If you’ve ever written for therapeutic healing purposes or for self-expressive creativity, you might realize that different parts might show up when you write. Maybe you have perfectionist parts that impede your creativity by trying to get everything exactly right. Maybe you have parts that want to set the record straight or get validation (finally.) Maybe you’re hoping someone will praise your writing or be influenced by it in some positive way. Maybe you feel shy about writing because someone once told you that you weren’t good enough or didn’t have the right to write. Maybe parts compare you to other writers and think you’re not all that, or you have imposter parts that think you’re a fraud. Maybe you have ambitious dreamer parts that want to write a bestseller and earn money or fame. Maybe you have justice-seeking parts determined to right a wrong or service-oriented parts that want to help heal others with your story.
The key is to realize when or if you’re blending with parts that do your writing, rather than just identifying with those parts, without realizing there might be other parts that have something to write as well, parts that might be in conflict with whoever has the pen.
In our upcoming Write To Heal: IFS + Memoir Writing six-week online class, master IFS trainer and Harvard-trained psychiatrist Frank Anderson, MD and I will be teaching a process for working with parts that might be inclined to write memoir material. When we’re writing therapeutic or creative memoir material, different parts are likely to tell different stories about the “moments that made you.” If you were to pick any key moment in your life- let’s say, the moment that split your life into “Before this happened” and “After this happened,” you might be surprised how differently various parts would describe that moment.
Let me give you an example.
A two week sequence of events in January 2006 split my life into “Before my Perfect Storm” and “After my Perfect Storm.” Let me write a few snippets about this event from different parts. (I’m going to intentionally let myself blend with these various parts as I write, just so I can describe this process a little bit.)
Grieving Part (this part was losing her father to cancer at the same time she was giving birth)
I’m in the recovery room with a fresh wound on my belly, covered with a gauze pad, and I see my bloated, steroid-swollen father enter the room. He’s flown to San Diego to meet the new baby of his first-born daughter and to die here with me and my baby by his side. He’s newly bald from all the radiation and I barely recognize him with the moon face from the dexamethasone, but his eyes are the same, and they fill with tears when he sees me. My mother is by his side rushing up to grab her new granddaughter, but my father struggles to walk and takes his time getting to me. He waits until my mother stops fussing before leaning in to hug me. He lingers in the hug and whispers, “I’m ready to go now.” I start crying because I can’t imagine my life without my father in it. I can’t fathom raising a child who will never know her Papa.
My mother sees me crying and jumps in. “What did you say to her, David?”
He looks like a child who’s just gotten in trouble. Busted, he says, “I said I’m ready to go now.”
Mom shakes her head and, using a harsh tone, scolds him. “Nonsense. You are not dying on your granddaughter’s birthday.”
But I can see it in his eyes. He will obey her orders, but he’s really ready to go right now, today. He’s kept his promise to me and to himself- that he would wait until my baby was born to die. But he doesn’t want to stick around one more moment. With the way she treats him, I can’t say I blame him. But I can’t handle losing him right now. I’ve got a new baby in my arms, my breasts are swollen, I’m feeling unsteady, and I can’t quite handle losing my father today too.
Angry, Vindictive Part (this part was mad at her work colleagues and mad at the medical system in general)
It’s been four weeks since my C-section, two weeks since my father died, one week since carting my three week old baby across the country to attend Dad’s funeral in Florida, and I’m expected to go back to work. We’re a group of mostly female OB/GYN’s and we insist that our patients who have C-sections take a minimum of twelve weeks off work to heal their wounds and bond with their babies, but those rules don’t apply to us doctors. We’re supposed to be superhuman, no matter what we recommend for other mothers.
I tried complaining about this expectation of early return to 72 hour call shifts, this pressure to wean my baby from my breast long before any lactation nurse or developmental psychologist would recommend. But I was told by my senior partner that she went back to work 48 hours after her baby was born, and I should just stop my bellyaching, even though my belly still hurt from the surgery.
They say we’re supposed to be empathic as doctors, that our bedside manner matters, that we have to retain our humanity and express compassion. But how are we expected to do this when nobody seems to have empathy for me? Doesn’t anyone care that I can barely stop crying, much less perform at a high level to operate on another human being who apparently deserves three months postpartum leave more so than I do? They call themselves doctors, these people I work with, and they’re good doctors with our other patients. They’ve been beloved by their patients. But why aren’t I worth the same care when I’m the patient?
