Integrity

To live in integrity is a lovely and precious thing — not only does it let others trust you, it lets you trust yourself.  What exactly does integrity mean, though?  It's not quite as simple as just being honest, although that's certainly a part of it. 

Integrity means being integrated

We all have a vast capacity for ambivalence.  Each of us has a multitude of interior "voices," parts of ourselves who want and fear quite different things. 

You can categorize these parts of yourself in various ways — Freud, for example, broadly distinguished the ego, superego and id, while I find it more useful to think of my mind as having analytical and conditioned/habitual and primal components.  On a more granular level, though, I hear a voice in me that says "I want to relax now" and another that says, "I want to do something fun," and another that says, "I have to go to work," and another that says, "I'm bored with work," and another that says, "I'm interested in that problem I'm trying to solve at work," and another that says, "I'm horny," and another that says, "I need to stop at the grocery store on the way home," and so on, and so on. 

No matter how you choose to identify the different parts of yourself, or how many of them there may be, they all need to communicate and cooperate to get you what you want and need.  In a real sense, you have to be friends with yourself. 

Getting the different parts of yourself communicating makes it much easier to figure out what you actually want in life.  Knowing what you want may seem simple, but it's not — plenty of people devote years of effort to getting something they think they want, only to discover in the end that they really wanted something else entirely. 

Getting the different parts of yourself to ally with each other makes decision-making and acting much easier as well.  This is generally more comfortable and effective than putting some parts of you in "control" of others, or trying to suppress or eradicate things in yourself you dislike.

When it comes to your sex life, being friends with yourself is particularly important, because we're programmed to be sexual whether we think we want to or not.  Only by being friends with yourself can you choose to have a sex life you can be proud of, as opposed to one that fills you with a sense of shame and/or inadequacy.  Think of all the self-proclaimed ascetics from Augustine to Jimmy Swaggart and including a significant proportion of the "celibate" clergy throughout history, who openly proclaim the importance of sexual abstinence while leading guilty, covert sex lives that fill their spirituality with lies.  That's why they hate sex so, not because it's bad in itself, but because they keep betraying themselves around it.

One of the central points of this site is that if you do the work to integrate your sexuality with the rest of your life, you can be proud of it — you can live in integrity with it.  Your sex life can be based on honesty and generosity and respect for other people, and can be full of joy. 

The loss of integrity

Unfortunately, it's probably true that most of us in Western culture are at odds with ourselves in significant ways — we've rejected and pushed away important parts of ourselves, and spend a lot of energy denying that they're there at all. 

One of the tell-tale signs of this is feelings of blame, self-righteousness and hatred — these are almost always unconscious strategies we use to push out onto others the things that we don't want to deal with in ourselves.  A great spiritual insight, often articulated and often forgotten, is the idea (to paraphrase Saint Gregory)  that real moral reform must happen in yourself, not in other people. 

Are we born without integrity — is our failure in this area a kind of original sin?  I don't think so.  In my observation, we all have, from our earliest childhoods, both a great many conflicting voices in us and a strong desire to keep them in harmony.  Much of the process of socialization, much of what we teach our children, is how to arrange things internally so that our various conflicting desires can be satisfied. We teach them to tell the truth, for instance, because as adults, most of us understand how much easier honesty makes life — the trust on which friendship and love are founded requires it, and even business relationships work much more smoothly and efficiently when it's present. 

Unfortunately, without meaning to, we also often shatter our children's integrity.  We make it dangerous for them to be honest to us, and show them that there are plenty of things we can't handle talking about.  We suggest to them that some of their feelings are "bad," some of their desires "inappropriate," some of their dreams hopeless.  They learn (as we ourselves learned)  that when you feel certain ways, you should pretty much just give up and ignore those feelings, because nothing good can ever come of them. 

That means there are voices within you that you don't believe can ever be satisfied, dreams you can never fulfill, wishes that are stupid, or worse, wicked, that you just shouldn't have, that make you bad.  Believing such thing doesn't make those voices and desires go away, it just puts you at war with yourself. 

Re-integration

What we need to learn, and need to learn to teach our children, is a process of negotiation and translation that gets all parts of ourselves working together harmoniously, and especially those parts that would make us behave in selfish, nasty or inappropriate ways if we didn't work to mediate them. 

