The Importance Of Interpersonal Integration

Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, director of the Mindsight Institute, a Harvard trained psychiatrist and an attachment researcher (Codrington, 2010). He sought to deepen his understanding of the mind and human experience. In 1992, he organized an interdepartmental group at UCLA to study the connections between the brain and the mind (Siegel, 2010). This group consisted of approximately forty scientists from over a dozen different disciplines of science including linguistics, computer science, genetics, mathematics, neuroscience, sociology, and developmental psychology (Siegel, 2010). Over the next four years this group met and developed a definition of the mind and created a new interdisciplinary field of neuroscience called interpersonal neurobiology. Interpersonal

State integration is the ability to embrace these different aspects of self like the need for closeness and solitude, autonomy and dependence, or caregiving and mastery (Siegel, 2010). State disintegration occurs when a person does not honor his or her need for alone time, and becomes irritable and burnt out in social situations (Siegel, 2010). Making time to integrate each aspect allows a person to accept different states, embrace these states, and function more holistically.

Interpersonal Integration Interpersonal integration is the ability to be differentiated and retain a sense of self while being linked to other's at the same time (Siegel, 2012). Siegel (2010) referred to this as the "we" of wellbeing and the notion of "feeling felt" by another (p. 74). Interpersonal integration helps individuals connect more intimately in relationships while retaining sense of identity. Interpersonal integration is impaired when an individual's relationship becomes chaotic with fighting and emotional outburst or rigid with predictability and boredom (Siegel, 2012).

Temporal