The Cost of Holding It Together
A reflection on disintegration, fear, and the hidden toll of staying intact
We've talked about the courage it takes to face disintegration: the mess, the surrender, the breaking open. But what about the other side of the equation? What happens when you don't fall apart? When you resist the invitation? When you hold yourself together too tightly, for too long?
I’ve lived through both. What I’ve come to see is that refusing disintegration doesn’t preserve your wholeness—it fragments you in quieter, more insidious ways. You start sacrificing parts of yourself to maintain an identity that no longer fits. You suppress the signals of discomfort, the inner protests. You become rigid where you once could bend, clinging to what feels safe until any challenge to it feels like an attack. And all the while, you tell yourself it’s strength.
What feels like stability can actually be the slow settling of a life that’s stopped growing. A version of “wholeness” that values comfort over transformation. Sometimes the very structures we build to protect ourselves become the walls that imprison us.
The Rewarded Resistance
Our culture has a complicated relationship with falling apart. On the surface, we celebrate resilience, composure, the ability to "bounce back." We reward people who appear unshakeable, who can handle whatever life throws at them without visible distress. There's an entire industry built around helping people "manage" their emotions, "cope" with stress, "maintain" their composure.
But what if the very thing we're trying to avoid—disintegration—is actually what we need?
Resisting disintegration is often framed as maturity. In many systems, it's even rewarded. You appear composed. High-functioning. Reliable. You become the person others turn to in a crisis because you "have it all together." But inside, you know something vital is slipping away: your vitality, your authenticity, your connection to what matters most. You become a master at managing impressions while losing access to your deeper truth.
This is what happens when we equate pain with failure, when we've internalized the idea that being undone is weakness rather than a threshold. So we armor up. We over-function. We intellectualize. We channel everything into control because falling apart feels too dangerous, too costly, too unknown.
But disintegration—positive disintegration—is not destruction. It's a passage. A shedding. A sacred undoing that makes space for something more honest to emerge.
The Architecture of Avoidance
I've watched this pattern in myself and others: the elaborate systems we create to avoid facing what wants to change within us. Sometimes it looks like workaholism—staying so busy that there's no time for the inner voice that's trying to get your attention.
Sometimes it's perfectionism—if you can just get everything right, maybe you won't have to face the places where you're not who you want to be.
Sometimes it's intellectual bypass—analyzing your life so thoroughly that you never have to actually feel it. Or spiritual bypass—using meditation, gratitude practices, or positive thinking to avoid the messier emotions.
Sometimes it's relationship patterns—staying in connections that no longer serve you because change feels too overwhelming.
The forms are endless, but the underlying dynamic is the same: the strategic avoidance of our own becoming.
What's particularly insidious about this pattern is that it often looks like growth from the outside. You're working on yourself. You're reading books, going to therapy, attending workshops. You're doing all the right things. But somehow, nothing is fundamentally changing. You're managing your symptoms without addressing their source. You're rearranging the furniture without examining the foundation.
The Compound Cost
The longer you postpone it, the more distorted your inner world becomes. You start mistaking your defenses for your personality. You mistake fear for discernment. You mistake control for strength. Slowly, the self that longs to emerge gets buried under the self you perform to survive.
I've seen people spend decades in therapy learning to manage their anxiety without ever asking what the anxiety is trying to tell them. I've seen people exhaust themselves maintaining relationships that drain their life force rather than face the guilt of setting boundaries. I've seen brilliant, sensitive people numb themselves with work, food, alcohol, or shopping rather than feel the intensity that's actually their greatest gift.
The theory of positive disintegration isn't just about growth through suffering—it's about allowing the process to happen. Not just surviving it, but consenting to it. Trusting it. Surrendering, not because it's easy, but because it's real.
When Dąbrowski wrote about disintegration, he was describing the necessary breakdown of lower-level organization to make way for higher-level integration. The old structures, the ways of being that once served you, must dissolve before something more authentic can emerge. This isn't pathology; it's development.
But our culture teaches us to fear this process, to see any form of falling apart as failure rather than metamorphosis.
Two Forms of Refusal
Sometimes the refusal is unconscious. It feels like survival rather than resistance. You don't know you're clinging; you just know you're tired. Or numb. Or incapable of accessing the parts of yourself that once felt alive. The performance becomes so practiced that you forget it is a performance.
This is the person who says, "I don't know why I feel so empty. Everything in my life looks good on paper." They've successfully met all the external markers of success while losing touch with their inner compass. They've optimized their life without asking whether it's the life they actually want.
Other times, it's deliberate. You sense the tremors. You hear the inner voice asking you to pause, to question, to soften. But you shut the door. Not now. Not here. Not if it means losing control. Not if it means disappointing people. Not if it means facing uncertainty.
This is the person who recognizes they're unhappy but says, "I can't afford to fall apart. Too many people are counting on me." They've made themselves indispensable as a way of avoiding their own need for transformation.
Neither is something to be ashamed of; both are something to understand. There are always reasons why we resist falling apart. There's a history. A context. A self that learned, often early on, that breaking open could be dangerous. That safety meant containment, even at the cost of self-abandonment.
The Wisdom of Systems
From my own experience and from witnessing the journeys of others, I’ve come to see that our psyche has its own intelligence. The same way a fever is the body's way of fighting infection, emotional and spiritual breakdown is often the soul's way of fighting what's no longer working.