How do you do this?  I'm not sure I have a good answer — I can only tell you what the process feels like for me.  It's like bringing each feeling and impulse I have before an interior council over which I preside.  All that stuff we teach children about being courteous, considerate, honorable and fair to other people — all that applies to the way I need to handle my own interior council.  I have to act as an impartial mediator whom all sides of myself can trust.  I have to resist the (huge)  temptation to lash out at myself in anger when I make stupid mistakes, or be contemptuous of my own dreams and desires when I believe they're unrealistic, childish or stupid.  Instead, I have to be patient and help each part of me translate its needs and wishes into something satisfyingly practical that all the other parts can collaborate on achieving.  Some of these parts do seem very like small children, but like children, they respond to attention and affection, and turn out to be amazingly cooperative once they trust that their wants are being taken seriously.

When I'm angry at someone, for example, I have to listen to the "conscience" voice that says, "You won't like yourself if you do something hurtful," and the analytic voice that says, "You're mainly angry because you didn't get enough sleep last night and had a bad day at work and this incident touches a sore spot you've been trying to ignore." I have to be able to say to the angry part of myself, as if to a child, "Let this go and I'll do something pleasant and meditative that will make you feel better." Only if I've proven trustworthy in the past, and backed up my own anger when it was justified, stood up for myself in spite of fear and social stigma, will that angry part agree to release the rage. 

The more you build that kind of trust in yourself, the more rapid and unconscious the process of mediation can become.  A visceral reaction like "I'm really horny and that person's ass looks absolutely scrumptious" elicits neither self-repression nor self-indulgence.  Instead, the rest of me is willing to become engaged with the horny part, muster the courage to go over and talk to the object of attraction, see whether the attraction survives making contact with the real person, see whether there's any mutual interest, see whether a sexual liason would feel right, and if not whether some other kind of relationship is desirable.  At that point the simple little horny voice has joined all the rest of me in a way that satisfies all the parts of myself. 

This only works, though, because the horny part of me can trust that it's truly being honored — I'm not just going through the motions.  If sex turns out to be appropriate, I'll take the risk and have sex.  Of course, that seldom happens, but when it does, I give the horny part of me a lot of credit!  It usually means I've gained a friendship I really value. 

That's why I suggest that rather than repressing your sexuality or "controlling" it by keeping it in a secret box under your bed, you befriend it, acknowledge it, honor it and stand up for it.  Only then can you ask it to express itself in ways that you can be proud of, and not in ways that make you feel ashamed afterwards. 

Deeper healing

The kind of internal council I describe may be all very well for bringing squabbling and mildly neglected parts of oneself back into communication and respect, but what about the all-too-common situation where dissociation goes much deeper? 

How can anyone communicate with parts of themselves that are so full of pain, rage and hopelessness that they no longer listen?  Suppose you're one of those people who sometimes feels like "going out and raping some bitch" or "caressing some sweet little boy who won't talk back?"  That voice may be coming from such a depth of despair and self-abandonment that it no longer listens to (or even hears) the rest of you.  Or suppose you have a voice that tells you with utter assurance and the panic of a child's experience, "You have to lie! It's the only way to get by!" 

Or in a less dramatic way, suppose you've given up on things that are important to you because your experience has shown you over and over that there's only disappointment waiting for you when you try for them?  Perhaps the part that wants those things now only turns its face to the wall when you try to speak to it... and why bother, when it just wants to be left alone? 

If you can't re-establish contact with such alienated parts of yourself, heal them and regain their trust, you're certain to betray yourself over and over, possibly causing terrible harm to others in the process.  And yet, to integrate those parts requires that you confront so much pain and disappointment and sense of worthlessness that the task may seem utterly impossible. 

Also, the more you've betrayed yourself and others in the past, the more difficult it is to believe you could ever be right again. 

Our society offers a few tools to help.  If you're lucky enough to be able to afford it, psychotherapy can provide a supportive environment in which to do the necessary work.  Some drugs can help a little some of the time.  The thing that seems the hardest, though, is to find the faith that healing is possible, that you can actually become a whole person again.  It' so easy for the task to seem hopeless, especially since for many people, it's a work that takes years and years, not days or months.

Faith is not a luxury when you undertake such a self-healing — it's necessary.  If you don't have it, perhaps it's worth going looking for it as a first step.  Follow your own spiritual impulses... there's no one true path.  In a way, it doesn't matter where you find your faith, because it's not about certainty!  Instead, it's whatever vision of hope, beauty, possibility and love that inspires you with the strength and courage to face pain and risk of failure so as to undertake your healing. 

I'm not sure, but I do feel that vision is available, somewhere, for almost everyone, if you look. 

(See also our faith page.)