Author: Ryan Klette

I’ve been thinking about writing a lot lately.

Over the past five years I’ve run a number of writing groups, and there hasn’t been one where people haven’t struggled to write. Sometimes it is obvious. Someone says they don’t know what to write, or they sit looking at the page. Sometimes it is more subtle. There is suddenly something else to do, a distraction, a feeling that what they have written isn’t good enough, or a tendency to stay on the surface.

I think this resistance to writing, and to speaking for that matter, is universal. We all know something of it.

And perhaps we are wise to anticipate the struggle.

Because when we write something down, we are doing more than putting words on a page. We are potentially unsettling the status quo. Even if that status quo is fairly miserable, it is known. We know how to live there. We know how to function. We know how to keep certain things contained, how to avoid certain feelings, how to keep ourselves busy, how to stay in control.

Writing can disturb that arrangement.

From an IFS perspective, it makes sense that the parts that resist are there. They have usually invested considerable energy in preventing us from going somewhere. They have jobs to do, and those jobs often make perfect sense when we understand what they are protecting us from.

Something I have become interested in is how much they are willing to let us do.

I was reminded of this recently listening to Tim Ferriss’s podcast, Where Is Your Bad Writing? He brought together several well-known writers about the process of writing, and something similar came through in each conversation: don’t wait for the writing to be good enough. Show up. Let the pen move. The quality of what comes out matters less than developing the willingness to keep writing.

Perhaps the part of us that wants the writing to be good is the very part that stops us from writing at all.

How much our critics let us write may be a pretty good reflection of how well we have come to know them.

If we sit down and immediately find ourselves writing freely about something that has always been difficult to approach, perhaps there is already some trust there. Another time we may find ourselves completely blocked. We can’t get anywhere near it. The stuckness tells us something too.

When we formalise the practice, this becomes even more interesting. We decide we’re going to write every day. We join a writing group. We commit to some writing for a number of weeks. From our perspective, we may simply be creating a regular practice.

But from the perspective of our protectors, the message may be quite different.

We’re saying that we want to go somewhere.

We’re saying that we’re willing to look at things that some parts of us may have spent years preventing us from looking at.

It makes sense that they might become more alert.

We can’t really stand in logic and say, “Well, it should be fine. There’s nothing to worry about here. I’m just writing.”

Because that isn’t necessarily the reality those parts are living in.

For some of them, the danger still feels real. The threat can feel imminent. And for some, they are lodged in the past as if the past were present.

Something happened, and a part of us learned that it was dangerous. It took on a role. It developed ways of keeping us away from that danger. Years later, we sit down with a piece of paper and decide that we’d like to have a closer look.

Of course something in us might object.

This is one of the things I find so interesting about expressive writing. It is a practice that looks incredibly simple from the outside. Sit down and write for fifteen or twenty minutes. Yet there can be a lot happening underneath that simple instruction.

And there is some fascinating research behind it.

In the 1980s, psychologist James Pennebaker began studying what happens when people write about difficult experiences. One of his early experiments asked students to write for fifteen minutes on four consecutive days about a traumatic or upsetting experience, including their deepest thoughts and feelings. A control group wrote about relatively trivial topics.

The study was small, and there were limitations. But the result was surprising enough to get people’s attention. Over the following six months, the students who had written about their difficult experiences made roughly half as many visits to the student health centre as those in the control group.

It was a simple experiment, but it opened up a much bigger question. What was it about putting an experience into words that might make a difference?

Pennebaker later worked with Jan Kiecolt-Glaser and Ron Glaser, looking at immune functioning alongside expressive writing. Other researchers began asking different questions about what might happen when people put difficult experiences into words.

One study I find particularly fascinating was conducted by Keith Petrie and colleagues in 1995. They worked with just 40 medical students who were going through a hepatitis B vaccination programme. Some students wrote about traumatic experiences and others wrote about more neutral subjects. The researchers then measured their antibody responses following vaccination.

The students who had written about their traumatic experiences showed higher antibody levels four and six months later.

