Caring For Your Inner Creator
Just get your butt in the chair every day and write! UGH how I hate to hear that. It may not be the worst advice but let’s be honest, if it were that easy, why would we need the exhortation? When I’m feeling stressed and anxious about my creative practice – for me, writing – I’m reminded of how I used to feel when I had an unhappy baby on my hands – shoulders tense, muscles tight, pit in the middle of my stomach, an all-pervading sense of hopeless dread. And immediately it comes to me: HALT.
The magic word of babycare, halt: Hungry, angry, lonely, tired.
It’s a great mnemonic word, because it tells you what to do – STOP! Stop agonizing, stop fretting, stop tearing out your hair. Go to the crying baby, and see what it needs: is it hungry, angry, lonely, or tired? Lord, hopefully the last one, right? But see what it needs and give it to them. I thought I would take the same approach to my inner writer/artist/creator.
Yes, you have an inner creator! And you need to ask yourself, “Do I treat my inner creator the way I was treated as a child?” If you are mis-parenting your inner creator, you may be:
• Criticizing, shaming, blaming it for not doing what you want it to do; • Focusing on the negative, the problems, mistakes;
• Never seeing positive aspects, not allowing growth;
• Being over-protective;
• Being under-protective;
• Being neglectful;
• Lacking empathy;
• Needing excessive admiration, attention;
• Using it for your own ends.
Such a good question, right: Like a narcissistic parent living through their talented child, are you using your inner creator for attention, acclaim, or other? Or are you letting it be what it wants to and is meant to be? It’s important to ask how am I relating to my inner parts, in particular, the creator, artist, writer, whatever you want to call it – the urge to make something, to express, to say, to form and shape the world around us. Like a good parent of a baby who has difficulty communicating to us exactly what it needs, we need to be alert and aware, anticipating that which it can’t tell us about. Here, then, are some ideas for you about Inner Artist Care.
RAIN on Your Parts
For internal adult care, the acronym is RAIN: Recognize, allow, investigate, nurture. When my inner creator is whinging, pouting, and being obstinate, I HALT in the sense that I stop fretting and tearing out my hair, but then I RAIN: I Recognize that my part is reactive, and that I’m caught up in it. Then I Allow and Accept this part. Hello, inner creator! I see you. OK, you’re one of my parts. Welcome. Next I Investigate the part: What are you afraid of? What do you want, what do you need? What triggered you? Finally, I Nurture the part – it’s going to be OK. I’m not going to let anything bad happen to us. I hear you, I hear your concerns. You can leave it to me.
What RAIN does is allow us to externalize or “un-identify” with our reactive parts. We are not angry, anxious, or afraid; we have parts that feel these things. They are bringing us information up from our subconscious mind, in the form of emotion. So before you even sit down to write, it’s good to get in touch with your parts. Ask who’s present.
Sometimes the biggest enemy of the inner creator is a harsh inner critic.
If you care at all about your art, you probably have one of these. Before we are even invited to try something we are invited to critique it. I bet you can name the best artist in your elementary school class. We learn from early on that some art is good and some is bad. Caring about the work – delighting in language, or color, or whatever you delight in about your field – increases the stakes when it comes to our own work. We are creators but we are also appreciators; hence, the gap in our taste and our ability.
It’s important to remember that our inner critic is trying to help us here, and appreciate them for their efforts, however misguided. We can make a deal with our inner critic, asking it to step to the side while we work on a piece, reasoning that the anxiety it produces if it chimes in while we are working tends to make our inner creator want to run and hide, instead of “do a better job.” Later we can look at a piece with a more critical eye, although even that may need to be negotiated, with particularly harsh critics.
There’s a lot to say about parts; you can find an excellent discussion in my 30-Day Relationship Experiment, but also all over the internet. A good place is the IFS Institute, and any of Richard Schwartz’s books, particularly No Bad Parts.
Next week we'll look at taking care of the writer's body. Subscribe below to be notified!
