The Healing Power of Emotion

6 Emotion as Integration

A Possible Answer to the Question, What Is Emotion?

Daniel J. Siegel

IN THIS CHAPTER WE WILL explore the fundamental question, “What is emotion?” As you read this collection of words, it may become apparent that the approach of this entry is different from the usual stance of a professional text: I will be directly addressing you in order to efficiently, and hopefully effectively, dive into the subjective nature of how we experience feelings. People use the term emotion in so many different and often seemingly conflicted ways. For this reason, from the outset, I’d like to suggest that you consider the usual English use of this term, emotion, as perhaps more problematic than it is helpful. You may wonder if the suggestion here is that emotion per se does not exist. And this is exactly the point: what is “per se” about the notion of emotion? What—in actual reality—is this absolutely real experience we have that in our language usage evokes the term emotion or emotional or other similar derivatives of the root word, emotion?

As a contributing author and one of the coeditors of this volume, and as the Founding Editor of the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology of which this book is a part, I feel particularly motivated to take this opportunity to invite you to try out this perhaps new way of communicating complex ideas: We will be honoring our subjective experience as much as we pay respect to our “objective” data of science. As historians of science know, science itself is a human endeavor, an unfolding story based on empirical explorations that use hypotheses and concepts to categorize and often quantify aspects of our perceived reality. Science has advanced our understanding of the world, and ourselves, in important ways that organize our view in a manner that subjective internal reflection alone could not have done. But, on the other hand, reflection on the subjective nature of our lives can also uniquely illuminate the nature of reality, especially that of the human mind, in ways that science cannot. Though subjective reflection is different from objective observation, both have important contributions to make to our deep understanding of the nature of emotion, the mind, human development, and the cultivation of well-being. In this way, we can attempt to integrate these two useful ways of knowing about reality into an inclusive approach that honors both points of view.

If this chapter can elicit in you a new and expanded perspective on the concept of “emotion,” then the goal of this project will be met. Ultimately you will synthesize your own point of view; now and here I’d like to invite you to consider expanding your notion of what “emotion” is. We can journey together in addressing the ways in which our collective views, our scientific and subjective stories of “emotion,” color our thinking and our actions.

Subjectivity, Science, and Story

Right now you have an inner world of subjective experience. No matter how many types of brain scans or other forms of technology we develop, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and the quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG), we have a nonquantifiable inner world of our subjective reality. The truth is that we actually do not know how neural firing and subjective experience create each other. Though some scientists may posit a unidirectional flow from neural activity to subjective mental life, such an assumption may be only partially true. It also can be said with solid evidence that our subjective internal mental life uses the brain’s activity to create itself. When you think of this morning’s breakfast, you are seeing these words and experiencing the flow of energy and information that evokes a neural firing pattern in the seeing and in the recalling. Ultimately, neural firing and mental activity mutually influence each other. The important point here is that no one—not scientists, Nobel Prize winners, taxi drivers, or philosophers—actually know how it is that the physical property of neural firing and electrical activity somehow influence the creation of subjective mental life—or vice versa. We have identified correlations between brain areas and mental processes. But these are just that: correlations of timing and not explanations of mechanisms of how this process occurs. And so we need to keep an open mind about brain–mind relations and not carry lingering prejudices about the nature of causal direction: Each influences the other.

So what happens when, given the opportunity, we ask scientists or clinicians or the general unsuspecting public about what emotion is? As with the examination of science and subjectivity, I have been struck by the numerous and conflicting stories that actually emerge. Emotion has been described by various therapists as “the feelings we have inside,” “the ways the body influences the mind,” and the “motivation to do something, to act, to ‘evoke motion.’” Some neuroscientists have suggested that emotion is the way in which soma shapes psyche through the input of physiological states. Others have proposed that emotional circuits coordinate and synchronize neural firing patterns. Developmental researchers sometimes view emotion as the glue that binds an individual across phases of growth. Social researchers may see emotion as that which connects people to each other in dyads, families, or larger groupings. The response of nonprofessionals is often initiated with a pause and then the use of ideas such as a “feeling” or a “mood” or a “reaction.” Each of these views carries some truth for the speaker, but clearly the term emotion does not have a precisely shared meaning even for those who use the concept in their daily work.

In this chapter I am going to ask you to take a step back from what you’ve learned from daily living, from clinical practice, and from science in order to take a perhaps fresh look at this familiar word, emotion. It also may be helpful to gain some distance from the stories embedded in your mental models of the mind, of how the mind works, or what the mind is, so that we can attempt to see the world of feelings from a more basic or “bottom-up” perspective. The outer layer of the brain that is most evolved in mammals is the neocortex. This outer bark of the brain is structured such that incoming perceptual data rise up into the cortical six-layered columns and are met, straight on, by the “top-down” flow of information coming from prior learning as it passes downward from the higher cortical layers. It is here, at the crashing of these two streams of information flow, where one can imagine we shape our perception of reality. It is also likely that this bottom-up shaping by top-down flow is how stories, in part, mold our vision and create our knowledge of how things are. These mental models shape our perception and form the architecture of language that both expands and constrains the way we see the world. In many ways, not grasping on to judgments—a fundamental part of mindfully approaching a topic—is the way we loosen the influence of the top-down constraints that keep us from seeing the world with fresh eyes. These are the fresh eyes we will need in this chapter as we dive into the pursuit of an open view of what emotion is.

What Is Emotion

If you say, “I had an emotional experience today,” what exactly do you mean by that? And would someone else know what you meant by your use of the term emotional? We might guess that, yes, we all share some gut sense of what that statement means. And if I tell you this story, what would you think: I left a group of colleagues at lunch to go to my office to take a conference call. As I walked to the counter to pay the bill, I had a nonemotional experience. What does that mean? Well, you might say, nothing “emotional” happened. Okay. Now—what does that mean? And then if I said that on my short walk to the counter to pay, a woman called out my name and said, “Dan, is that you? I’m Sara Smith.” Is this an emotional experience? If I didn’t know Sara—or if I did, how might that fact make this moment emotional? Well, it turns out that Sara was the widow of my first psychotherapist—and, in fact, earlier today this is exactly what happened. She was sitting at lunch with her granddaughter, and I decided to be late to the conference call in order to take this unique emotional moment and connect with her and let both of them know what a wonderful man and therapist Dr. Smith had been for me. Sara’s eyes welled up with tears and her granddaughter looked both proud and longing. I also felt a huge wave of sensations in my body, eyes filling, a feeling of sadness and gratitude and appreciation that Sara had stopped me and a feeling of transformation, of being different than when I first headed for the counter to pay the bill. This sense of transformation had an almost indescribable quality that the arrangement in my being was now different; somehow I was changed, and I’d likely be able to mark that moment in my life within memory as a significant event, something I might reflect on years later, or in a story I’d tell to others, perhaps you. Transformation feels as if some basic architecture is being remodeled rather than just new furniture being put in the house or moved from room to room. There is some deep structural change, even if quite subtle, that alters the backbone of existence. I would not be the same since this experience; something in me had changed, some awareness of the passage of time, of the therapy with Dr. Smith, of the changes in him, of his illness, his death, of all of our mortality, of the youthful glint in his granddaughter’s eyes, the sadness in Sara’s.

