thank you Korin and Hunny. We are having a wonderful time. Right at this moment I am sitting in this beautiful room at the Sagamore in Lake George. There is a wonderful was museum here in Lake Goerge called the House of Frankenstein. Fantastic exhibits, but should anyone decide to visit beware of the sinking floor. LOL this place is a world of scarey things over the course of ages - frankenstein, Jack the ripper, lizzie borden and other natorious scarey folks done in wax, horror movie type stuff..

You are walking down this hall looking at exhibits, its dark in the hall, as you reach the exhibits the display lights come on. In this one spot you take a step and the floor sinks because you're suddenly stepping on foam rubber instead of solid wood. definitely gives a moment of freight if not prepared for it.

At first glance the above description is just that. A description of a place I went to see.. But hunny after reading your post today and thinking about my trip through the wax museum yesterday I think I have found a way to explain to you what I meant..

Yes the act of integration is perceived differently by everyone... Some call it merging,... some call it emeshing..For some its perceived as an end to something to others its a beginning..

but everyone has to got through what here in location is called "post integration".

Imagine being outside on a warm sunny day and where you live its always sunny and warm, day in and day out your whole life its bright, its warm, its comfortable, its the only thing you know.. then one day you open this door and you are in a dark hall with all these horror exhibits.. nothing is the way you are used to your whole life..

all there is, is total silence (no voices, no bells, static, white noise, no fog, no numbness, no feeling unreal either your self or your environment...) "Your" memories of all these horrors through the years that for your whole life you perceived them to have happened to Joe, peter, elizabeth and Jane alters..

Now joe, peter, elizabeth and jane are you and you are them, there is no defining mental line, wall divider separating you from who and what they were and who and what you were..

Everyone one who has integrated goes through these same things from the moment that they are integrated..

then you look in the mirror. you dont see your reflection as you used to..this is Joes eyes, this is peters nose, this is elizabetheth's smile...

you see you for the first time in your whole life..

Everything you do, say, wear, eat is now you not you and these alters who like the museum exhibits were behind glass walls, roped off areas,...

Just like there is more to being DID than just the name of the disorder and what you can find on the internet, theres more to being integrated than just the merging, becoming one whole person.

theres this whole area of things that goes on, for which only those who have been through it understands..

you can read about it all in books, on the internet and see how the movies portray it but the reality is so, so much more complicated on so many different planes of life that even transcends the mental aspects and the physical...

those were the things I was going through two years ago when I first came here. When I first came here there was absolutely no one going through even a smidgen of this... in fact everyone was getting upset because I was attempting to talk about these things here..

up until possibly the past 6 months the only postings about integration was me wording it as "becoming one whole person", an occasional posting by some who experience temporary silences of their alters and how scarey that is for them, and some who began integrating and then found out they werent integrated because others they didnt know where there showed their selves..

like being DID is a whole world of things so is integration.. even now I am only touching the iceberg of it because its so hard to describe, to those who havent been through it..

I have to go we are off to Ticonderoga today and I still have some packing up to do before we check out soon and get back on the road.. Hopefully hunny this has made it a bit more clear what I meant about not being able to get my needs met here, so instead Im here to help others in return it may help me..

"see you all in a day or so.."