It is a small study, and it certainly doesn’t mean that writing improves the immune system in some straightforward way. The wider research is much more complicated than that. But I find the question fascinating. What is happening when something we do with our experience seems to have consequences that can be measured in the body?

The research continued in different directions. Pennebaker and colleagues studied people who had recently lost their jobs and found that those who wrote about their thoughts and feelings surrounding the experience were subsequently re-employed more quickly than participants in comparison groups.

Researchers have since studied expressive writing across a wide range of populations and circumstances, including physical illness, psychological distress, stressful life events and major transitions. There has even been research into whether expressive writing might influence wound healing.

And researchers began looking more closely at the writing itself.

This is perhaps the part that interests me most.

It wasn’t simply that people who expressed the most emotion seemed to benefit. Researchers became interested in changes in language, particularly words associated with insight and making connections. There has also been research suggesting that writing can help people take a little more psychological distance from a difficult experience, allowing them to look at what happened rather than being completely inside it.

You might begin with:

I was angry.

Then:

I was angry because I felt ignored.

And perhaps eventually:

I think being ignored brought up something much older in me.

Something has shifted.

The experience has become connected to something else. There is a little more context around it. We are no longer simply inside the experience. We are beginning to see it.

I recognise this in my own writing. I’ll sometimes start writing about something that I think is the issue and, somewhere along the way, realise that it isn’t. Something else has been underneath it. I didn’t necessarily know that when I started.

Maybe that is part of what the page offers us.

Space.

We can slow something down enough to notice it.

And perhaps this is where the resistance becomes interesting again.

If writing can take us towards places that we have spent a lot of energy avoiding, then it makes sense that some parts of us might not be enthusiastic about the idea.

We don’t need to get rid of those parts.

We don’t necessarily need to push through them either.

We can get to know them.

We can ask what they are worried about.

We can notice when they are willing to let us go a little further and when they aren’t.

This is one reason I have become less interested in telling people to “just write” and more interested in helping people develop a relationship with the parts of themselves that make writing difficult. I have a sense that the motivation to write, or to express what is inside us, is already there. The work is to meet the resistance in a more skilful way.

Sometimes the writing itself becomes the conversation.

I don’t want to write about this.

Why?

Because something bad might happen.

What do you think might happen?

And suddenly we have something to write about.

We don’t have to force our way through the protector. In fact, doing that may strengthen its protective impulse.

Maybe we start with what it is willing to let us see.

That might be a small thing. A memory. A feeling. A conversation from yesterday. A moment when we felt ashamed or small. Something we are angry about. Something we keep thinking about.

Or simply:

I don’t know what to write.

And then we stay with that for a while.

I’ve come to think that writing is partly about developing this capacity to stay curious about our own experience.

We don’t always know where the writing will take us.

E. L. Doctorow described writing as driving through the night with the headlights on. You don’t need to see the destination, just enough in front of you to know where you are going.

I actually think the mixed findings in the research make the whole thing more interesting. I’m less interested in proving that writing “works” than I am in understanding what happens when it does. The effects are generally modest, and there is no simple formula. It seems to matter who is writing, what they are writing about, what is happening in their lives and perhaps how ready they are to go there.

Maybe writing helps us organise something that has been difficult to organise. Maybe it helps us make meaning. Maybe it gives us enough distance to see something we couldn’t see when we were completely inside it.

Maybe sometimes it doesn’t.

Perhaps the invitation is simply to create a little space in which our experience can speak, and to become curious about what is willing to be said and what isn’t.

And perhaps that is one of the simplest reasons to write.

To give our experience somewhere to land.

And perhaps how much our parts let us write about our experience may itself be a reflection of how well we have come to know them.

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Curious about your inner critics?

What stops you writing isn’t always a lack of time or ideas. Sometimes it’s the voices inside telling you not to start, not to go there, or that what you write won’t be good enough.

If you’re curious about which critic voices tend to be loudest for you, take my Inner Critic Report. It takes about 5–10 minutes and gives you a snapshot of the critics that may be shaping your experience.

Take the Inner Critic Report →

Imagine carrying around a picture of the person you believe you should be, and then forgetting that you’re carrying it.

