We All Have Parts / Essay by Ann Marie Potter
We All Have Parts
There are truths I’m not ready to tell, words I can’t bring myself to say. To even think them leaves me feeling naked, soiled, and shivering. Let’s just say that you have to drop a kid pretty hard to shatter them into sliver-shards of being. Turns out I’m not alone in this brokenness, however, not unique in the corruption of my mental symmetry. I’m not freakish in my propensity to fragment and fuse, split and solder in a process that leaves discernable scars. We all break into pieces.
The unified mind is a myth. We all have parts. Some are playful children. Others are terrified, wounded kids. Down the hallway of our internal houses, there are angry, confused teens. Up the stairs, wise old women hum and knit. Our parts have names and faces and voices. If we look inside, we can see them. If we listen, we can hear them. They have stories to tell, secrets to reveal, and wisdom to impart. Healing our parts can bring peace where chaos has reigned. When wounded and terrified kids become playful children, our lives get better. Knowing and understanding our parts can help us make sense of an internal world that has baffled and unbalanced us. Building them a safe, warm home brings us sanctuary.
Some of us have more parts than others. Life has fractured us a little more completely. Our parts war with each other and ambivalence cripples us. I have Dissociative Identity Disorder, the result of chronic and severe child abuse. Traditional therapy failed miserably, but parts work has provided me with unfailing, methodical healing. Although I write from the perspective of a poly-fragmented DID, I believe that parts-oriented therapy can be beneficial to anyone, regardless of where they fall on the dissociative spectrum. Most of us can sense the parts of ourselves that got stuck in childhood or adolescence for one reason or another, those parts that that war within us, leaving us slogging through ambivalence, frozen with indecision and unhappiness. The good news is that our systems can be mapped and managed, our parts unified in a communal purpose and peace.
Healing from the hardest things in our life can be volatile at times. It needs to be done in partnership with a skilled therapist who understands dissociation. Fortunately, more and more mental health professionals are accepting the reality of the dissociative process in all its complexity. By spending time inside ourselves, we can map our internal systems, discovering the age, role, and needs of each subpart. Inner peace can be brokered through dialogue, compromise, and ritual. Parts can be healed of any wounds and unburdened of any excessive emotions, often through the use of guided imagery. Painful memories can be stripped of negative feelings and reduced to benign photographs. When we rescue and heal those parts of ourselves that we’ve exiled through fear, rage, or childhood shame, we can recapture the art of play. When we no longer have to assign parts to manage our anxieties or addictions, we can re-assign them to more creative roles. Parts work has proven highly successful in treating issues such as procrastination, rage, jealousy, eating disorders, and anxiety-driven process addictions such as hoarding.
On the far end of the dissociative scale, where I live, daily parts work is God-sent to those shattered by trauma. I have a monumentally complex internal system and start each day on the inside, getting my wounded children to the internal healing venues I’ve established and my internal healers to the parts who need them most. Thinking back on the moods and behaviors of my parents, I now realize that they both had pronounced dissociative disorders, also related to severe childhood abuse. I’m so sad knowing that their internal children went to the grave, having never being acknowledged, healed, held, or loved. I will not be that kind of parent. I have been doing internal healing work for many years and will be doing so for the rest of my life. My children will be loved and loved deeply, every day of their sweet internal lives.
Ann Marie Potter has officially retired from academic life. She currently lives in the beautiful state of Wyoming where she watches the wind blow, the sky snow, and the deer play—and poop—in her front yard. Her work has appeared in The Muleskinner Journal, The Meadow, Peauxdunque Review, and Literally Stories.
