A Part of me wants to kick him out of the house but another Part of me loves him and can’t imagine life without him. This kind of admission when we examine ourselves honestly and deeply is one we all intuitively understand. Similarly, for self-examination in the form of, My head tells me one thing but my heart tells me something else. These are the sorts of thoughts and feelings that affected Amelia before our therapy began.
We usually consider these Parts,
heads, and hearts
as metaphors or substitutes for logic versus emotion. But in this book, we take them for what they are, as proof that our minds are not unitary, but naturally multiple. The Disney/Pixar movie, Inside Out, has already introduced a larger lay audience to the idea that we have naturally-occurring subminds that think and act on their own. Scholars have recognized this multiplicity for roughly a century, but the ideas have only slowly reached mainstream consciousness.
Healing Amelia presents the narrative of Amelia’s discovery and therapy of her personified Parts of self (elsewhere called ego states, subpersonalities, sides, and voices). Complete with artists’ drawings of her Parts (Old Woman, Head-Banging Little Girl, the Witch, Gypsy, Love, Old Man, Monster-Head, The Hippie, and more), Amelia’s story includes overcoming her rage with her husband, her postpartum depression, her debilitating premenstrual dysphoria, and her failure to bond with her first child. Through it all she struggles with whether to have another child and with the Parts of her who vociferously object to that option.
The novel therapy that unfolds over the course of the narrative is Parts and Memory Therapy (formerly called Parts Psychology). You are guided through the process of deep and lasting healing as Amelia’s internal Parts present challenges or blocks to healing but ultimately give way as Amelia’s traumas and trauma-like experiences are neutralized through the newly recognized process of memory reconsolidation. The healing interventions that utilize this process lead to complete and permanent healing of disturbing emotional memories. In turn, this brings about the lifting of the heavy emotional shrouds that dampen joy and prevent fully living.
