Episode 8: Surviving Disintegration
Extended show notes, Part 1
In Episode 8, I talked about an experience of positive disintegration that nearly killed me. Be warned that this post will include journal entries and thoughts from that difficult time prior to making two suicide attempts.
Please note that Emma also shared her experiences of disintegration in this episode. These two posts with the extended show notes will only be from my perspective, but I hope Emma will consider doing a follow-up on her experiences eventually as well.
When we released the episode, I wanted very much to share excerpts from my journals because that’s what informed my part of our discussion. But we weren’t sharing written posts yet, and I wasn’t quite sure how to do it.
I’m sharing the experiences I’m writing about today because the literature doesn’t contain enough examples of positive disintegration like the ones I’ve been through. Michael has done case studies of moral exemplars and explored the higher reaches of multilevel development, and I have found resonance in their stories.
But what about disintegrations that look more like mental illness? Where are the stories of people who grew up identified as highly gifted and later went through years of disability and mental health treatment?
I attempted to limit my thoughts to one post, but it was too much, and I felt it was best to break it up. This post has excerpts from the transcript, my journal entries, and the work of Dąbrowski and Piechowski.
Before discussing the episode and sharing my follow-up thoughts, please know that I sometimes use paywalls in my posts for privacy. As much as I want to make information as accessible as possible, I’m still easing myself into public writing about these times from my past. If you want access to our paid posts and can’t afford to subscribe at this time, please reach out, and I will gladly comp your account.
Without further ado, let’s talk about Episode 8: Surviving Disintegration, which was released on February 7, 2022. It was the first episode where I listened to myself and thought I did a decent job, which seems worth mentioning.
I started us off with a quote from Piechowski (1975), the monograph from Interesting Quotes, Vol. 13 called “A Theoretical and Empirical Approach to the Study of Development”:
“Positive disintegration means restructuring of the organization of affective and cognitive functions. It is called disintegration because the lower level of functioning must break down before it is replaced by a new organization of a higher level. The term positive is used in the same sense as when we speak of evolution from lower to higher forms of life. Rather than in terms of age or learning, development is measured in terms of structural and functional reorganizations. By this definition, if there's no restructuring, there is no development.”
The goal for this episode was to give examples from our own disintegration experiences. I introduced my history:
Chris: My first disintegrations happened when I was young. The first one was when I was in seventh grade, and then it happened again in high school more than once. During those times when I was a tween or teenager, there was a lot of ambivalence and ambitendencies. But there were also multilevel dynamisms present, too, although they were lower level compared to how they would look later. I've been through disintegration many times in my life… I don't think I had my first really major earth-shattering disintegration until I was 20 to 21.
Today’s post is about that earth-shattering disintegration at 21, which led to two suicide attempts.
Thoughts On Disintegration
Emma asked if some people are more likely to go through positive disintegration than others. The short answer is yes. People with multiple, strong overexcitabilities are more likely to have this experience. She also asked a question I’ve been asked many times:
“How does someone know when they're actually going through a disintegration as opposed to just rough life circumstances?”
We can identify a period of disintegration by looking for what Dąbrowski called dynamisms.
I mentioned dynamisms in the post with Episode 1 extended show notes, featuring an abridged transcript and recorded commentary from me and Emma. In the audio voiceover, I mentioned a point of disagreement from Michael about the dynamisms arising from overexcitabilities. I don’t think we’re completely out of alignment on the issue. I agree with Michael that it takes more than the overexcitability alone to produce dynamisms.
Dąbrowski believed that overexcitabilities could have narrow or general expressions. He described narrow OEs as indicative of a unilevel process, and general OEs had more positive developmental implications.1 Theoretically, narrow OEs would mean a limited developmental potential.
My case provides insight into how OEs can first be general and later become narrow and produce unilevel dynamisms and problems such as agoraphobia.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time and energy considering how the OEs contribute to producing dynamisms in both unilevel and multilevel disintegrations. Like everything else about the theory of positive disintegration, it’s complicated. I’m sure some nuances will be missed in my attempt to capture these processes, but I’ll do my best.
Here’s the first excerpt I’d like to share from Psychoneurosis Is Not an Illness:
“A person manifesting an enhanced psychic excitability in general, and an enhanced emotional, intellectual and imaginational excitability in particular, is endowed with a greater power of penetration into both the external and the inner world. He has a greater need to see their many dimensions and many levels, to think and reflect upon them. These forms of overexcitability are the initial condition of developing an attitude of positive maladjustment to oneself, to others, and to the surrounding world.” (Dabrowski, 1972, p. 65)
Positive maladjustment is a dynamism, and we can see above that Dąbrowski thought the experience of overexcitability was connected. There are other places in his work where he connects these dots.
In the following example from The Dynamics of Concepts, Dąbrowski described how the OEs lead to not only dynamisms but also other processes of development, such as prospection and retrospection:
“Emotional overexcitability is of fundamental importance in the formation and shaping of a hierarchy of values, empathy, identification, self-consciousness, autonomy, authenticity, etc.; that is to say, of the dynamisms which play a decisive role in the general and positive development of a human individual. Imaginational overexcitability is of great significance in artistic creativity, in positive infantilism, in the capacity for retrospection and prospection, in intuitive planning and even in contemplation and ecstasy. Intellectual overexcitability, especially in conjunction with emotional and imaginational overexcitability, gives rise to scholarly creativity, to the growth of reflection and self-control, of autonomy and authenticity, of an autonomous hierarchy of values, of the dynamism “subject-object” in oneself and of the third factor.” (Dabrowski, 1973, p. 173)
The next example from Piechowski’s 1975 monograph (see Interesting Quotes, Vol. 13) brings us back to Emma’s question of how we can identify the process of disintegration. We can also see that the concept of developmental potential doesn’t exist to put people into boxes but to account for individual differences and their developmental implications:
“The concept of developmental potential is introduced out of logical necessity to account for individual differences in the extent of development. This concept is not offered as an abstraction, however elegant, but is associated with observable traits—the five forms of overexcitability and their derivatives—the dynamisms—which allow one to assess its composition and strength. These traits are the key to and explanation of development through positive disintegration.” (Piechowski, 1975, p. 266)
Before I share examples from my life, I’d like to point new subscribers to Overcoming the Self-Stigma of Mental Illness, Part 1, for an overview of my story.