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Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Donald Abdur.
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Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today we're going to be talking about integration and emotional processing. This is something that's talked about a lot in the positive psychology world. And I came to realize while I was talking about this too, it took me a long time to understand what these terms actually meant. So I decided to make a podcast on it today because these very commonly used terms are very misunderstood. In psychological terms, integration refers to the completion of an emotional response across both the mind and the body. So that the emotion is no longer perceived as a threat by your mind. Once the emotion has been fully integrated, your nervous system no longer treats the experience as active or threatening. And here I would go with more of an active experience rather than threatening. Because you're not inherently scared of your own emotions, even though you might be in survival response because of them. It is more that the emotion stays active in your body. More and more of your mental space is being occupied because it's trying to deal with this constant background noise of an unintegrated emotion. As we know from this podcast, your emotions begin as your perception or your thought, which in turn activates a physiological arousal. This mobilizes your attention, your energy. This activation has to be followed by a resolution. Integration is a point where an activated emotion reaches its conclusion, its resolution. The memory, your meaning making of the event, your thoughts might remain, but the body no longer organizes itself around it. Once the emotion has been fully integrated and made sense of, there's no ongoing need for hypervigilance on your part. So through these definitions, it matters because emotions are mental events that you keep thinking about once they have been stuck in your body, and they're followed by action programs in your nervous system that you need to take in order to fully finish them. From a psychological and a neuroscience perspective, an unintegrated emotion is something that has been interrupted mid-cycle. And an interruption can come from avoidance, suppression, continuing to think over and over again about it, which is rumination, premature meaning making or singular meaning making of an event, and not considering any other options so that the emotion keeps regenerating itself, or you're trying to force yourself into regulation, thinking that you should be feeling something else. So when any of these things happen, your nervous system keeps a portion of your emotional response continuously online. Your attention stays narrowed and in survival mode. Physiologically speaking, the system behaves as if something is still unresolved. And integration is what allows for the system to stand down, let its guard down. So this connects directly to my previous podcast on HRV coherence and incoherence. In that episode I described coherence as being an organized physiological rhythm and incoherence as a state of unresolved activation, which currently I'm describing as unintegrated emotions. Integration is the mechanism by which incoherence resolves. When an emotion integrates, your parasympathetic tone re-engages and your HRV improves. When an emotion is not integrated and lingers on, your nervous system stays in an activation loop. Your HRV remains low. Integration is the process through which your nervous system regains rhythm after disruption. And unlike popular belief, integration is not primarily a cognitive achievement. Insight and thought processes help, but that alone does not complete the emotional cycle. Understanding why you feel something and what thoughts are creating your emotions do not automatically tell the body that it is safe for you to settle down. A lot of emotional completion integration requires embodied processing. The emotion must be registered in your body as a sensation allowed to rise and fall at its pace, all without your active interference. Interference here again means disruption, suppression, avoidance. It does not mean your attempt of integration. When this happens successfully, your nervous system updates its internal model. The event has been over, it's been survived, the signal has been delivered, and the mobilization is no longer required. You can let go of the survival mechanism. In emotional processing terms, integration is what differentiates experience from constant looping. Those are two different methods. A fully processed integrated emotion has a beginning, middle, and an end. A non integrated emotion has a beginning and it repeats itself without resolution, mostly from your thoughts. This is an unresolved stress response because integration breaks that loop by allowing psychological arc to finish, and in that case your mind and your physiology regains its flexibility and its health back. These are the reasons why integration is foundational to your emotional health. Without it, you may function, reflect, and perform, but your nervous system can continue to chronically be activated. What I'm trying to say is that with integration, your emotion lose their hijacking quality. They become information rather than the commands that run your life in the background. And in the context of your life, what that means is that integration is the bridge between your emotional experience and coherent action. For an easier understanding, I created an integration