Essays

Get in Line, Brian Kilmeade

Days of Bruising in the Sunflower State. Kansas City, Kansas, June 19, 2015.

You want me dead, Brian Kilmeade? Trust me, there’s a psych tech in Kansas who couldn’t agree with you more. This photo was taken three days after leaving KU Medical Center in 2015 with bruises all over my body after being beaten by a psychiatric nurse who also put me in a face-down hold, despite that position being illegal in most states and despite my having asthma. He threatened to hurt me even more if I ever “tried anything.”

What I had “tried” was getting my inhaler because I couldn’t breathe. The staff refused to give it to me, saying it was expired by one day, and they didn’t have orders for another one. I’d just been diagnosed with common variable immunodeficiency by the lead immunologist at KU Medical Center, but the staff in the psychiatric unit said I was making my diagnosis up. I also had thyrotoxicosis at the time, but nobody at KU Medical Center did the simple test necessary to reveal that was the case, even though it’s in their algorithm to test the TSH level of anyone who presents with symptoms similar to mania. The psychiatric unit’s former director implemented that policy.

Photos of these bruises are also on file at Shawnee Mission Medical Center, where social workers from KU Medical Center and a local organization for women took me to document what had happened to me. Of course I never did anything about what happened. Lawyers weren’t interested in my case. The state human rights organization wanted me to tell my story over and over again, which was retraumatizing. And my records from KU Medical Center were not accurate. This incident, for example, didn’t make it into the record. Nor did the EKG they had to do while I was blacked out, which I’m only aware of because I woke with a node still stuck to me. Nor did my being undressed, washed enough to be wet all over, and dressed again, but without my underwear.

The staff withholding my medication didn’t make the record. Nor did the staff throwing food on the floor for me to eat. Nor did two male techs standing in the doorway laughing at me. Nor did a female nurse dogging me in the hall outside my room while saying “I didn’t do anything to you,” as if this absolved her from everything that was done. Nor did the staff hanging up the phone on me while I was trying to call my immunoglobulin company, which I’d been instructed to do to set up my infusion deliveries after I left the unit,* or important organizations like the one that was trying to advocate for me, or my friends, or my family members. Nor did their crushing me in the doorway to the room where the phone was located while trying to remove me from that room. Nor did their playing violent movies in which women were being beaten. There are more nors, I’m sure. But you get the idea.

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* Having these infusion deliveries set up was a condition of leaving the unit. The staff repeatedly refused to let me use the phone or hung up mid-call in an attempt to keep me from being discharged.

Updated Immunotypical Privilege List

In 2014, I wrote a piece titled “44 Signs of Immunotypical Privilege” shortly after my diagnosis with common variable immunodeficiency. It’s a compilation of my experiences and those articulated by others living with various forms of primary immunodeficiency. The Irish Primary Immunodeficiencies Association published it on their site and had plans to make it into a brochure, though I’m not sure the brochure ever materialized.

My piece was inspired by Peggy McIntosh’s famous essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” written in 1998. I later updated my piece when “COVID” and “monkeypox” became household names. It’s now titled “46 Signs of Immunotypical Privilege.”

I plan to write a new piece titled “44 Signs of Neurotypical Privilege in the Poetry Community.” It won’t make people feel comfortable. That’s not the point. The point is that it needs to be written, and it matters, and I can’t see how to not do so after what amounts to an executive extermination order against those with mental-health issues. Ask Brian Kilmeade. He sees that order for exactly what it hopes to be and understands exactly what it allows those who hate us through and through to say, including my fellow Utahns.

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46 SIGNS OF IMMUNOTYPICAL PRIVILEGE

Every day, as an immunotypical person—

  1. I can go out when COVID is circulating without being in a high-risk category that makes me much more likely to be hospitalized, die, or develop long COVID.

  2. I can go out during flu season without worrying too much about how serious contracting the flu could be.

  3. I can see the exponential rise in monkeypox cases and not worry that I might be especially vulnerable to the disease.

  4. I know my immune system will respond to flu and COVID vaccines. I might even skip vaccination altogether without serious health consequences. Attenuated, live vaccines such as the one for monkeypox are safe for me because my immune system works properly.

