Positive Disintegration

* Rough Transcript *

So I was going to do an episode this week about myths and misconceptions around giftedness and while I still only do that this week, there’s been a lot of themes around Integration and disintegration, and I thought it would be a good time to touch on Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration and give just a quick overview of it.

If you really want more details, you can listen to episode 154 with Chris Wells, where she talks about it much more in depth, and she is an expert on that. But positive disintegration is a theory from Kazimierz Dabrowski where he believes that we sort of have to have experiences of disintegration before we can integrate into a stronger pool.

And he believes that things such as intensity or over excitability are signs of high developmental potential. And that things you would call neuroses, which we might call neurodiversity, mental health issues, especially anxiety and existential depression, are things that can be good if they move us towards a more integrated self.

So, Dabrowski talks about three factors that can affect our development. The first two are kind of nature nurture, so biological, and social factors that influence our development. The third thing he calls the third factor, and the best way I can describe that is some sense of meaning or drive is the third factor that moves us forward towards positive development.

And he also talks about something called dynamisms, which are the inner and outer things that influence the decisions we make and the things that we do. So when talking about positive disintegration, there are different stages, and the original work that he did didn’t really have levels necessarily, but when he started working at a university, they started labeling them by levels.

So when we talk about the first level of positive disintegration, that would be kind of ignorance is bliss, so you’re integrated. That’s because you don’t really know better, you don’t really have any reason to have inner conflict or inner turmoil. And the next stage would be ambivalence, where there is inner conflict, but the things that the inner conflict is about are really not, there’s nothing one better than the other, and so there’s sort of this ambivalence.

And so that stage of disintegration doesn’t really move you towards positive disintegration. And then the next phase is what he calls spontaneous multi level disintegration. And basically what that means is you’re having this inner conflict that happens spontaneously and it’s between two things. And one thing is Higher than the other or more desirable than the other.

And so, that inner conflict happens and you want to move towards that higher thing. But, at this stage, you’re, they’re just happening spontaneously and you don’t necessarily move towards that more positive thing. And then the next phase would be considered directed multi level integration. This is sort of when we have this conflict between what is and what we think ought to be.

And so there is this higher level that we want to attain, but we don’t know how to get there. And that final stage is the conscious self, where we are an integrated self and our actions are moving us towards that more positive goal. According to Dabrowski, partial secondary integrations are happening all the time when we have positive resolutions to conflict.

And so nobody constantly lives at that state of conscious self. The more that we can move towards that. Those positive resolutions, then the more likely we are to have that integrated itself to some great books that address the positive disintegration include searching for meaning by James Webb, who is the founder of saying supporting the emotional needs of the gifted and transcend by Scott Barry Coffman, which was written just last year.

Earlier, I touched on how Dabrowski and his theory of positive disintegration believes that. Intensity or over excitability, or as he might call it, super stimulability, are positive signs of high developmental potential, and he considered five areas of over excitability, and those were intellectual, imaginative.

emotional, sensory, and physical. And you could be intense in any one of those areas. And basically what that means is that you receive the world more intensely than others and react more intensely as well. And so there’s a lot of overlap between over excitability and a lot of areas of neurodiversity.

And so in some ways, as Chris Wells, who did our podcast on positive disintegration mentions, he kind of was an early pioneer of the neurodiversity movement. So when we talk about integration and, and resolving those inner conflicts in a positive direction, a lot of what comes up for me is integrating different parts of ourselves that are in conflict.

And one of the things I’ve often seen with. Folks, when they discover some aspect of neurodiversity, whether that’s giftedness or diagnosis of some sort is that oftentimes there’s this over identification period. Where we over identify with that particular identity. And what happens then is that it becomes this thing that separates us from other people.

And I’ve seen some folks who’ve actually entirely rejected that part of themselves because it had become something that separated them from others and they didn’t want to be separated anymore. So rather than integrating it as a part of the larger whole, they would just reject that part of themselves entirely.

Another way I’ve seen this over identification happen is with over identifying with a particular cause or something in a way that may not have been productive. So, for example, I knew someone who had been a hardcore feminist, but the way that feminism worked for her was, was kind of almost violent. It was very aggressive.

And so when she went through some, some re evaluation, She ended up rejecting feminism entirely, and rather than re examining what feminism actually means, and integrating it into the larger whole, she just threw it out entirely and rejected that as something she didn’t want anymore. When you talk about positive disintegration, there’s this great analogy by Nikki Peterson that you can find on Amazon called the Browski’s sweater.

And I love the analogy because she talks about positive disintegration as if we are knitting a sweater out of our experiences growing up. And maybe the sweater doesn’t quite fit us right because it was influenced by all these outside factors, but we have this solid foundation of yarn that we can then unravel.

And knit into a sweater that maybe suits us better. And I always just thought that was a great visual for positive disintegration is that we take these experiences that we’ve had. And some of them will fit us. Some of them won’t, but we can use that as the foundation for creating something new in our own identity.

And when we look at integrating two different parts of ourselves that may be in conflict. I learned this strategy called voice dialogue, and I just touched on it in my coach training, but it’s basically a technique where you have two different conflicting parts of yourselves have a conversation. But the thing that really stood out to me about it is that not only did you have one part ask the other part what they want from the other, but then you’d also ask what they want to hear.

give the other part. And that really struck me because we never really think when we have those two conflicting parts, we never think about what one part wants to give to the other. And for example, if you have say an inner critic and an inner child that are in conflict, that inner critic might be wanting to protect the child, but doing it in a way that’s maybe not so productive.

And so, I thought that was kind of a great thing to ask yourself when you have two conflicting parts of yourself is what does this part want to give to the other?

So, apparently, it cut me off and I didn’t even know it. So, to wrap it up, obviously, I can’t give a really thorough explanation of positive disintegration in just a short podcast or video.

But You can find a lot more detailed discussion about it with Chris Wells, who works at the Gifted Development Center and really is an expert on Dabrowski. And she’ll also be speaking about over excitabilities this fall. So, you can find that on episode 154, I believe, and also I wrote about this and some strategies to find meaning and challenge in this workbook called Finding Meaning in Challenge, and it’s part of my Ignite Your Power workbook series and course, which you can find in my Embracing Intensity community, and we are doing monthly calls there in the Embracing Intensity community.

Both. Along the themes of the course and also with our guest speakers on related themes. Our upcoming one is going to be on breaking the stress cycle with Dr. Zaria Rubin and it’s going to be a great call and we Zaria Calls twice monthly now, and we’re adding in a NeuroDivergent Book Club, and Nika, who did last month’s call, wants to host a regular writing group.

So come join us. We’re in the Embracing Intensity community at community.embracingintensity. com.