cycle. Think of it as a package moving through a delivery system. An emotion being the package that arrives at your nervous system. The package is not the problem, it is information that you need to process, it needs to be routed, stamped, and delivered properly. Integration is what happens when the package completes the route instead of getting stuck at the delivery center. Because if it's stuck at the delivery center, then the system stays on alert. This is the emotion that is unintegrated. The components of the integration cycle are number one, identification and labeling. Once you receive the package, once you receive that information, you give it a name, you give it a label. The moment you name an emotion, the system registers what's arrived. You can say to yourself, I feel anger, I feel sadness, I feel fear. This step brings the emotional signal out of it being a vague background noise into your conscious awareness. The nervous system now knows that what it's dealing with instead of staying hypervigilant. The second step of the cycle is acceptance and allowance. This is like opening the intake gate for the package. When the emotion is allowed to exist without resistance, judgment, or urgency of fixing, that way you don't accidentally fall into forced expression or suppression of the emotion. This way you're increasing the emotional containment of your body. It signals safety to your nervous system. Because when the emotion is permitted to be present with its sensations without fear of it, your nervous system no longer has to amplify it to make sense of it. The next step of the cycle is investigation or processing. This is you routing the package. You explore your emotion with curiosity rather than rigid interrogation like a police officer. All that means is that it includes noticing what triggered it, meaning what thoughts brought it on, you allowing the sensations of the emotion within your body, and understanding what the emotion is protecting, signaling or responding to, meaning what message is it actually giving you. This is not your analysis for solution, it is just you allowing your nervous system to organize the signal instead of organizing around it as a threat. Next step of the cycle is expression, meaning releasing pressure from the system. Some emotions complete internally. Others require expression to fully discharge themselves, and that can include speaking your mind, writing, movement, a creative or physical release. Expression is not required every time, but if the emotion is high energy specially, expression prevents it from staying stored with tension in your body. The next step of this integration cycle is action, delivery completion. At this stage, the emotion has delivered its information. You may or may not find that you have to follow it up with action, but the key shift is internal. You will know the cycle is complete and the emotion is fully integrated when you feel a release in your body. Your thoughts no longer loop around that emotion and your body feels relaxed. There is no ongoing conscious or subconscious sense of threat. The memory might remain, you might have thoughts about it, but it's gonna have a different narrative, a different emotional signal to it. This tells you that the emotion has been completely integrated. At the completion marker, and this is critical for you to know, the integration cycle is complete when the nervous system is no longer organized around the emotion. You're not constantly managing it, you're not constantly distracted because of it. You simply no longer need to respond to it with the same urgency or depression as you did before. You're back in high HRV and your coherence restores. The package at this point has been delivered and the system is free to move on. This whole process is integration. So putting all of this into practicality, what does this actually mean for you as a Muslim woman? Let's say the situation is that you're a woman that volunteers at the masjid committee. During planning a meeting, someone interrupts you and they repeat your idea as their own, or they have a constant habit of undermining you. In this situation, the cycle will look something like this. You identify and label, which is you receiving the package, you say yourself, I feel irritated, I feel disrespected. And all of this after you've noticed the sensations within your body. There's no need here for you to label yourself as dramatic or oversensitive or to judge the other person completely out of context. All you're doing is naming your emotion accurately. And what this does is that it prevents you from ongoing background agitation. The next step of the cycle is acceptance. You're opening the intake gate. You let the discomfort of your felt disrespect and your irritation exist without you reacting to it. You don't rush to prove yourself and your contribution. You just allow the emotion to be present. What you're doing is listening to the message behind the emotion. Here, your nervous system is telling you that you will not tolerate disrespect and somebody else taking credit for your work. That is all that the message is behind these emotions. Then you're processing, investigating, routing the package. You are noticing the sensations in your body, and it might be during or after the meeting, depending on your practice level. You're learning how that emotion organizes itself within your body, how it's diffuse, or if it's a tense irritation at certain location. Then the next step is expression. If it's a high energy emotion, you journal, you go for a walk, you discharge