difficulty rectifying the difference you may start thinking about it consiously to try and come up with a good, simple logic to put back into the processors. Sometimes this instanly changes your processors, and sometimes it is just the most recent data, that may be going up against thousand of examples in your memory to the contrary. Hence the old phrase “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. It is not that an “old dog” is incapable of learning new things, it is that it is very difficult for the human mind to overcome long held and long reinfoced subconious beliefs.

The reason we cannot instantly fix a fragmentation is that our subconsious mind is like a memory pool. An opposing drop in a pool that becomes larger every second has less and less impact the bigger the pool, so our consious mind may learn a new revalation instantly, it takes a long time for that to become the pervasive subcoinsous belief, the older you are, the longer it takes (more or less).
UNLESS that new understanding is brand new, and it is the only data of that type in the pool, then you can learn it much easier. The same reason a second language is harder to learn than a first, and a third is easier to learn than a second. It’s really is somewhat mathmatical.
This new revalation might possibly be in an area that doesn’t get thought of often and possibly it can be the subconsious processing portion that acts as a lense through which we interpret both our new observations as well as our previous memories etc.

The way to fix significant fragmentation, the kind that causes you to seek help can be achieve in one of two ways. One isn’t easier than the other.

1.) Change your surroundings and set yourself reminders to continually be consiously thinking about the fragmentation, not the fact that it’s there, but the topic of the fragmentation, the deeper you examine the root, the faster you can re-align your minds. cut the single trunk instead of all the branches. This will take more time the bigger the information pool, but it can be done. It is the function that allows us to aclimate to a new environment, why it can be difficult at first, but slowly become familiar as the ratios change in the memory pool. All memory is weighted basd on how recent the aquisition is. The logistical offset to that is that the earlier we learn something, the more it affects all the things we learn after that, so changing either a belief or a processsing (fragmentation when they are opposing) is best accomplished by finding the root instead of working from the branches. This very often will require a second person, prefebly someone with significant experience with finding the root of a fragmentation and in implementing a path to rectify it.

2.) You can use this understanding and if you “feel” the problem is the world view you hold, you can work on fixing that lens, or if it is the subconsiouls processing side, you can work on that lens.

Either way, changing the interpretation will start you on a path towards reconciling the fragmentation. All new memories are stored through the new reconciled or matching lenses that will yeild future alignment of those ideas and reduces feeling of serious fragmentation.

Why processed observations and our world view can be severed so deeply can come from truama or enlightenment possibly.
For example, children instinctively have a world view of their parents as good and loving. this is re-affirmed every time the parents meet their needs and show them affection etc.
Years later when a parent abuses the child, particularly the first time, a fragmentation occurs. Sometimes the child doesn’t even view it as abuse at the time or later because they process it through their view of their parents as loving because all the other data they have backs up that view. So it must be the child that is wrong and they devleop shame etc. In this case the harm was done and the child now views the world with self-doubt and shame, which impacts every other interaction and memory they develop from that point on, including re-processing previous experiences. This person will have a whole, but wrong self image, It is the hope that later on as they gather more data about what love really is from other sources than their own expereince, that they will eventually be fragmented as they gain more experiences that show them they are not shamed because of that initinal event. Hopefully they will analyze that new fragmentation at its root and fix it there. They will have a lot of future “healing” to do, but the root fragmentation is fixed and future fragmentations from that root will be easier to reconcile with a good foundation.
On the other hand, a child that is abused, depending on development and everything else they know about the world, how they have learned to process things etc. They might be abused for the first time and and have instant frature, knowing it’s their parents that are wrong, not them, becuse of all their other understanding. But a serious fracture happens instantly in the difference between the way they have processed this new data, which they now is not loving, and their previous world view that their parents were loving. This too needs to be addressed at it’s root. In the first case the childs world view was dominant and their processing is what got changed from them on. In the second, the processing was dominent and their world view of their parents was changed from then on. Either way, there will be many more fragmentations as a result as new “branches” are reprocesses and reinterpreted and must be reconciled.

Unfortunately, 90% of this process goes on without us being at all aware of it in our daily lives which makes the healing process difficult to impossible.
The good news is that yoru freeling for “Fragmentation” as well as your desire to be “Whole” are both very natural and healthy to have. The more grave the difference in the world view and the subconsious processing the greater the feeling of fragmentation. Every day we are faced with some type of fragmentation, usually minor, our minds ability to process and reconcile the differences is a truly remarkable gift, but that does not mean that it is quick or easy. Consequently, I believe the reason it is difficult and slow is to counteract our natural pack or mob instincts. We are not easily able to change everything we think and do at the drop of a hat with the latest expereince. That would reduce fragmentation, but lead to chaos in your personal life as well as society. Still the desire to be “whole” is the real key. Wanting to reconcile gives way to consious contemplation about your life and life in general. Althought humnas share a lot in common with other animals in our biology and even much of our psychology, this is “fragmentation” and desire to be “whole” is what makes us unique. It gives us a choice in how we want to approach the world and our lives instead of just reacting to it.

Hope that was helpful. I know it was rediculously long. sorry for anyone that had to wade through my rubish to get to the next post.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a mental health professional! as such, I will not be liable for anyone taking my advice should it cause harm to you or anyone else. I truly just want to help others whenever I’m able. (existance of true altruism is another discussion)