And so meeting the two women in the restaurant was emotional. We might all agree on that. Here the term emotion and its derivatives are reflecting something very powerful, something universal, something we even can agree upon in using the term in this example. But what makes this encounter emotional? What is emotion?

This story raises a first issue: Emotion is not a noun, but rather, a verb. It may be useful to sit with this thought that emotion is a verb for a moment. Emotion-related words and concepts are active processes, not fixed entities. Seeing emotion as a verb opens our mind to a fluid, moving mechanism that acts, changes, transforms.

Okay. But what is emotion, even if it is a verb? We can turn to a variety of views and summarize the various approaches from science and clinical experience and say that there actually is little firm agreement, even among some of the scientists and clinicians contributing to this volume, on how the word emotion actually is defined. Depending upon the larger story of the particular discipline of science, emotion can be seen as a process that links people together (anthropology, sociology), a fundamental part of the continuity that connects a person across development (attachment research, developmental psychology, developmental psychopathology), or a way that the body proper—our somatic physiology—is connected to the brain and coordinated within its various layers (neuroscience with its branches in affective and social neuroscience especially).

You may notice that there is an inherent side issue embedded in each of these differing stories of science. The term consilience refers to the search for common principles across distinct disciplines. After trying to find some summation across the sciences so that I could finish writing The Developing Mind (1999), I felt frustrated with this lack of convergence in definitions. It seemed that I would never be able to finish writing the book or the chapter with an overview of emotion given that there was no agreement on what emotion is. I even felt like the project would fall apart, or I’d be destined to try to continue to write it for yet another 5 years, threatening a sense of well-being in my marriage (in my head) and my sense of equilibrium. This was an emotional moment indeed. Surely something as basic as emotion had to have some common definition that we could all come to some sort of agreement upon. Fortunately, one concept—not identified directly but pointed to indirectly by each of the various disciplines—began to become clear in the journey to discover what emotion might actually be. The consilient finding that emerged from that effort is that of “connection” or “linkage” of different elements into a functional whole. The linguistic term we use for the linkage of differentiated parts into a functional whole is the word integration.

Though science and subjectivity narrate the story of “emotion” in very different ways, we can see that the consilient scientific view may indeed be the common, though not stated, perspective that emotion is integrative. What this means, literally, is that emotion, emotional processes, emotional regulation, emotional relationships, emotional experiences, emotionally meaningful events, emotional development, and emotional well-being each involve integration. It isn’t even that emotion leads to integration. What I am suggesting is that emotion is integration. In this way, for example, an emotional experience is one that shifts our state of integration. Emotional development promotes integration. Emotional well-being reveals an integrated individual. We can increase integration in cases of emotionally meaningful events and when we feel emotionally well. Similarly, we can decrease integration when we are emotionally distraught or emotionally unwell. Emotion is the shifting in integrative states: Sometimes integration is enhanced, sometimes diminished. Herein we can see the verb nature of emotion: a shift in the state of integration.

This proposal is, yes, a bunch of words making yet another story, one that explains and doesn’t describe. This is a consilient story, finding the hidden but shared views from separate disciplines and is one interpretation of the science and of our subjective descriptions. I ask myself, “Dan, why did you put this narrative perspective in now when you were building up this whole view of the importance of bottom-up direct description of experience and there you go, giving a top-down mental model?” Why didn’t I save this for later in the chapter? I’m not sure. But stay with me for now—perhaps this view of emotion as integration, the linkage of differentiated components of a system—will help to expand and illuminate other stories we may have. And even the feeling inside of me now as I type is something like this: I felt a fear that you’d jump ship, saying “This chapter is just weird, what a waste of time,” and so I wanted to throw in now, near the beginning, the essence of the chapter, the take-home message, so that you would feel more comfortable staying with the experience, thinking it to be worthwhile enough to stick with it. I am making an emotional appeal, an invitation to link your mind with mine, to integrate us together. Even this “emotional appeal” can be restated as an “integrative appeal.” I think if I were reading this, my own logical circuits would welcome this concluding finding here, in the beginning, and then I’d feel readier for becoming more vulnerable to raw, direct experience: I’d have a logical framework within which I could abandon logic temporarily. And so there is an emotional reason I’ve put the punch line of the story in at this point: I want to invite you to integrate this idea into your perspective. It’s like the old saying that you have to believe it to see it. Once the pattern can be stated, we can see the image in the picture. Without the identification of the pattern, its underlying organization remains invisible to us beneath the layers of seemingly disparate dimensions of this thing called emotion.

For my students and for myself in the last decade, this approach of translating the use of the commonly used but ill-defined noun emotion as the verb of integration has been extremely powerful. One aim of this chapter—side by side with the invitation to explore direct experience together—is to propose a precise definition of the term emotion: Emotion (verb) is integration. Emotional experiences involve dynamic shifts in integration. Such a new perspective actually helps us see what is meant by the term and what we can do to promote “emotional well-being.”

Let’s go forward and see how you feel as we go.

Being Mindful of Emotion

In this chapter I’m asking you to consider trying to be mindful—to be open-minded, intentional, and awake—about emotion. This means that we intentionally seek to notice the categories that shape our preconceived ideas of how we structure our perceptions. We avoid premature categorizations, come to an experience with an emergent sense of novelty and freshness, and remain attentive to our state of intention and the specific focus of awareness. This mindful stance gives us the possibility to see more directly the true nature of reality, accepting that much of what shapes our perceptions lies beneath the radar of our conscious awareness. Such a mindful awareness also enables us to become freer from the linguistic categorizations that constrict our view of the world. Being mindful of emotion entails identifying old beliefs and not grasping on to these perspectives so that we can see things as they are with more clarity, vividness, and detail. Naturally much of what goes on in our bodies, including our neural processes in the brain itself, is not a part of conscious awareness. Yet an openness to these physiological experiences is an intentional stance we can take: open to whatever arises, aware of the limited nature of consciousness and of linguistic-based explanations, pausing before making judgments, and being receptive rather than reactive.