  5. I can read about measles resurgences without feeling alarmed. After all, the measles vaccine isn’t contraindicated for me, and I know my body has mounted an immune response to the disease.

  6. I can touch door handles and other surfaces in public without much concern.

  7. If I get a slight cough, I don’t have to worry about it turning into bronchitis or pneumonia.

  8. My health status never goes from relatively normal to life-threatening in a matter of hours.

  9. When I take antibiotics, they work quickly, and I only need one round.

  10. I haven’t been on antibiotics dozens or even hundreds of times over the course of my life.

  11. I’ve never been on prophylactic antibiotic therapy. I don’t even know what that is.

  12. I don’t have to routinely take medicines such as prednisone that weaken my bones and put me at greater risk for osteopenia and osteoporosis.

  13. I don’t have to wonder what comorbidity might be lurking just around the corner and if it will be a noninfectious condition, a malignancy, or an autoimmune disorder.

  14. I’ve never heard the phrase “immune dysregulation” and don’t have to concern myself with what that might mean.

  15. For me, boosting immunity means popping more vitamin C or Airborne. I have no idea what immunoglobulin is or why it’s essential to the human immune system.

  16. When I attempt to eat out, I don’t have to think too much about how long items are left on buffet tables or how well food is washed and prepped by food handlers.

  17. When I’m out in public, I don’t have to worry when people cough into their hands or without covering their mouths.

  18. I can be sure that, when I go to classes, movies or restaurants, I’ll find a place to sit in which I’m free from issues that exacerbate my breathing problems, such as perfumes, fragrances, and cigarette smoke.

  19. I know I won’t have to pass on social activities because they would put my health at risk.

  20. I know family gatherings won’t pose a threat to my health, even if young, potentially unvaccinated, children are present.

  21. If someone I love is in the hospital, I don’t have to think about when I can visit, how long I can stay, or other health considerations. I can fully focus on that person and their health needs.

  22. I can attend school, have a full-time job, raise a family, and engage in recreational activities without also having to manage the many conditions that would affect me if my immune system didn’t function properly.

  23. I can leave meetings, classes, and conversations and not feel excluded, fearful, attacked, isolated, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, stereotyped, or feared because of my immune system.

  24. If I pick up a magazine or watch television, I’ll see images that represent me and my experience of my health.

  25. I never have to speak on behalf of all those who are immunotypical. My thoughts about my immune system can be my own with no need for political alliance relative to my immune function.

  26. My actual and potential contributions to society will not be challenged because of my immune system.

  27. I can go for months without thinking about or being spoken to about my immunotypicality.
  28. I’m not identified by my immunotypicality.

  29. I won’t lose friends who can’t relate to what I’m going through, who think I’m exaggerating about my symptoms, or who just can’t deal with having a friend with my health status.

  30. I know I won’t be discriminated against by employers who neither understand my condition nor have the desire to provide a reasonable accommodation, despite the legal requirement that they do so.

  31. I don’t have to be afraid that, when I talk with others about my health, they will suggest unsolicited supplements, dietary approaches or exercise programs.

  32. I won’t be told by friends, family, and even uninformed members of the medical community that my condition is really just a psychological problem such as anxiety or depression.

  33. I know nobody looks at me and makes assumptions about why I appear to be ill (or well), or why I am too thin (or too heavy), or why I am not fit (or manage to stay fit despite my illness), or why I do (or do not) eat what I do (or do not) eat.

  34. I don’t have to explain why I have a lingering cough, why I might sometimes need to wear a mask in public, or why situations and settings that are safe for others may not be safe for me.

  35. Because I have never had to wear a mask in public, I have never been asked to leave a public place because the manager or owner of the establishment believes I am putting others at risk, when in fact the mask is to protect me from the pathogens others carry.

  36. I don’t have primary immunodeficiency, so I never encounter people who make the assumption that, despite the condition being genetic, I somehow brought it on myself through my diet or lifestyle.

  37. People aren’t embarrassed to be seen with me because of my health status.

  38. When I talk about my health, I can be certain that friends, family, co-workers, and others won’t become uncomfortable and change the subject.

  39. My partner doesn’t suffer from undue stress and hardship because they’re my primary or only caretaker.

  40. Nobody tells me I should feel lucky to have primary immunodeficiency because it means I don’t have to work or accomplish anything during my lifetime.