When someone comes to me in the middle of what looks like a life falling apart—job loss, relationship ending, identity crisis, spiritual emergency—I've learned to ask: What is trying to emerge? What is this breakdown clearing space for?
Because invariably, beneath the surface chaos, there's an intelligence at work. Something in them knows that the old way of being has run its course. Something is ready to be born, but it can't happen while they're still invested in maintaining the structures that no longer fit.
The disintegration isn't random. It's targeted. It's surgical. It takes apart precisely what needs to be dismantled to make way for the next stage of growth.
Walking Through the Walls
Part of the journey is learning to recognize when the walls we built to protect us have become the very structures that imprison us. Positive disintegration invites us to walk through those walls slowly, willingly, with the support we need to make it through.
This doesn't mean being reckless with your life or your responsibilities. It doesn't mean having a breakdown without regard for the people who depend on you. It means developing the capacity to feel what wants to change without immediately trying to fix it, manage it, or make it go away.
It means learning to distinguish between the anxiety that's warning you of real danger and the anxiety that's trying to keep you from growing. Between the sadness that's depression and the sadness that's grief for who you used to be. Between the anger that's destructive and the anger that's trying to establish healthy boundaries.
Disintegration asks us to trust the intelligence of collapse. To honor the inner call to let go. Not recklessly, but bravely. Not all at once, but honestly.
The Invitation
If you're reading this and recognizing yourself in the pattern of holding too tight, I want you to know: your resistance makes sense. Whatever you learned about safety, about love, about survival, it was probably accurate for the circumstances you were in when you learned it.
But you're not in those circumstances anymore. And the strategies that once protected you might now be preventing you from becoming who you're meant to be.
The invitation isn't to destroy your life or abandon everything you've built. It's to develop the capacity to feel what's true—about your relationships, your work, your way of being in the world—without immediately needing to act on it or make it go away.
Sometimes the truth is that everything is fine and you just need to adjust your perspective. Sometimes the truth is that major changes are needed. Most often, the truth is somewhere in between—some things to keep, some things to release, some things to transform. And sometimes the truth is that you’ve outgrown the life you built while holding yourself together so gently and persistently that you don’t notice the ache until it’s asking to be met head-on.
But you can't know which is which if you're afraid to look.
The Intelligence of Breakdown
In the end, falling apart isn't the end of you. It's the beginning of becoming someone truer. Someone more aligned with their deepest values. Someone who can hold complexity without needing to resolve it immediately. Someone who can feel deeply without being overwhelmed by the feeling.
The cost of holding it together too tightly isn't just personal, it's collective. When we refuse our own growth, we model that refusal for everyone around us. When we prioritize appearing functional over being authentic, we create cultures where everyone is performing wellness rather than actually cultivating it.
But when we have the courage to let old structures dissolve, when we trust the process of positive disintegration, we don't just heal ourselves: we give others permission to do the same.
The breaking open you've been avoiding might just be the breakthrough you've been seeking.
What structures in your life once protected you but now feel like prisons? What would it mean to trust the intelligence of your own becoming, even when it feels uncertain? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the delicate dance between stability and growth.
"I want you to know your resistance makes sense"
Yes. And we don't magically integrate all at once either, I've fallen apart enough times to learn the most painful truth for a quick thinking brain: it takes time. There's no rushing healing 🙏🏼 and the tendency to intellectualize often helps in the moment to cope, but if it's never *felt* or we don't look under the hood for why these patterns subtly (or not) repeat through work, relationships, conflict of any kind it takes way longer. Gotta pull things out of the cosmic pockets and do an inventory, a tune up, every now and again. That's reslience in action ✨
Thank you Chris! I always appreciate your thoughtfulness and approachability in your writing. Much of what you say is deeply relevant and resonant. Indeed, we have created a cruel culture where there is no time or space to breathe -- let alone grieve, rest, contemplate, or heal, much less fall apart. Thank you for naming this so clearly.
And, as a trauma-informed somatic practitioner, I think there are two very important pieces missing here (and from TPD). For a human to be able to fall apart *and come back* two guardrails are needed: (1) sufficient social support, and (2) sufficient nervous system capacity.
Many of us don't fall apart because it's quite literally not safe to. This isn't a false belief, fixed mindset, small thinking, or lack of courage. It's our body's wisdom as a member of a deeply social species. Relatively few of us have the social support, financial safety net, and sufficient trauma healing to disintegrate. There are real barriers, especially for those of us with multiple marginalized identities and/or c-PTSD/trauma (gifted trauma or garden variety).
As practitioners, we must be competent in discerning, and helping those we're serving discern, whether their barrier to disintegration is actually life threatening, or "just" an outdated script or habits it's time to let go. It's the worst sort of bypassing and gaslighting to encourage a drowning person to swim faster or let go of the buoy they're clinging to. The result can be -- and often is -- fatal.
I celebrate the resilience of those (including my own clients) who resist falling apart because to do so would quite literally mean death. Unfortunately, far too many highly sensitive souls and brilliant folx do *not* survive the disintegration -- but they don't end up in online forums or research studies on the gifted. I myself almost didn't survive the last, and probably won't survive the next.