Even with an open stance embracing reflection on the inner realm of experience, our nonconscious stories can still shape how we perceive the target of our attention—in this case, the experience of emotion. Becoming mindful entails more than just simply being aware. As we focus attention, say, on our experience of what is meant by the word, emotion, we can let the layers of prior learning that filter our experience also enter awareness. In this way the inner thoughts, perceptual biases, and interpretations of raw experience into the language of explanation become a focus of our attention. But here is a helpful distinction along our journey. Notice the difference in the inner experience that emerges when you see these two similar words: description versus explanation. You can try to describe your experience, what if feels like, the timing of what comes up when, where you experience things in your body, in the “space of the mind,” or even in your interpersonal relationships. These are the common “what, when, where, and how” elements of description distinct from the more predominant linguistically organized left hemisphere’s favorite pursuit, exploring “why.” The left side of our cortex appears to specialize in the cause–effect explanations of syllogistic reasoning that is so coveted in science, and in schools, and perhaps in modern society in general. For now let’s leave aside the whys of the explanation of cause–effect connections, this essence of left-dominant syllogistic reasoning. Here we will dive into description. If we are lucky, we may also move into the realm of a more open definition of what emotion actually is. Ultimately we will interweave the fullness of our experience in both left and right hemisphere perceptual modes to attain an integrated sense of our inner worlds.

Let me suggest that in the Norton Series—including this richly diverse edited volume, The Mindful Brain (Siegel, 2007), and The Developing Mind (Siegel, 1999)—there are plenty of scientific explanations and references to fill a left hemisphere’s dream of exploring the “why.” As the experience within the reading of those published works is already available, here in this chapter we will try to stick more closely to experience, use a descriptive role for words initially, and then see if broader concepts can then mindfully emerge as an explanatory framework. Let’s just try to speak directly to each other here: me to you and you to me, by way of my imagining your possible response to these experiences and notions.

The Science and Story of Emotion

If you are continuing to read on, then I imagine you are game for the experience of looking straight into face of this question, “What is emotion.” Some readers may have stopped early on in this chapter, seeking a more logic-focused, science-based, linguistic view. I am hoping that you will find that though this may be different from the usual approach, the unfolding experience of this chapter will be well worth the risk. And what is the risk? How are we vulnerable when we try to describe direct experience rather than rely on logical explanation? One risk is that we have to be honest with ourselves. Another is that we have to be open to what is, rather than relying on what has been defined by others. Our cortices are structured to organize perception based on prior learning. Being open to new learning, to examining an old term like emotion with fresh eyes, takes intentional focus and purposeful energy. Let’s see how direct experience and description unfold in our quest to answering the question, “What is emotion?”

If sensing direct experience requires inward reflecting, what if looking inward leads us to come up with nothing? What if we peer inside and we encounter emptiness? Or what shall we do if we sense pain, or confusion, or just plain cardboard boring bland unexciting run-of-the-mill dull internal layers of drab blanched hues of a meaningless existence? These are more of the risks of a direct-experience approach. Better to just rely on some experts’ opinions, leaning on the data and group consensus, rather than the riskier process of peering inside and seeing with new eyes. Wouldn’t it be “safer” to just stick to the science? Isn’t it more comfortable or noble to have research backing us up than saying something like, “I have a sensation in my belly that washes over my awareness in ways I can barely articulate.” And is that sensation emotion?

Integration and the Subjective Feeling of Feelings

Consider a time when you felt emotional in the recent past. What was the experience like for you? How did your state of being impact others at the time? What happened before you became emotional? What was the outcome of that emotional experience?

These questions could be asked about a minor event, like seeing a sunset—or not seeing one. My wife called me on the phone last night and asked if I’d like to come to watch the sun set over the sea near where we live. Our son had just gone out, and I assumed he had taken the car that he and I share. In fact, I had just been thinking of finally getting a car of my own after 2 years of riding my bike to work while he drove his sister to school. So I said “no” to my wife, telling her that I could not go to see the sunset as I had no car. It turned out that both she and our son saw what they both said was one of the most gorgeous sunsets of their lives. On this plane, right now, as I am typing these words to you, I just looked out the window on my way to teach in Vancouver, and I am seeing a fabulous explosion of reds, blues, and purples as the Earth turns and the sun goes down. Right now I feel quite emotional. What is the emotion? In many ways, there are no words to define what I am feeling with normal English. I could say something like: nostalgia for the present with a sense of longing to connect to my wife and son and share with them an awareness of the passage of time in the glorious hues of nature’s rainbow. And what would that tell you? What is this “emotion,” as I am now feeling it? Well here is an elaboration of the story that puts it into a connection with this chapter’s timing: When I realized that the car had actually been there in the driveway for me to take, I was frustrated with myself for assuming I’d had no means to get over to the beach. I had not been open to how things were but made a judgment, clung to a previously established expectation. I was not mindful. This whole tale is one of integration and the lack of it: I could not share the romantic experience with my wife, felt absorbed in my own preoccupations about the car so that I didn’t check on its actual availability, and my internal desire to share that transition of day to night with my wife was unmet. And the next day I was to leave for a trip to Canada. This was an emotional experience as it was filled with issues about integration—or lack of it. She as a differentiated person could not be linked to me. Integration was impaired. And so we can see this experience as another illustration of “emotion” as occurring when our state of integration is significantly altered—either raised or diminished.

Beyond such a subtle emotional experience, we often can draw on more intense traumatic events from the past to explore the recollection of emotion. Here we see how the feeling of an experience that is overwhelming blocks our sense of internal coherence. We feel distraught, blocked, terrified, shattered. In this shattering of our internal state, various elements of memory are literally separated from each other. Perceptual modalities can be isolated, such as sight from hearing, touch from smell. In interpersonal trauma we can feel betrayed as the individual with whom we expect to rely upon hurts us or neglects us. Such betrayal is, at its heart, impaired interpersonal integration.

A clinical example may illustrate this idea. A 25-year-old patient who recently came to therapy to deal with her anxiety about her new boyfriend arrived on her third visit highly distressed. After initially dating and then becoming romantically involved with him, she felt hesitant to move forward as he pressed for her to become physically intimate. On a rainy evening the night before our appointment, at his apartment she felt herself “slipping away” and became lost in what felt like a dream: She had the sensations of being sexually assaulted and became disoriented, confused as to where she was, lost in a flashback of an event she could not recall. I saw her on the following day and in the session she seemed disheveled, distant, disorganized. As her recollections of the night before unfolded, she returned to a state of immersion in a terrifying set of painful physical sensations. In this traumatic recall, her usual sense of time and self were distorted—disintegrated—as the usually linked elements of her consciousness and memory were unraveling. This “emotionally distressful” flashback was filled with elements of dis-integration—in memory, in her awareness of time and space, in her ability to be in the present moment. This was an emotionally significant moment in her life, in her therapy, and in her stepping into the integrative process of healing.