  41. My doctors have seen a lot of patients who are immunotypical. This means I’m not put in the position of having to educate them about my immunotypicality, since they’re already familiar with it.

  42. When I present in a health crisis at the emergency room, I’m given prompt medical treatment, not told I’m merely having a panic attack.

  43. I’ve never had the experience of being misdiagnosed over and over again throughout my life.

  44. I don’t have old misdiagnoses in my medical record that can’t be removed without a great deal of time and effort on my part.

  45. I don’t have to deal with the financial burden of expensive, ongoing medical care and therapy.

  46. I don’t have to face insurance companies that must review coverage for my life-saving therapy before that treatment is approved; that sometimes make patients go off their therapy for months in order for those patients to prove they still have the condition; and that sometimes deny therapy because they don’t feel the patient is ill enough to warrant it, despite documentation to the contrary in the patient’s file.

July 24 Executive Order Erasure 1

Given that Fox News host Brian Kilmeade just called for people who are unhoused or have mental-health diagnostic labels to be killed by way of involuntary lethal injection, I’m sharing two erasure poems that use the July 24 executive order as their source text. Nobody, including poets, seems to be aware of the existence of this horrific executive order. This is the second erasure.

Black Box

I had an exciting thought about a poem at the tail end of a dream, and now I can’t go back to sleep. The fact that poems thrill me after three decades says a lot about poems. Perhaps it’s not just the Earth and sky that last forever, as the band Kansas asserts. It’s also the verse, the line.

I will never remember what happened to me two years ago today because I was overmedicated in the emergency room at Intermountain Health after being turned away when I went to the mental-health access center there for help the day before, but not before the access center kept me in a loud, brightly lit room for 24 hours with no bed, where I was left alone with two male nurses. What a terrifying thing for someone with a history of abuse at the hands of men to endure while in a state of trauma about her childhood abuse. Also, sleep deprivation and exposure to lights and noise, including music, day and night are more in keeping with prison torture tactics than with mental-health care, but sadly, the two are often one in the same. Shame on Intermountain for engaging in such practices.

To top it off, they failed to give me my thyroid-replacement medicine for hours, thereby exacerbating the state I was in by disrupting my endocrine system, which in turn negatively affected my HPA axis. That axis is key to emotional regulation. I don’t have a thyroid thanks to thyrotoxicosis and cancer, so my thyroid-replacement medication is critical. My TSH was already 11mIU/L when I got to the access center. It should have been less than 1mIU/L. The access center made my hypothyroid state even worse by not administering my medicine in a timely fashion.

The ER overmedicated me after I said Joseph Smith was delusional. What I actually said was, Sure. It’s fine when Joseph Smith does it, but not me. I wasn’t being hyperreligious. I was deconstructing religion, in that moment Mormonism, as well as the unwritten social rules that appear to govern when someone is seen as insane, divine, or both. Crazywise, as some call the latter. But not, largely, Southern Utahns, and certainly not ER workers at Intermountain.

That’s the last thing I remember. I blacked out for more than a day, this one: September 9, 2023. It’s a dark, rough-hewn box I can’t open, but I think Sharon Olds’ devil from her collection Satan Says might be inside it. By that, I mean my father.

Breaking Molds or Just Breaking

More notes on how and why I’m at an impasse with poetry. I’m amending my previous statement about my poetry and writing not being strong enough to continue with either. I think both are strong but that my poetry in particular is not aligned with what editors and publishers are looking for and that shaping my work so it’s better aligned with what contemporary editors want will destroy something fundamental in the work, in the process, and in my healing.

I don’t want to slot my poems into this or that mold. I don’t even want to be aware of what the molds are. Poetry is as much about breaking molds as honoring those that have a history of serving poems and their readers well, even if it’s just because familiar molds create one less barrier for the reader. But new molds do something for the reader as well, and for the poet. And barriers aren’t always a bad thing. Some of the most rewarding poems require thoughtful consideration on the part of the reader. New molds are important and shouldn’t be rejected because they’re unfamiliar. Not everything new is bad. Not every outsider poet has no idea what they’re doing.

The highly endogenous nature of poetry doesn’t always serve poetry well, as folks tend to gravitate to the names they know and the styles of poetry that sound a lot like the other poems they’ve been reading. How many voices are being missed? My guess is a lot.