“Surgeon Mode” Part (this part goes “all business” when the shit hits the fan and can function at a high level in times of crisis or emotional overwhelm)
When things are falling apart around me, I can go into hyperdrive and do whatever it takes to survive the moment. Everyone thinks I’m doing just fine, but they don’t realize that when “surgeon mode” kicks in, it’s usually because I’m anything but fine. Surgeon mode kicked in about twelve hours after my C-section, when I’d been puking my guts out for twelve hours straight because they put Duramorph in my spinal, even though I begged them for no narcotics because the nausea winds up being worse than the pain. But nobody listened to me, and they refused to give me Zofran, and now I haven’t made hardly any urine in my foley catheter since the first hour after my surgery. Way less than 30cc/hour, and now my IV bag is empty and beeping. I’m hitting the nurse call button, but nobody is responding. I’m probably just dehydrated from all the dry heaving and from being NPO before surgery. But I could be bleeding inside, for all they know, and that’s why I’m not making any urine. That’s why we watch the urine output so gravely in the first 24 hours after surgery.
I call my doctor on her cell phone because she’s also one of my best friends. She’s an excellent surgeon who’s also married to the chief of surgery, so I appeal to her surgeon mode. I tell her my urine output is falling off, I can’t keep liquids down because I keep vomiting, my IV is empty and they’re not giving me the 500 cc bolus of Lactated Ringers that they should be giving me. So she calls the nurse and gives a verbal order. “Dr. Rankin may write her own orders.” So now it’s 2am and my baby is screaming and hungry and my milk hasn’t come in yet, and I’m writing my own orders because nobody in this hospital seems to have any clue how to take care of a woman who just had a C-section and isn’t making enough urine.
C-section patients aren’t supposed to leave the hospital until 48-72 hours post-surgery, and they have to be making enough urine. I order my foley catheter to be removed, and I sign the Against Medical Advice papers by the time of morning rounds and discharge myself, less than 24 hours after my surgery. I can take better care of myself at home, and I have a father that needs me to help him die.
Fast forward two weeks, and I’m at his bedside. The night before, he had gathered us all together to say his final goodbyes. He kept his promise to my mother and waited the two weeks she asked, in order to avoid dying on his granddaughter’s birthday. We fed him the chicken wings from Hooters (“where the booby ladies go”) and the chocolate ice cream he’s requested for his last meal, and he announces that he’s leaving. We laugh. He still looks pretty good. How does he intend to die? I’m terrified he’s going to ask me to facilitate some sort of physician assisted suicide, and I’m definitely not up for that.
But he says he’ll just stop eating, stop drinking, and stop taking his steroids. He expects his brain will herniate pretty quickly and it should all be over soon.
Less than 24 hours later, I am at his bedside and a minute or more is passing between each breath. Then he stops breathing for one minute, two minutes, three minutes…then after one last gasp, he doesn’t take another breath. I pull out my stethoscope and listen to his heart. It has stopped. I look at the new Rolex my daughter’s father bought me with my money and pronounce the time of death. We call Hospice, sign the paperwork, and it is over.
Other Parts
I could continue this process for quite some time if I kept going. I could write from my Mother Part, who was so worried that her baby wasn’t crying or protesting or demanding attention. She was scared that her baby was so attuned to what a shitshow she’d been born into that she wasn’t making her needs known and could experience developmental trauma because of that. She was so terrified that she had to wean her baby from her breast and start pumping at four weeks old that this part wound up influencing her to quit her job as an OB/GYN permanently within the next year.
I could write from my Big Sister Part, who was caring for her little brother, whose liver had failed after he took an antibiotic for a sinus infection and wound up jaundiced in her own hospital, where she had to ask her colleagues to care for him because she was too busy caring for her baby and her father.
I could write from the Devoted Dog-Lover Part, who lost her 16 year old bichon frise only days before losing her father.
But you get the picture. We all are like this, when we reflect back on the Moments That Made You. There are lots of parts that get activated when we flash back for healing or memoir-writing purposes. Acknowledging this and making space to hear from all these parts can help us heal while also improving the depth, vulnerability, and immediacy of our creative writing.
Writing From Parts Vs. Writing From Self
As you can see, none of these accounts are written from Self. They’re all blended with different parts. So who does the writing if you’re writing a memoir about a moment that made you like this? Frank and I will be teaching you how to do this- with yourself or with your clients- using the memoir-writing process to get to know various parts, let them write, bring in Self to witness those parts, and ideally, let your wise, compassionate Self choreograph whose voice gets included in the final manuscript versus how Self can retell the story on behalf of these many parts in the final draft.
If you’re curious to try this kind of writing and healing practice for yourself, please join us for WRITE TO HEAL: IFS + MEMOIR WRITING.
The class starts next week, so we hope to see you soon!