The definition of emotional experience as shifts in integration also reveals for us that something “emotional” occurs when integration is enhanced. When our internal state reaches more highly integrated configurations, we can have an “emotionally meaningful experience.” My encounter with my old therapist’s widow and granddaughter reveals such an experience. Also, when the dis-integrating effects of trauma or grief are healed, we can see that integration is enhanced. Healing is integration; psychotherapy is facilitated integration catalyzed by the relationship between two people. As we shall soon see, integration is at the heart of a coherent mind and living a harmonious life. In this way, we can see that we tend to use the term emotion or emotional for moments when the state of integration is altered—when the degree of differentiation and/or linkage of components in a system such as the brain or our relationships is changed—and we are changed as a result.

Imagine someone with whom you feel emotionally close. What does that relationship actually entail that leads you to use this descriptive term? For many, such meaningful and rewarding relationships involve the essence of two people being intertwined. We feel safe and seen. Feeling safe comes along with being receptive and relaxed, open to others and to our own experience as it unfolds. Being seen gives a feeling of being real, of being connected, of not being alone. When we are safe and seen, when we have the sense of “feeling felt” and being psychologically held in mind by another, we develop a sense of inner security. In many ways, we have linked the differentiated mind of another within our own: We have integrated a secure relationship into the fabric of our psyche.

The opposite of these states of emotional closeness can be subtle or severe. They can include feeling unsafe and closed off, guarded, and well-defended. When we are not seen, we can come to feel isolated and alone. If we are not seen at a moment of intense arousal—of joy and excitement or sadness, fear, anger, or distress—then we can come to feel a state of shame. Our eye gaze turns away and there can be a heaviness in the chest and nausea in the belly. We may even have an internal thought of ourselves as being defective and unlovable. Clinically we may see this set of sensations as the state of shame in which a specific coordination of physiological processes coalesce within that “emotional state.” These categorical emotions serve to organize our system—even into synchronized states of impaired overall integration. I know this may sound contradictory, so bear with me. The categorical emotions—the classic states of fear, anger, disgust, joy, surprise, sadness, and shame—have characteristic neural firing patterns that become manifest and organized. These are cohesive affective states: They stick together. Yet we can have certain states—for example, shame—actually restrict our degrees of freedom. So while these emotions are organizing our system, and thus changing our degree of integration, in this case they are diminishing the level of integration achieved. Such diminishments can be proposed to include the uncomfortable emotions that may serve to paralyze our thinking, distort our perceptions, imprison our behaviors. For those of us with shame, these enslavements of self-concept and other-directed interactions lock us into rigid patterns of behavior, and we become stuck. Within therapy, the underlying sense of a defective self can emerge and become the direct focus of attention.

Here we see that fixed patterns of thought, perception, feeling, and action organize a way of being into “unhealthy” patterns derived from past experiences of impaired integration. The persistent organization of these states makes them seem to be cohesive—a state not to be confused with that of the integrative state of coherence. In cohesion, elements stick together and may or may not be adaptive. These can be seen as our self states, our repeating states of mind, and our categorical emotions described above. In the case of the cohesive state of shame, rigidity is the result. With increased integration emerges a state of coherence marked by a sense of fluidity and flexibility. The differentiation of two people who then come together as a functional whole, a “we,” illustrates such a coherent harmony of an integrated system.

And love as an emotion? Yes, we can even see love as a form of integration. When we feel love for another, our whole being longs for connecting ourselves with that person in mind and in body. We show affection through touch, through the resonance of two minds, through the expression of our intention of good will, with the sharing of loving kindness. These are each reflections of enhanced integration.

The Emotional River That Flows between Chaos and Rigidity

Let’s review the essential proposal that emotion is integration. We can suggest that whenever the terms emotion or emotional are used in their various combinations, the individual is very likely referring to shifts in the process of integration—the linkage of differentiated elements of a system to each other. Naturally people do not tend to think of the process of emotion as integration. Instead, we think of the sensations that wash over us, that fill our awareness, that are the topic of conversations, the focus of therapy, the stuff of novels and cinema. But I’d like to suggest that you consider the term emotion and its use in your own experience. Does this translation of emotion as integration work for you? When an experience is emotional, do you notice that the degree of integration in the system you are in is changing—that it is either enhanced or diminished? In this way emotion is a window into something changing. Psychotherapy is inherently an emotional opportunity in that we can help promote lasting change through the cultivation of integration in a person’s life. But what are these changes of emotion? How do we know if they are good, bad, or irrelevant? Science offers us an underlying framework that both describes and explains the centrality of integration in the functioning of systems such as minds, brains, relationships, families, schools, and communities. Complexity theory offers a mathematical view into these questions and into the importance of integration. When an open system is capable of chaotic behavior, we call this a complex dynamical system. Such complex systems include clouds, a mind, a brain, or a relationship. They are called nonlinear in that small inputs can lead to large and unpredictable changes in the system. As such, nonlinear systems move through time, and their behavior is governed by a self-organizational process. Self-organization moves the system toward maximizing complexity. This odd and nonintuitive idea can be made more accessible when we read the details of this complexity theory’s predictions: When a system links its differentiated elements together, it achieves maximal complexity. Herein lies the central role of integration as it moves the system in a unique state. With this integrative state of maximal complexity the system is the most flexible, adaptive, and stable. When I first read that, I fell off my chair and thought, “What an eloquent definition of well-being!” If we read on, we find that this flow toward maximal complexity occurs with integration and actually achieves the qualities we can remember with the acronym FACES: flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable.

And so this perspective yields a working definition we can consider of emotional well-being as an integrated system. And what happens when integration is lowered, when maximal complexity is not being promoted? When the system is not integrated, it reveals rigidity, chaos, or both. For example, if we are emotionally distressed, integration is decreased and we move into states of rigidity, chaos, or both. Even a random dive into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) reveals that any symptom of an “emotional disorder” has this profile. Such a review suggests that we could see integration as the heart of well-being that creates a flexible and adaptive state. This flow of a coherent mind is a river bounded by rigidity on one side and chaos on the other—giving us a new approach toward the evaluation of emotional health. We take “the pulse” of integration by assessing rigidity–chaos parameters in a person’s or relationship’s life. Individuals at various moments of their lives and in various settings reveal chaos and/or rigidity or they reveal the harmony of a FACES flow. Chaos might be seen as unstable affective outbursts, intrusive thoughts, impulsive behaviors. Rigidity can be revealed as repeating patterns of inflexible thinking or behaving, stuck ways of relating to others, self-destructive habits. Combinations of chaos and rigidity can be revealed in disturbances of self-regulation and in functions such as thinking or controlling attention.

And what does an integrated system look like? At the heart of this integrated FACES flow is the term coherence, which itself is an acronym for its own characteristics: connected, open, harmonious, engaged, receptive, emergent (something fresh and new), noetic (a sense of authentic knowing), compassionate, and empathic. These qualities help describe the nature of a life well lived, a feeling of exuberance and vitality, a state of flexibility and openness. This is the harmonious flow of an integrated system.