I think poetry has moved in some disconcerting directions in the past few years in terms of what’s allowed and what’s not allowed, which extends to which voices are included and which are excluded. I’m not down with any of that. I’m down to write—and to write from my embodied self as it relates to the world. I don’t want to see my work altered to the point of being unrecognizable so that it can get published. What use do I have for a poem that doesn’t look or feel like me anymore? I don’t want to see my work or my life or my mother’s life gutted for the sake of having an easier or more palatable or less complicated poem or understanding of the world or understadning of things like psychosis.

I also recognize that if I had more talent or if my poems were challenging in the right ways (whatever that means), there would have been some evidence of it by now. That evidence doesn’t exist. As I move into my mid-50s, I have to consider what I’ve invested in poetry over the past three decades and whether I can continue to invest in it. Workshop fees, contest fees, manuscript reviews, submission fees, and more add up, as does traveling to read my work, assuming I could even get an invitation to read anywhere. I don’t have the time, energy, or health to keep up with the financial and other demands of poetry, all while waiting years for something, anything, to happen.

Then there’s the sexual assault I’ve talked about more than some of you might like. That experience in itself was awful, but worse, perhaps, was the poetry community’s response years later when information about that poet came to light from several sources. Hundreds of poets were involved in discounting the poet’s actions and claiming he couldn’t have done what he was accused of doing. By that I mean: hundreds of poets I respected up until that collective public outburst were involved in discounting the poet’s actions and claiming he couldn’t have done what he was accused of doing.

This is what I mean when I say pathology is systemic. In this case, it wasn’t just one poet doing harm. It was many, including editors and publishers, the very people I won’t placate now with easy-to-slot work that doesn’t raise anyone’s hackles or that only raises certain hackles the right way (again, whatever that means). There are too many of these poets to avoid. They live in every part of the country, teach at numerous institutions, and have published with just about every publisher out there. I remember what they said. It’s triggering to see their names throughout the day when someone brings one of them up or quotes their work or drops their name into a group chat I’m in.

When I crept back to poetry cautiously in 2022, I thought things would be better. They aren’t. The kinds of things that happened to me are continuing to happen to other poets. Poets are still largely silent about everything that happens in poetry and protective of those who create and sustain systems that lead to inappropriate exertions of power.

Navigating all this is weighing heavily on me. I told myself in 2022 that I’d go as far as I could go in poetry and that I’d stop if it became clear I needed to. I would just stop. I said this to myself as if it would be simple, stopping. It isn’t. Continuing isn’t simple, either.

Faltering

In a place that’s lacking in diversity, one that doesn’t cultivate an inclusive mindset at the individual and collective levels, broad-based cultural sensitivity and cultural literacy will falter. That’s what it comes down to for me as I look at Southern Utah through the lens of systems theory.

The cultural literacy here is concentrated in teachings and the culture of the LDS church and influences everything and everyone, even those outside the church. That focus leaves those who aren’t members out of social events and social support systems while tending to reinforce small-minded and small-hearted views, at least in this part of the state, about those whose identities aren’t accepted, aren’t represented, or have been historically misrepresented in and by the church. If you don’t believe that, ask me when slave day stopped being celebrated at the local schools. Ask my why it ever existed here in an area folks still insist on calling Dixie. Ask me about the Confederate flags folks fly and display on their trucks.

The selective cultural literacy here is why I experienced no fewer than twenty-seven frictions when attempting to participate in a local literary event, from five different folks centrally and peripherally involved in that event, on seventeen different occasions. Those frictions rose to the level of discrimination in eight cases. The others involved invasive questions about my gender and sexuality, othering, negating, trans erasure, and trauma erasure. The forms of discrimination included ableism, sanism, and gender- and sexuality-based discrimination.

Nobody here can see what happened. They literally can’t see it. The lack of cultural sensitivity and cultural literacy is what allows folks to feel entitled to probing about my gender and sexuality as if I owe them an explanation, to treat me like I’m scary because I have bipolar, to tell me talking about my trauma isn’t appropriate, and more. These attitudes and behaviors also have the effect of expunging me and folks like me from local events, from the local university, and from the area as a whole.