the energy that organizes itself around it. Integration and action. This is the fifth step. When you are a little bit more relaxed and you're not replaying the moment over and over again, you know that you reached the completion marker. At this point, you're welcome to engage in a dialogue with the person who you thought was the culprit all along. At this time, you're able to finish the cycle. The emotion did its job, and once all of the cycle is complete, your system is going to stand down. And this is real integration. Or let's say you grow up with a father who was physically present but emotionally unavailable. How can you integrate an emotion that was so far distant in the past? Emotions like loneliness, dismissal, or minimization. When the emotion is subconscious and unintegrated for a prolonged period of time, this loneliness and this dismissal that might have been living below your awareness, it might be showing up as strong emotional reactions in your life around men that otherwise feel disproportionate. You either trying to create hyperindependence or craving validation or both at the same time. You might have a sensitivity to being ignored. Because this emotion of loneliness was never named or completed, the body keeps scanning the environment for the same threat, emotional absence from others, especially from men. So if this happens to be the case, a resolved integration cycle is gonna look something like this identifying and labeling cleanly and accurately. I felt lonely, I was unseen, I felt dismissed. There's no minimizing or exaggerating the emotion. It's just identifying and labeling. Then you accept and you allow. You allow the sensations of the loneliness to be present in your body, maybe it's heaviness, maybe it's fleeting sensations, maybe it's tension in your shoulders or in your chest. You're not trying to escape the emotions, you're just trying to recognize them. This lets your body know that you are safe through the sensations of the emotion. This is the step of acceptance. Then is investigation. You're organizing the signal, you're becoming curious about where it lives and how it lives and how you're gonna be able to express it. You're becoming more aware of the emotion and how it lives within your body. Then there's expression. You might look like you're letting your grief surface and take actions from it, but this is your body discharging that energy into a healthy expression. This is a functional energy release. Maybe it looks like crying, maybe it looks like anger being acknowledged and letting out in some sort of way. Some sort of healthy expression of the emotion. Then the last step is integration and completion. When you have completely made sense of what you went through and why you've created a different narrative around it, you will no longer have a constant charge when you think about your father or about your childhood or when you think about other men in your life, especially if it's been projected onto them all this time. Your memory still might exist, but you have a different meaning. You no longer have a threat response around it. Your body will feel a release. This is you finishing the cycle. Once you've reached the completion marker, which is the final step of this cycle, you're not going to be forcing forgiveness or minimizing your loss. You would have fully felt and completed the emotion of loneliness within your body with the purpose of healing and the outcome of healing. The difference between integration, suppression, and rumination is huge. But people still confuse them, and that is one of the main reasons why people stay psychologically and physiologically dysregulated while believing that they're coping well. Suppression is the blocking of the outward expression of the emotion. Once the emotion is fully integrated, the valence, the charge loses its power over your nervous system. The sadness, the loneliness, the anger, all of that can be present without it collapsing your life. Anger can rise and fall and it doesn't hijack your physiology because you know how the activation completes its cycle. Your system stays flexible. It has a memory of how to return itself to coherence. The coherence is not you being in positivity all the time. It's order. A coherent nervous system is not defined by pleasant feelings all of the time. It's defined by clean timings and completions of cycle and efficient signaling by your nervous system, by your body that you know how to integrate and what each of that means. What the nervous system cannot tolerate, and inshallah I've made it very clear, is that you have to deal with is the unfinished emotion. Unresolved grief creates chaos because the body stays mobilized. That can be grief, that can be sadness, that could be anger, that could be irritation, that could be any of the above emotions. When those emotions are integrated, you can hold all of them with steadiness and you realize that you've had the capacity to hold them all of your life. You just have been accidentally and subconsciously suppressing them. Integration is when an emotion has been felt and completed enough that the body no longer needs to stay on guard. With that I pray to Allah Swanla, O Allah, help my heart and my mind finish what I have been carrying. O Allah, allow what was interrupted to complete itself within my mind. Grant me the coherence and clarity in my mind and wisdom in my actions. Let my emotions become guidance and let my past release itself without a hold on my present. Amin Yarabularmin. Please keep me in your draas, I will talk to you guys next time.