In contrast, consider times when you may have felt emotionally unwell. What was the sense of those states? For me, perhaps through the biased and distorting lens of my own top-down story of emotion as integration, such moments fit into this view of chaos and/or rigidity. The experience and concept are these: An integrative state moves like a river with a coherent and harmonious flow bounded on either side by the banks of chaos or rigidity. Trauma is a good example of an impairment in integration—a blockage to emotional well-being. As we saw in the example of the 25-year-old patient, described above, unresolved states can be prone to intrusive memories and images. We can also experience a shutting down into rigid states of avoidance and withdrawal. In many ways, unresolved trauma reveals a mind moving outside the central integrative flow of coherence. But what is actually flowing in this flow of well-being?

The FACES Flow of Integration

Emotional health can be seen as a form of resilience in which an integrated system—our nervous system, our relationships, our minds—moves in a particular flow. As we’ve seen, this flow can be described as flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable—that is, FACES. Certain regions of the brain participate in creating such an integrated state that links widely separated areas to each other. These regions are, literally, integrative in that they physically connect distinct, often anatomically distant, areas to one another via synaptic linkages. Of note: It is the integrative regions that also play a role in self-regulation, and it is also these integrative areas that may continue to grow into our adulthood. And further, childhood trauma and neglect have been found to impair the growth of the integrative fibers of the brain.

An important example of a regulatory integrative region is the front-most part of the frontal lobe of the neocortex: the prefrontal cortex just behind our foreheads. The middle area of this prefrontal region literally links the energy and informational flow from the cortex with the subcortical limbic, brainstem, and somatic regions. The prefrontal region also creates representations of other minds, of other nervous systems’ states, so that we can add the social to this list. Linkage of social, somatic, brainstem, limbic, and cortical representations into a functional whole is a wonderful example of what we mean by the term neural integration.

And here we see that the neural regions considered essential for executive functions and for self-regulation are inherently integrative. We can propose that integrative regions—ones that link widely distributed and differentiated areas to each other—permit a coordination and balance to be achieved in the nervous system. “Affect regulation” is achieved via the coordination and balance of various areas of our nervous and social systems through the integrative fibers of the brain. Coordination involves the synchronous layering of firing in the nervous system to enable complex functions to be achieved. Balance implies the raising of some regions’ activities with the simultaneous diminishment of others. Examples of this coordination and balance in the nervous system include the function of the middle prefrontal area in balancing the accelerating sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system with the decelerating parasympathetic/brakes branch. Across the hemispheres, the integrating fibers of the corpus callosum enable the homologous—or matching—areas of the right to mutually inhibit the firing of that area in the left hemisphere. With coordination and balance, integrative regions contribute to the regulatory functions of our brains, bodies, and relationships with each other.

This perspective on integration also raises an important dimension of our internal experience. We have considered the idea that emotion is a verb, not a noun. Integration is an active, changing process that moves through time. It is composed of two fundamental dynamic processes: differentiation of components of a system and then their linkage together in time. This layering of connection and interconnection permits coordination and balance to move a system through time as it achieves a dynamic and harmonious flexibility in its functioning. This is how integration can be seen as the heart of health—in a body, a brain, a mind, a relationship, or a group such as a community or a society. When we “emotionally process” something within any of these levels of experience, we are altering the state of integration of our system.

The Undefined Mind

But what elements of the system are differentiated and linked? We can sense a flow of something, but what is it? Notice how you feel when you read this word: YES! What do you notice in your experience? Now read this and see if you feel anything different: NO…No…No…. You may sense a difference in the quality of energy flowing through you. So energy flow, something even physicists are challenged to define but that we can feel directly, is part of the dynamic of integration. And what else? Yes and no have information embedded in them. They are linguistic symbols of something other than themselves. You may have experienced various bodily sensations when reading the words, then images, feelings, and even thoughts. These are various experiences that have information in them, such as that of an image or a word-based thought. If you saw red when you read “No,” you should know that there is no red in your head, just the informational representation of the color.

We now come to a central element of this whole approach: the mind. Here is a strange and embarrassing research finding: The mind has not been defined in the training of over 95% of 77,000 therapists I’ve surveyed in lectures around the globe. In each of our various disciplines of mental health practice there is an odd absence of definition: What is the “mental” or even the “health” of what we are practicing? In interpersonal neurobiology we have had the opportunity to learn that a working definition of the mind can be a useful starting point: The mind can be defined, in part, as a relational and embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information. This definition was of use to a study group of over 40 scientists gathering for 4 years to study the relationship between mind and brain. These individuals represented over a dozen sciences and found this working definition relevant in their individual pursuits. And in clinical practice, this definition offers us a shared starting point with which to define the entity we focus upon and to even then propose what a healthy mind might be.

As energy and information flow within the body–brain and relationships, various degrees of differentiation and linkage occur. Integration is a dynamic process of the mind that emerges as differentiated elements of this flow are linked together. In this way, emotion, clarified as integration, reveals how our feelings are the music of the mind—the fundamental pattern of energy and information flow that is at the heart of our subjective lives. We can propose that a healthy mind comes from an integrated flow in which the music of our minds achieves a state of harmony and coherence.

Types of Emotion/Integration

You may be wondering, “What does Dan do with issues such as those universal affects Darwin described over 100 years ago?” or “What about that whole business of motivational states and emotion that Jaak Panksepp and Steve Porges so beautifully describe?” And how about the work of affect regulation embedded within relational aspects of emotional communication eloquently described by Allan Schore, Ed Tronick, and Colwyn Trevarthen? And the clinical work of pioneers such as Diana Fosha, Pat Ogden, and Marion Solomon in using these ideas of attachment, the body, and the centrality of emotion in the therapeutic process? (Please see this volume’s chapters for these individuals’ most current thinking on these and other related topics).

Here is one way in which we can approach these important questions. In common language, the term emotion often evokes the connotation of one of the seven basic states Darwin indeed described over a century ago. These are sometimes called the categorical emotions and include the familiar feelings of joy, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and shame we discussed earlier in this chapter. These are also called the “universal” affects because the expression of these internal states—the affects—has been identifiable in cultures throughout the world. When a finding is universal, we sometimes view it as a hardwired, innate, genetically determined feature. Other basic universal affects that reveal a common internal state could also include states such as pride, confusion, rage, and betrayal. There are many states an individual is capable of experiencing that can be readily detected by other people.