But they really don’t see it. They have no idea. To them, I’m a troublemaker, a problem, someone who’s just hastily making assumptions, not responding to a suite of valid experiences and real erasures that have been occurring for eight months and, outside this event, for five years, which is when my husband and I moved to Southern Utah.

It won’t change. This place won’t change. But what’s happening here underscores why we need more understanding, not less. More inclusivity, not less. More cultural literacy outside of one specific culture, not more of the same. We need these things across the country, but Southern Utah is where their effects are felt earlier than in other places and more painfully and more deeply and more consistently, all outside of a larger supportive community. There is no larger supportive community here unless you believe those intent on gaslighting you into thinking there is or that there is no issue here that isn’t all in your head.

Beating Back Blackbirds

I went to Storm the Mic tonight at Art Provides in St. George, Utah. This is the energy and community I’ve been looking for here in Southern Utah. Things finally aligned in a way that allowed me to attend. I also read three of my poems. It’s the first time I’ve done so in more than eight years.

It was important for me to read tonight. If I didn’t do it, I’d never do it. And poems can’t just live on the page. They live in us, through us, and between us. We have to give them breath. They move through our bodies by way of our lungs, our throats, our mouths.

Poems are like instruments. You can’t leave an instrument in its case or just open the case and peer inside at all that bright metal or dark wood. You have to get it out and say it/play it.

I left poetry and the poetry community eight years ago after an especially traumatizing situation that made it impossible for me to continue writing. I vowed to never write another poem. And I didn’t until I had a cancer scare last summer and started talking with some friends of mine, poets who never gave up on me, who kept loving me and checking in on me year after year. One night, after talking with one of those friends, I decided to write a poem to wind down before I went to sleep.

“Boys are beating back blackbirds. Houses hoard the sunrise. / This autumn is unmetered, a dream of wind and shovels.”

Those were the first two lines. I knew I was in trouble. Poems were still there, inside me, surrounding me, eager to be transcribed. Poems waited for me, too, all those years. When I returned, they weren’t even angry. They just flowed.

“This room. This rock. This rough sand. On my shoulder. / On my stutter. On my girl skull. On my hinges.”

Oh, I was in so much trouble. But it was good trouble. This time, poetry would be nothing in my life but good trouble. I could tell. I could feel it. I was home, again, in these words that twist and dance and break and stammer all around us all the time. I could catch them and engage in deep play, deep exploration.

Love. That’s what it is. Writing poetry is an act of love, an act of care directed inward and outward: community care and self-care. It doesn’t even matter what we write about. It’s all love, ultimately. Love is—didn’t Thich Nhat Hanh say this—the act of being alive not only within but also because of uncertainty and pain. (I’ll find the quote and update this post when I do.) The upshot is: What isn’t love? It’s all love.

“Night of deep crimes. Day of mirage ceilings. / During each, an orchestra of fire between my ears.”

Darren Edwards does an incredible job hosting Storm the Mic. I’m so thankful for him, for everyone who attended and read, and for Art Provides for letting folks use their space. They are literally providing for artists, poets, and writers when all three are so desperately needed.

On Poetry and Healing

I don’t approach poems as therapy. I just come to them as myself.

Poems allow us to reclaim our stories, understand trauma and survival, realize that growth and healing are possible, lessen shame and embarrassment, and give us a sense of belonging.

The hippocampus, which situates our memories in time, doesn’t function properly under stress or during trauma. My poems are an external mechanism for placing traumatic events in time, which keeps them from feeling never-ending and ever-present. I think of it as a kind of assistive technology, like a keyboard for my dyslexia or glasses for my farsightedness.

Poets use the beauty intrinsic to poetry to shape their experiences and change the way they live in the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allows us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

I see great value in dreams and writing about them, not only because dreams are where we do unfiltered processing of our experiences without the imposition of an artificial sense of time or an enforced rigid inner governance but also because we can more freely make leaps when talking about dreams, since that’s exactly what dreams do. Injecting a bit of the surreal into the poem can help us bring our dream wisdom into our waking lives—and therein lies not just surviving, but the ongoing work of healing.

