I’ve been thinking about Internal Family Systems and how that model of the psyche, of the self, applies to healing in and through poetry. The IFS model draws on Carl Jung’s work, which drew on indigenous ways of knowing, so there’s a long tradition behind it about being conscious and being human. The focus in IFS is on the mind, but it’s also on the body because we are all embodied. No mind without body. No body without mind. Or minds, as Richard Schwartz, the creator of IFS, might say.

I’ve long understood that different voices were at work in my poetry, much more so than when I write a lyrical essay or, say, a feature story about health or medicine. In my earlier work, those voices were darker, for lack of a better word. Not that they were dark. They just lived in darkness. I couldn’t see them well outside my poems. I often thought I was channeling some experiences that were outside of me or that were part of the collective unconscious, which certainly can be the case.

I came to see, over a period of more than two decades, including the seven years I spent not writing poems, that what those voices were sharing was either what happened to them or their feelings about what happened to them. The “them” in question was me. Many of those things happened to me. My voices were what Schwartz calls parts, also known in other models as subpersonalities or ego states.

Poems gave me permission to write what I couldn’t face or completely understand or entirely integrate. I write poetry in a state that’s closer to meditation or sleep, so the door is at least somewhat open to parts of my experience and parts of my self that are otherwise sequestered.

I’m not talking about a pathology or a label like dissociative identity disorder. Schwartz says this having of and living with parts is the natural state of the mind and works well until trauma happens. Or traumas. Even then, no part is bad. They’re all trying to help. They all want to be heard, and they need to be heard. I keep typing heart instead of heard, as if parts of me know this going in, going toward them, is the heart of the matter.

I typically move fluidly with my parts now when I write poems. I think this is one reason I write so much. All the parts, well at least many of the parts, come to the table and follow my lead as I tell their stories. That’s my self, guiding these creative interactions, which makes the parts feel safe. Safety is exactly what they need.

We’re still working on how to be in the world, but we’ve got the poetry experience down. A couple of my parts are still in the shadows. They’re the most vulnerable ones and the ones I fear. There’s one I may feel disgust toward. We all have parts like that. The work is doing the work to talk to them and bring them closer to me, unshaming them and loving them.

I’m not sure Internal Family Systems has been written about in terms of trauma literary theory, but it should be. It’s another lens for understanding how and why poetry can help heal trauma. It rings true for me, like the bells I sometimes hear in downtown Toquerville that make their way across the creeks to find my body and set it to music.