How do we view such universal affective expressions in light of the proposal of this chapter that emotion is integration? Here is the idea: Each of these categorical emotions reveals the way in which we create common pathways of neural firing that link together states of activation into a functional whole we call an emotional state of mind. For example, the specific neural firings that cluster together for anger are different from those areas that link together for joy or for sadness. Each categorical emotion is created by a form of integration—the linkage of differentiated circuits—that is characteristically present for that particular state. A categorical emotion reflects this organized shift in the system’s state of integration. We can even see how particular states of mind in one person can be perceived and then instantiate a similar state in the physiological response of another person. This basic form of affective resonance may be the underlying mechanisms by which two differentiated people become linked. But notice that we do not become the other person: Integration is not the same as homogenization. Each person can retain a sense of individuation even in the face of intimate interconnection. Through mirror properties inherent in our nervous systems, we come to resonate with each others’ states, not become carbon copies. We then take the information from this altered state of interpersonal integration and access it through our insula, the passageway from the subcortical world from which affects arise to the cortical correlates of consciousness. It is through this flow from cortical perceptual mirror neuron activities to sub–cortical limbic–brainstem–bodily resonance and then back up to cortical representation that we come to feel the feelings of others, to be aware of our own internal state as a reflection of the internal world of another. As we take this vital subcortical data upward with interoception, the insula enables our prefrontal regions to receive the basic information needed to create images of the other’s point of view in something we call empathic imagination. In this way, the linkage through affective perception of body to body, cortex to subcortex, subcortex back to cortex, enables the highly complex integrated state of empathy to be achieved.

We can see that the sharing of affective states, of emotional resonance, is a fundamental form of integration. Such resonance occurs with subtle nonverbal expressions of our internal state and how they come to be perceived by others, creating interpersonal integration. And even categorical emotions, with their internal states of neural net firing and their external affective expressions, are highly cohesive states that can be shared between people, identified, and labeled. As differentiated circuits are linked together, the degree of arousal can motivate us to action; hence we have e-motion, in which integrative firing motivates us to move, to act, to behave in particular ways. If I am walking down the street and not much is happening, but then I see an old friend and feel a sense of surprise and joy, my state of integration has shifted, and I am now “emotional,” and it was an “emotionally meaningful experience.”

I went for a walk this Thanksgiving with an old friend and in the course of our long seaside stroll, he began to cry profusely as we discussed issues about the meaning of life and decision points in our development. At that point, the discussion indeed induced a shift in integration—and hence was emotionally meaningful. At any point of change, there is also the risk of shifting out of the harmonious FACES flow of maximizing complexity with integration. In this incident, my friend moved toward chaos. He said that before the tears came, he also had found himself shutting down—becoming rigid—in our discussion of meaning and development and our looking deeply into our life’s journeys. As our energy and information flow across time, we are in a dynamic process in which states of differentiation and linkage are forever changing. As we share those states and their dynamic shifts, as we blend the music of our minds with each other, we become open to unpredictable shifts that remind us we are all complex nonlinear systems in perpetual flux. When those states move in significant ways, we have an “emotional moment.” Along that time of change, though, we can move through periods of disequilibrium in which the flow of the system moves away from complexity and into rigidity, chaos, or shimmering in combinations of both.

As my friend and I continued the walking and the talking, we explored just this issue. Staying present within awareness through the moments that unfold within rigidity or chaos enable those states to move in their natural process toward an inherent push the mind exerts for integrative complexity. This movement directly describes the experience of affect regulation and its fundamental interpersonal nature. Because the mind’s energy and information flow is both embodied and relational, regulating this flow is both neural and interpersonal. We achieve new levels of integrative complexity by engaging in our internal and interpersonal worlds with the courage to transform our present state. Rather than this being just another early morning walk, my friend and I were both transformed because of the integrative nature of the talk. You might call this an “emotional walk” and, now that we’ve come this far in our journey together, I think we could agree that this is synonymous with a shared experience of integrative transformation. This is the natural path of healing, one that my friend and I could experience in the safety of each other’s company.

But sometimes our paths get stuck and we find ourselves in the rut of rigidity and/or chaos as an engrained pattern in our lives. Whether we have a formal DSM diagnosis (which, startlingly, fits this notion of chaos and/or rigidity throughout its pages) or our own unique blend of movement in some personalized stuck fashion, we can now view how emotional health depends upon integration.

The Music of the Mind: Our Basic or Primary Emotions

In The Developing Mind I suggest that one nomenclature for processes involving the idea of “emotion” is to consider the mind’s basic mechanisms like the primary colors of the rainbow. In that text the mind is defined as an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information. This energy and information flow is happening all the time, and its texture, the music of the mind, can be considered “primary emotion.” The layers of processing that occur include the following outline. (1) Attention is alerted such that the direction of energy and information flow is oriented in a specific pattern. This is called primary orientation. (2) Once the mind is focused in a particular way, the brain rapidly assesses whether this thing being attended to is “good” and should be amplified, or “bad” and to be avoided. This can be called appraisal and is the initial way in which meaning is created by the evaluative circuits of the brain. (3) As orientation and appraisal unfold, a layered process of arousal ensues in which the brain integrates itself—links differentiated regions together—to carry out effective information processing and behavioral enactment. Such arousal can lead to the classic universal emotional states described earlier, or to a unique configuration of firing that clusters differentiated regions together in a one-of-a-kind way (this one-off state is the more common experience). When we significantly shift integrative states, we would say that we have had an “emotional” experience. Because arousal itself is not a unitary process, the various energy levels and drives toward reward satisfaction can have layered degrees of engagements in our many states of mind.

With the less frequent universal states of categorical emotion and the more common unfolding of unique states of mind, we have a shared notion: Integration is being significantly altered. As the mind regulates energy and information flow within the body and between and among people, we can see that the dynamic process is the state of mind. Explored in great detail in The Developing Mind (1999), elaborated in The Mindful Brain (2007), and applied in therapy in Mindsight (in press), these states of mind can be shaped by the focus of our attention. In many ways, secure interpersonal relationships and mindful awareness harness a particular receptive state of mind that promotes integration and facilitates the flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable qualities of the flow of integration.

Integration, Mindsight, and Psychotherapy

Naturally this discussion of emotion as integration raises the fundamental question of what the transformative process of psychotherapy does to promote “emotional well-being.” If our proposal is true that emotion is integration, then we can take a fresh look at psychotherapy in general, and at specific forms of interventions, including evidence-based approaches in particular, to see if there would be a consilience among treatment modalities that work. In my own personal journey over this last decade teaching to a wide array of therapeutic associations, it has been both rewarding and informative to see that the concept of integration has been welcomed and accepted as a valid mechanism that illuminates the underlying efficacy of the work of a broad range of groups focusing on individual, couples, family, and group therapeutic settings. From psychodynamic therapy to EMDR, Adlerian to family systems work, seeing integration at the heart of well-being illuminates the various mechanisms beneath these seemingly disparate approaches.

