The Triangle of Integration

John P. Flynt, PhD
Nov 28, 2024
9 min read

Updated: Feb 13

Experience is not a given. It is something that arises from the combination of feeling and the ability to consciously translate feeling into a narrative that you create on an ongoing basis. This exploration enables you to use head motions to explore how meaningful experiences become part of your life narrative.

The Ritual of the Triangle of Integration

Here are the steps of the procedure. It is suggested that you seat yourself comfortably in a chair before proceeding:

Relax. Engage in mindful breathing. Ride the wave of your breath. Close your eyes.
Gradually, let your head slant to your right shoulder. As you do this, allow your eyes to turn to the right, also. Tense your body a little on the right. Stiffen your arm. Feel the warmth of tension. Feel the feeling. Let it come to your attention without thinking about it. Let the sensation happen. Allow your awareness to include the movement of your eyes and your breathing.
Now bring your head back up and slowly let it slant to the left side. As you move, rotate your eyes so that you are looking to the left.
With your head to the left, tell yourself, in one to five sentences, the “story” of the sensation you just explored on the right. Think of a beginning, a middle, and an end to this little story. Think, using words. Hear the words.
Now bring your head up to the middle. As you move your head, allows your eyes to rotate back to the center, so that you feel you are looking ahead. Let yourself be aware of the experience you have just had. Allow your thought to involve these questions:

How does this experience stand with me—this story and this feeling?
Can I accept the story I have told as consistent with my sense of self?
More generally, do these lines fit into the narrative of my life? (A line in a chapter, a chapter in a book, a stanza in a poem….)

If the story and the feeling feel okay with you, accept the experience. Allow it to become part of your autobiography—the continuing story you generate about yourself as you integrate the experiences of your life. Takle deep, mindful breaths and feel the experience of being absorbed by the whole of your body, as part of your, as something that is part of you.

Repeating the Cycle

If the story and the feeling are do not feel okay, then start back at the feeling. After starting by mindfully centering with your head straight, tilt your head to the right, moving your eyes. Return to feeling. Then move to the left again, turning your eyes, and again tell the story. Let the story change as it will. There is no right or wrong. Let the words find the feeling. And then once again go back to the middle, allowing your eyes to look ahead. Take a mindful breath and ask yourself whether you can accept the story and the feeling as a passage in your autobiographical story.

The Triangle of Integration in Depth

Let’s go over the integration triangle with more discussion of specific references to psychoneurological activities:

• Feeling.

Sometimes the right lobe of the brain is spoken of as the lobe of feeling. Sometimes it is spoken of as the lobe of intuition or the unconscious. The movement to the right was a movement toward feeling, toward a store of sensations and images that are merged into a vast array of energy that allows you to feel present without having to name or analyze. In our exploration, the movement toward the right involved tensing and feeling your shoulder and right side.

Every experience begins with feeling. This is a notion introduced by Antony Damasio in the 1990’s and it has been a basic notion of neuroscience and psychology since then. This notion is fundamental in therapy since every thought emerges from a feeling (emotion) state. The right lobe is considered the emotional lobe, so the memories of sensations, intuitions, and feelings can be pictured as being stored and accessed through the right lobe. This is as much a metaphor as a scientifically verified notion—but regard it for now as a model for understanding the activities of the brain that is commonly used by psychologists informed by neuroscience.

• Language or symbolization.

Sometimes the left lobe of the brain is spoken of as the lobe of language and symbolism. One approach is to consider that sensations and feelings have names. Think of the sensation of heat or the feeling of anger. You can know sensations and feelings without naming them, but to identify them, to connect them with broader dimensions of your life (such as identifying them in the present or the past as you speak about them), you must name them. The movement over to the left was a movement toward giving language to sensation and feeling. The movement involved invoking your left lobe to provide a narrative for your feeling.

Let’s take a moment to review sensation and feeling. In this context, if you touch your finger on a hot stove, you have a sensation of being burned. If you hear news about the death of a friend, you feel sad. Feelings involve emotional names like sad, glad, depressed, delighted. Sensations involve cold, heat, sharpness, or softness. But then we hardly ever experience sensation and feeling without mixing them, so we can feel hot emotions and sensations and can even speak of the sensation of an emotion. The idea here is the left lobe allows us to name what we sense or feel, and in this way, we can access it through thought as well as memory, through the stories we tell.

Therapy involves finding the voice for your sensations and feelings. And when we can tell the story of what we have felt, we have moved from the right lobe to the left lobe. You can view this as a “calling” from the left lobe to the right lobe. The left lobe is sometimes identified as the area of conscious awareness. It allows us to direct our attention to feelings and sensations and say what and how intense they are. In the left lobe, we match words to feelings. This activity is sometimes referred to as mentalizing. It is something that it is important for children to learn but is also necessary throughout life if you want to say something as simple as, “Wow, I am sad, that hurt.” “Wow, I am happy, that felt great!” You are calling to memories of sensations and feelings, and you are giving them names, magnitudes, contrasts, places, and times.

• Integration.