Poetry’s concision and beauty allow me, as a writer and reader, to enter into myriad experiences—some like mine and some unlike mine—and to see common human impulses at work. A collective psyche emerges—a collective conscience and collective unconscious—as a backdrop to the individual experience. Poetry has taught me a great deal about my own psyche, my own mind, my own impulses, and my own needs. But it’s also contextualized all of that within a larger environment and larger swaths of time than a single human timespan. Poetry approaches the archetypal, the mythical, the things that lie deep in our ancestry: things we can’t, and shouldn’t, ignore if we’re going to survive on this planet and help this planet survive.

Stephan Torre says that, for him “… writing comes when it must, when it’s too hard to hold in the joy or grief without blurting it out.” I love that way of approaching poetry, but I personally don’t wait until the point of bursting. I try to do the work every day of cultivating making music out of noise, as Kim Addonizio writes in her poem “Therapy.”

Gregory Orr talks about something similar, which is that the act of writing a poem gives the poet more control than they had at the time of the traumatic event they’re writing about, which in itself is empowering and healing.

And then there’s all this beauty intrinsic to poetry, which the poet uses to shape the experience and move it into a different part of the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allowing us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

Poems as Time-Stamps

During Saturday’s Utah Poetry Festival panel discussion on Poetry As Survival, if there’s time, I’d like to talk about why trauma is a wound of the present and how poetry (and other forms of art) can help with processing those wounds.

One of the reasons trauma from the past plays such a role in the present is because our brains don’t time-stamp traumatic events properly. The hippocampus, which is responsible for encoding and storing dates for our memories, can’t do so when levels of arousal or stress are too high. Instead, memories are recorded in great detail but without a time-stamp associated with them. That’s why there’s an always-ness to traumatic memories, an endlessness, a nowness.

The first way poetry addresses this issue is by allowing us to move time around as we write. As Gregory Orr says, this gives us more control over a situation we may have had little or no control over when it was happening, which in itself is empowering. The very act of writing about the experience is an act of survival. But the act of writing also gives us a past, a present, and a future—that is, the sense of time and its passing that’s missing in our encoded memories about what happened.

Even if we write about an experience in the present tense, the act of putting that experience in writing, moving it from the body to the page, from feeling to language, helps us do the time-stamping necessary to process what we’ve lived through. That’s what I believe anyway, as a poet who lives with trauma but who’s not a psychologist or neuroscientist.

The second way I believe poetry is helpful is that it serves as a creative historical record that we can revisit anytime we want and reinforce what we’re learning as we heal. I realized this last fall when I was looking through my older poems. Together, they serve as a network of external time-stamps that reinforce an “I am here” as opposed to “I am still there” message. I can read my poems and situate them in time in a way that helps me make sense of my past and my life as a whole. This thing happened. Here is when it happened. Here is when I wrote about it. A year ago. A decade ago. A week ago. Not now.

And that’s the point of time-stamping: to know what was then and what is now, as well as what isn’t now.

I’ve had similar experiences when I look at photos I’ve taken, but the time-stamping isn’t as strong for me as it is with poetry, probably because I just point at things and click. I don’t put artful effort into my photos the way I do with my poems. I’m also not stepping into parts of my life or into the world itself in photos the way I do—or the way I hope to—when I write a poem.

I love language in ways I can’t properly articulate. I’m dyslexic and had extreme difficulty with reading and writing when I was young. It was poetry that allowed me to enter into language, not dull language but magical language that gave me access to worlds outside my family, my home, my town, and what happened there. I have a strong time-stamp associated with the first real poem I read. It was in a children’s book tucked on a shelf in what was once my sister’s room, but it wasn’t a nursery rhyme. I found it, and I loved it, and it was mine. I know where I stood when I read it, how the paper felt, what it did in six lines, and how I came alive reading it. Fully alive. Fully present. I had no idea at the time what a gift the poem would be or how it would shape my life and my healing.

For me, healing is a process and there will always be an ongoing-ness to it. But the poems I write are essential parts of my mind at this point, externalizations of what my hippocampus can’t do as readily as someone who hasn’t experienced trauma. I hope I also create beauty, at least sometimes, in and through my writing.

I’ll close by saying that I’m not talking about poetry as therapy. I approach poetry as an art, and I also recognize its healing powers, which for me are rooted in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and spirituality.

Poetry and Internal Family Systems

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.