Meta-analyses of psychotherapy reveal that it is the “nonspecific” psychotherapeutic relationship that is the most robust feature leading to transformation in psychotherapy. When we look at these criteria in detail, it becomes clear that each of them—from the therapeutic alliance to empathy to openness to feedback—reveals an aspect of integration at work. Let’s recall that integration is a very specific concept, not some California New-Age anything-goes term (I think I can say this as a native Californian still residing here). Integration is the linkage of differentiated parts. Within the common features of the therapeutic relationship, for example, alliance is the way in which two people align their goals; empathy is the means by which the therapist is receptive to the internal state of the patient and focuses attention on that shared state; through openness to feedback the therapist honors the input from the valued perspective of the client so that there is an explicit recognition that there is no “immaculate perception” and that the therapist and patient/client are collaborative partners in the journey toward healing. These aspects of the therapy each involve a process called “mindsight,” in which we nurture our innate capacity to perceive our own mind and the mind of others. In this way, at the heart of effective therapy may be the capacity to cultivate our human ability for empathy and insight as we promote kinder relationships—both interpersonally and with ourselves. Mindsight is an internally and interpersonally integrative process.

Beyond these important integrative aspects of the therapeutic relationship, we can also propose that effective psychotherapy of any sort creates lasting change by altering the synaptic connections in the brain. We can call this the way we SNAG the brain: stimulate neuronal activation and growth. As we join with the patient/client, the joint focus of attention stimulates neuronal firing. This state of shared focus alters neural activation such that neurons that fire together wire together in specific ways that harness higher states of integration. It isn’t just that we are saying, “Let’s go out and change the brain willy-nilly.” Instead, we can propose that such SNAGing promotes healing by literally activating anatomically and functionally distributed neuronal groupings and linking their simultaneous firing in a way that leads to growth in integrative neuronal fibers. These neuronal pathways are called interneurons in more localized regions, or they may be of longer length and interconnecting more widely separated and differentiated regions. These latter integrative neurons are found in various areas such as the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus, the corpus callosum, and the cerebellum. In research paradigms and in clinical settings we would seek to explore the ways in which the growth of these and other integrative fibers enables the systems of the person (body, mind, relationships) to achieve the FACES flow as a way of being. Markers of nonintegration—chaos and/or rigidity—would be our guideposts as we seek to identify and promote patterns in enhanced well-being through the integrative state of harmony and coherence.

One overall perspective we could propose is that interpersonal communication that honors the differentiated experiences of each person and then links them together is “integrative communication.” This type of communication links differentiated minds as energy and information are passed back and forth between two or more people. We can view this energy and information flow between and among people as stimulating energy and information flow within each person in a way that is itself integrative. That is, disparate regions of the individual’s nervous system distributed throughout the whole body—what we can simply call the Brain (with a capital B)—is in this state of mind linking differentiated areas together. In this manner, integrative communication facilitates integrative neuronal firing.

In the field of neuroplasticity, we have come to understand that patterns of neuronal firing lead to the activation of genetic material, such that protein is produced and new synapses are formed, old ones strengthened, and even neuronal stem cells are stimulated to grow into synaptically interwoven mature neurons. Based on a wide array of scientific findings and their consilient analysis, we could propose that integrative communication activates neuronal firing that is integrative and produces the conditions to promote the growth of integrative fibers in the nervous system. That’s our proposal for effective therapeutic mechanisms of action in a nutshell. The result is a change in the Brain of each individual involved. This is how “emotionally therapeutic” relationships are at their core integrative as they SNAG the Brain.

The Triangle of Well-Being and Domains of Integration

This proposal of emotion as integration leads to the natural question, “Is there a way to organize an approach to psychotherapy with integration at its core?” The answer is “yes,” and what follows is a very brief outline of such an approach. A chapter of The Mindful Brain (Siegel, 2007) and an entire book, Mindsight (Siegel, in press), are devoted to this approach and offer clinical examples illustrating each of the nine domains of integration described below. In this chapter, space considerations allow us to touch only lightly on the general notion of these areas.

To begin we need to propose a “triangle of well-being” which helps us envision the issues involved in integration. The triangle is essentially a metaphoric way of viewing energy and information flow. On one point of the triangle is the Mind: the regulation of energy and information flow. Another point is Relationships: the sharing of energy and information flow. And the third point is the “Brain” (or the distributed nervous system throughout the whole body), which embraces the neural mechanisms of energy and information flow. These are three irreducible elements. There is no need to create only one element. Instead, this regulation, sharing, and physical mechanism of energy and information flow can be seen as the essence of human experience. When we focus on well-being, we can think of a coherent Mind, empathic Relationships, and a flexible and adaptive nervous system, the integrated Brain. Each of these reflects a state of integrated energy and information flow.

A psychotherapist armed with this triangle of well-being can enter the system of the individual or couple or family at any point: Relationships, Mind, or Brain. Each basic element mutually influences the others. By examining layers of chaos and/or rigidity, the evaluation process assesses the nature of integration in various domains. Therapeutic strategic planning is an emergent process embedded within this evaluation and the relationship between therapist and client/patient(s). At least nine domains can be articulated as a helpful framework for approaching the SNAGging of the system—that is, the way in which we inspire clients/patients to rewire their nervous systems, create coherence in mind, and compassion and empathy in their relationships.

These domains of integration, described in richer detail in the texts named above, can then serve to orient areas of focus within therapy.

The integration of consciousness involves the linkage of differentiated aspects of attention into a state of mindful awareness in the moment. A virtual tripod is constructed in which the camera of the mind’s awareness is then able to offer a more vivid, richer, detailed, and clearly focused picture of objects of attention, including the fabric of the mind itself. This reflective tripod consists of three o’s: openness to what is; objectivity that the objects of attention are not the totality of one’s identity, and observation of the self as the experiencer of events.

These formal facets of mindfulness overlap with aspects of our psychotherapy goals. At the heart of such reflective practice is an integrative process in which the mind is open to what is, rather than being enslaved by prior learning and the consequent distortion of experience into what should be or what was. One stunning overlap uncovered in the journey to understand mindful awareness and its possible correlations with neural integration, secure attachment, and psychotherapy has been the following list of processes: (1) bodily regulation; (2) attuned communication; (3) affective balance; (4) fear modulation; (5) response flexibility; (6) self-understanding or “insight” (7) empathy; (8) morality; and (9) intuition. This list was generated by working with a patient who had suffered a severe blow to her forehead resulting in damage to the middle portions of her prefrontal cortex. This region is profoundly integrative, and this array of middle prefrontally mediated processes—from bodily function to morality—are created by way of neural integration. These are examples of what we mean by the FACES flow of flexibility, adaptability, coherence, energy, and stability.

