In a previous article, it was stated that "Our being seeks to quarantine any unreality that develops within our internal model – to separate the unreal part of the self (or the model) from the rest – this is the creation of a persona... From that moment, the persona remains bound up with the unreality that created it. It remains 'stuck' in that unreality – that is, stuck in the past."

We can think of your hived-off personalities as prisoners. A part of you becomes trapped in upset which it is currently unable to resolve. This happens to us all the time, when we do not have (in the moment) the resources (tools) available to fully integrate an experience. To contain the upset, that part of your psyche is walled-off from the rest. It is imprisoned. It is sentenced to live with its upset until its eventual liberation and rehabilitation. In the meantime it is kept more or less out of sight and out of mind. It is locked into your subconscious. But it does not stop feeling its upset.

When something triggers the memory of the upset, you are brought back into contact with that prisoner. You feel the prisoner's upset, which is unpleasant to feel; your subconscious sees the prisoner crying, or screaming, which is unpleasant to see. The normal response is to seek to run far away from the prisoner, or build even stronger walls to keep it behind – in any case, to suppress it further. This is a manifestation of the destructive power of judgement. This is how we unconsciously behave towards the upset in our subconscious.

Remember that ignoring something in reality, is ignorance. We need to acknowledge the reality of everything that is, and embrace it. To do that, we must find the light in everything – by which, we return everything to the light.

You might consider the possible purposes of a prison. We have already considered them as a means of segregation (quarantining a potentially threatening part from the rest of the population or psyche). Prisons are also viewed as a place of punishment and/or of rehabilitation. The prisoners within your mind are punished by remaining locked-in with their upset – but do you want to keep these parts of your own mind in such a state of suffering?

In therapy, the goal should be to rehabilitate these prisoners whenever they are found.

If there is something you really want to avoid in your psyche, something you do not want to talk about because you fear resensitising an upset, this is probably the very thing you most need to talk to a therapist about. It is understandable that you do not want to feed the monster, but it is feeding itself in the shadows of your psyche – it is that ongoing feeding which keeps that thing painful for you. So it needs your attention – but in the right way.

If a client finds themselves experiencing a feeling of upset, and they want to destroy it, or run from it, or hide from it, or otherwise remove it from their present perception, the therapist can explain to them that what they are meeting is an imprisoned part of themselves. Do they really want to destroy a part of themselves? Or leave it in pain on its own in a dungeon? Sooner or later, they will realise that what they actually want to do is free it, help it feel better, help it to be its best self, and allow it to be reconnected with the rest of them.

By far the easiest way to achieve this (in most cases), is to start a conversation with the imprisoned part and help it express its upset. Very commonly, the imprisoned part will first be perceived by the client as something horrible (a monster of some kind) – it is only by bringing it into conscious awareness that the client can give shape to it at all – but after it has been healed and rehabilitated, it usually becomes something friendly and sweet, and it feels nice to have it around (like a little friend, or pet, or similar).

This rehabilitation is a process of reunification, (or reintegration). This is how we grow in integrity. Of course, here is meant 'integrity' in the sense of whole and undivided; but since the process of rehabilitating the prisoner requires it to release its upset (which was holding it in the past, in unreality), we also in this way become more real, more truly present, more true to our Self. The more integrity we can muster, the more power (and responsibility) we have. The more integrity we have on the inside, the more meaningfully we can connect with our world (and the people in it) on the outside – and the less we'll sink to coercive tactics and deception to move people.

Dostoyevsky expressed it thus: “A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.”

Every time we meet with a (past) upset in our psyche and do not liberate (or reintegrate) it, we add another layer of suppression (or repression), another layer of self-harm, of irresponsibility – and this will probably become an additional layer of guilt. This just makes the prisoner feel worse and scream more loudly. Ultimately, despite the many and varied defence mechanisms we have all developed to try to bury or ignore our unresolved (past) upsets, the organism will not allow this to continue for ever. We will keep meeting all our prisoners until we rehabilitate them. We will keep resensitising our upsets until we are compelled to address them. Eventually, all stories end up happily ever after.