When you move your head to the center, you are engaging in a movement that reflects what the brain does when integration of experience takes place. Feelings and sensations in the right lobe connect up with language in the left lobe across a dense cluster of neural connections called he corpus callosum. This activity allows language to be given to feeling so that what is properly called an “experience” emerges. An experience in this respect is something you can relate or narrate without being overwhelmed with feelings or sensations that are so strong that you are unable to find language for them. An experience is something that you can recall, something that is in the past, something that you can add to, elaborate, write about. It is something you know as part of your life.

But you also introduced a condition for the integration of feeling and narrative. You asked about a feeling about a feeling. You asked whether you felt this was an acceptable or true story of the feeling. This is what we do when we integrate experience. This is a reflexive experience, one of being aware of being aware. Such experiences allow us to grow throughout our life. They allow us to be aware of the present and to transform the present into the past. With such awareness, it is possible to be self-aware, to know self-states. Through reflexive abilities, we have a feeling, we tell ourselves about it, and then the experience arises as something we accept and talk about in the general context of our greater Self.

The integrative triangle is a primary process through which we create our life history and maintain mental health. Experience always begins with feeling. Feelings and sensations are to a great extent beyond conscious control. But then transform feelings and sensations into language to give a story to them, and when we can tell this story, we move forward in life.

Trauma and Healing

The triangle of integration continues to operate as long as you live, but at times it can be overwhelmed by sensations and feelings so that it is not able to fully translate them to language. When this happens, you experience trauma. Trauma occurs when the feelings you have are so powerful that the brain pushes into circuits that are separate from those that sustain the operation of the triangle of integration. Memories that house such feelings are dissociated. They can remain dissociated for a few seconds while you take in what has happened in some minor incident, such as spilling a glass of water into a friend’s lap by accident. Or they can extend to events much more disruptive, such as a car accident, a war, a fire, or an earthquake.

Because trauma characterizes everyone’s life in some way, it is sometimes necessary to cycle through the triangle of integration several times before an experience can be fully integrated. Likewise, at times, we can lose the ability to sustain the triangle. When this happens, it must be repaired through therapy, which involves freeing it from the confusion that grips it. To accomplish this, “therapeutic space” can be developed, so that the work of the triangle can resume in a special place characterized by psychological safety.

Your conscious processing or experience initiates your ability to symbolically transform the experience so that is has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It becomes part of something you distinguish as your past, your autobiographical narrative:

This is an experience I have had. It has this meaning for me. I accept it as part of my life. It is what I am.

If you are not able to make the experience part of your life on the first try as mentioned before, you must return to the feeling and cycle through once again. You again try to translate it into a life story. Sometimes accomplishing this can take years. It can even take a lifetime.

If you are stalled in an intense state of session of sensation and feeling, you can also simply spin in place, around and around. This is sometimes referred to as rumination. Ruminative states involve repeated memories that are not translated into stories and recognized as in the past but form an persistent, plaguing present from which escape seems impossible. People encountering such states often feel desperate, trapped, bewildered. They are stuck, and if what they feel or sense is painful, they become desperate. One outcome can be dissociated states of self. Another is schizophrenia, where the brain throws itself into a confusion that bars the pain from coming fully into awareness.

The Journey

Call it life’s journey. The triangle of integration characterizes the journey of life from the time when you are around 16 months old, when language begins to become operational in your brain, and it continues until the end of life. Your journey is one of learning to narrate your autobiography.

It is important to add that the triangle is operational even before language develops. In the womb and during the first months of life, the underlying layers of feelings and sensation are forming. The triangle can be thought of as working even then. Consider, for example, the physical action of a mother smiling at her child or cooing in response to cooing. The sounds are there already, but in the beginning, it is the right brain that prevails, enabling the nervous system of the baby to grow in response to a world characterized by unconscious feeling and sensation more than language and conscious thought.

The essence of psychological health lies in telling stories of experiences of self in a manner that results in the ability to move from feelings and sensations to language and through language to a meaningful life. Meaningful experience is not a given. It is something you create in your life through endless efforts that involve translating feelings into narratives that allow you to branch and mix your storytelling so that you can direct your attention to connect up any one experience with any other experience in different ways as you explore your memories of life.

You assess the narratives on an ongoing basis, deciding where they fit into your life and how you will extend them in different ways to broaden your sense of self and your ability to find life interesting in endless ways.

Feelings, sensations, narratives, integration–these enable you to add to the epic you create for yourself in your journey through life. You are a poet of your own destiny. You are the hero of your journey. You discover and create the story of your life. You can change direction. You can go back and come forward. You can project in efforts to envision—to create the expectations form which the future emerges. As you go, from birth to death, you are repeatedly challenged to find meanings in your feelings. And as you go, you tell stories about them.

Sources

Antionio Damasio, Descarts’ Error.

Bonnie Badenock, The Heart of Trauma.

Carl Jung, Introduction to Jungian Psychology.

Daniel Hill, Affect Regulation Therapy.

Daniel Sigel, Mindsight.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary.

Jon G. Allen, Peter Fonagy, Anthony W. Bateman, Mentalizing.

Joseph Cambell, Hero with a Thousand Faces.