The first eight elements of this list are also the independently proven outcomes of secure parent–child attachment (the last one, intuition, has not yet been studied in this context). Could this be a coincidence? Or could these be an example of what we in interpersonal neurobiology propose? Secure relationships are filled with integrative communication that promotes the growth of integrative fibers in the nervous system. It turns out that this list is also both the outcome and the process of mindful practice. Further, after asking thousands of psychotherapists, I can also state that this is a commonly held “wish list” for the outcome of effective psychotherapy and for a description of mental health. Teaching recently to early educators in Alaska, I was also told by a tribal elder that many points on this list have been the highlight of what the spiritual leaders of the Inuit culture have been teaching over the last 5,000 years as the essence of wisdom and well-being.

Vertical integration entails the linkage within awareness of our energy and information flow across the vertical plane, as we link somatic processes into cortically mediated awareness. Horizontal integration involves the linkage of the differentiated processing of the right and left sides of the brain. These anatomically oriented domains of integration entail bringing into awareness often-disparate elements of our information flow and honoring each of them. For example, in body-centered work we bring the sensations of the body up into cortically mediated awareness as a form of vertical integration. In narrative-based work, we enable the logical, linear, linguistic left hemisphere to draw upon the imagistic, holistic, nonverbal, bodily, autobiographical, and stress-reducing mechanisms of the right hemisphere. A coherent narrative can be seen to emerge from a bilateral form of horizontal integration.

Differentiated elements of neural firing embed experience into synaptic connections in something we call “memory.” In many ways, memory is the way an experience in the past alters the way the mind functions in the present and the future. In research terms, “implicit” memory forms the basic building blocks of how an experience becomes embedded in the brain in the form of perceptual, affective, behavioral, and bodily memory. Without the integrative coordination of the hippocampus, these implicit puzzle pieces of memory remain isolated from each other. With the integration of the master puzzle-piece assembler, the hippocampus, we then have the emergence of factual and autobiographical forms of what is called “explicit” memory. With such integration of memory, we now know that when something is brought into awareness as a fact or as a sense of self from the past, it feels as if we are recalling something. Memory integration refers to the ways in which we connect implicit memory into its more interwoven factual and autobiographical forms.

In narrative integration, the additional process of a “narrator” creates meaning as we harness this mental function that enables clusters of lived experience to be witnessed from afar. This witnessing self offers an important vantage point from which new decisions and perspectives can be derived to lift a person out of automatic pilot. Without narrative integration, we may be no more than passive observers of an ongoing drama. With narrative integration, we become the active authors of our own living story as it unfolds.

The brain has over 100 billion neurons with hundreds of trillions of connections among them. If the on–off firing patterns of the brain somehow correlate with our subjective experience of mind, then we could state that there is an estimated 10 times 10, 1 million times (i.e., 10 to the millionth power) of possible states of mind. What, then, does state integration actually entail? These clusters of neural firing patterns develop engrained profiles that are repeated across time. State integration refers to at least two dimensions of the linkage of these differentiated states of firing. The first dimension is within a given state. Some states of mind have an internal coherence that makes them stable and effective. An example might be a tennis-playing state of mind. Other states may be incoherent and prone to movement toward chaos and/or rigidity. Someone who was betrayed by a tennis teacher who sexually abused him or her would be an example of an incoherent state of tennis-playing. Unresolved states of trauma or loss are examples of impaired state integration.

A second dimension of state integration effects a linkage of information and energy flow across states, rather than within them. We have different motivational circuits that function to achieve different goals. Life is a heterogeneous mixture of needs and goals and states of mind that effectively (or not) carry out the internal processing and external behavior to meet those needs. Owning the complexity of human life is a part of honoring these different states and moving toward collaboration rather than believing that one state should dominate another.

Interpersonal integration also honors the unique states within different individuals. Integrative communication enables us to be open to the internal states of another, make sense of the other’s needs, and then respond in a timely and effective manner. This contingency is found in all cultures and serves to promote a highly integrative state between two people: Each individual’s differences are respected (i.e., differentiation is promoted) and his or her internal worlds are connected (i.e., linkage is promoted). This interpersonal integration is the heart of well-being in our relationships with each other.

The final two domains of integration bring us to some basic existential questions of human life. In temporal integration we embrace the issues raised by the passage of time. Three elements emerge in the ways in which the past, present, and future can be integrated. The first relates to the drive for certainty in the face of the reality of uncertainty. As this natural push to know and to predict the outcome of events meets face to face with life’s lessons about the ultimate unpredictability and unknowable nature of how events unfold, we are faced with the first aspect of temporal integration. Allowing the drive for certainty to exist while we embrace authentically the reality of uncertainty is the challenge of linking differentiated aspects of our mental life.

A second aspect of temporal integration involves the idea and longing for permanence: that things we love and cherish remain forever. Yet reality hits us head on with the truth that nothing is permanent. Resolving this tension evokes the ability to honor our drive for permanence but to also welcome the unavoidable reality of transience in life.

Finally, our third dimension of temporal integration focuses on our drive for immortality in the face of the reality of death. So much of human life is spent on avoiding the reality of our mortality or driving us to various explanations of the nature of life and death. Temporal integration enables us to invite all of these longings of the mind—for immortality, permanence, and certainty—and their counterparts in solid reality—mortality, impermanence, and uncertainty. Time is the common dimension here, as we use our cortical machinery to represent life across time, we come to sense these central existential issues. Running from them, avoiding the challenges of temporal integration, throws us into patterns of chaos and/or rigidity in our effort to deny reality.

The ninth domain of integration moves us beyond our individual sense of a bodily and time-defined self as we come to feel a part of a larger whole. Transpirational integration refers to the ways in which we come to embrace the importance of a personal identity and coherent life history, linking us across all the previous eight domains of integration. But as we “across-breathe” or “transpire” through these domains, what seems to occur is a dissolving of the illusion of a wholly separate self. The previously rigid definition of a self that is contained within a body in this century of life on Earth seems to melt away as a sense of belonging to a much larger whole emerges. This belonging seems to happen naturally, without any effort or intention. Instead the top-down enslavements of a narrowly defined sense of self give way and in their place emerge a common description of a much larger self, a fuller mind, a sense of belonging to a larger whole.

The practical implication of this transpirational integration is that people seem to experience a widening in their sense of connection. Taking part in movements to help improve local communities, larger efforts at helping people they’ve never met, or feelings of commitment to helping the planet in ways that none of us alive today may come to enjoy—each of these ways of being a part of a larger whole seem to appear naturally.

Discussing emotion as integration, as we link our individual sense of self with its own unique, differentiated history to the selves of others now, in the past, and also in a future we will never directly see, we come to realize our “emotional ties” to a much larger whole. This is perhaps the essence of emotional health for our planet: We come to see that we are all interconnected, each a part of the other, part of one living, breathing organism we call life on Earth. Perhaps with a movement toward integration we can feel the sense of compassion and ease that emerge from such states of well-being—for us, here and now, and for future generations who will receive this message through our words, our relationships, and our integrative efforts to heal our world.