The picture fades into the background, but it never really leaves. Part of you keeps measuring your life against it without even realising it.

You find yourself striving, apologising, improving, comparing or feeling disappointed, but you can’t quite explain why.

This is one way of understanding what the Enneagram calls the idealised image.

It is the picture we carry of the person we believe we need to be. Not necessarily consciously. It’s not like we sat down and decided, “This is who I need to become.”

It develops gradually. Through family, school, relationships, culture, religion, peers and our own experiences, we begin to discover which qualities seem to bring belonging, approval, safety or love.

Over time, the picture becomes familiar. Eventually, we can forget that it is a picture at all.

We simply experience it as me.

Why does this matter?

Because these ideas can be organising our lives without us knowing.

The clearer we become about what is driving us, the freer we are from the confines of personality.

One of my Enneagram teachers used to describe personality as a kind of prison, except we don’t know we’re behind bars. The patterns are so familiar that we can mistake them for who we are.

Jung suggested that we don’t usually solve life’s deepest problems; we outgrow them. But we can’t outgrow something we mistake for who we are.

In Zen they speak about taking the backward step. Stepping back just enough that we can begin noticing personality rather than living entirely inside it. From here, a different kind of seeing becomes possible.

If we’re interested in life’s deeper questions, what ultimately matters, what makes a life meaningful, what this unique life is here to express, then sooner or later we have to begin teasing apart what belongs to personality from what belongs to something deeper.

James Hollis makes such an important point here. Meaning doesn’t necessarily make us suffer less. But we can endure far more suffering when our lives are rooted in meaning.

We are meaning-making beings. To loose meaning is one of the deepest forms of suffering.

And this creates an interesting dilemma. As we begin moving towards what genuinely matters, towards the life inside us that wants expression, so too do our loudest critics begin speaking.

“Who do you think you are?”

“Not yet.”

“You’ll embarrass yourself.”

“Maybe when you’re better.”

“Don’t risk it.”

One thing I’ve really noticed over the past few weeks working with the critic in groups is that as we begin moving towards what really matters, these critics often get louder.

It makes sense. They’re trying to pull us back from the possibility of failure, embarrassment, shame or humiliation and towards what has always felt safer.

But what else are they protecting?

Very often, they are protecting an idealised image of who we believe we need to be.

The critics hold us accountable to that image.

“Be more like this.”

“Don’t be that.”

“If you fail to live up to this, you won’t belong.”

Somewhere in childhood we each reached conclusions about who we needed to be in order to maintain connection, safety or belonging. We stopped remembering them as adaptations and started experiencing them simply as who I am.

There is nothing inherently wrong with socialisation. We all need it. But these strategies can become frozen in time. They continue organising our lives long after the conditions that created them have passed.

This is why James Hollis, Richard Rohr and others describe the second half of life as a different task altogether. In the simplest way, a return to curiosity.

Asking:

What is seeking expression through me?

What ultimately matters? What is the alive thread running through my life, and what happens if I follow it?

Very often, the answer asks us to risk disappointing the idealised image we’ve spent a lifetime protecting.

The nine idealised images

The Enneagram describes nine common ways this idealised picture can take shape.

We’ll recognise pieces of ourselves in all nine, but usually one becomes particularly powerful—a lens through which we organise our lives.

1 — I am good.

The picture is of someone who is good, responsible, disciplined and morally right.

There is a strong sense of how things should be and how I should behave.

Mistakes can feel bigger than mistakes. They can become evidence that I am failing to be the person I am supposed to be.

The image says:

“If I can get it right, behave properly and do the right thing, I can be a good person.”

2 — I am helpful.

The picture is of someone who is loving, generous, caring and needed.

Being there for other people becomes central to identity.

I know what others need. I anticipate it. I give. I support. I become indispensable.

The image says:

“If I am loving enough and useful enough to other people, I will be loved.”

Over time, knowing what I need can become much harder.

3 — I am successful.

The picture is of someone who is successful, capable, impressive and valued.

I learn to notice what counts as success and become very good at moving towards it.

Achievement, competence and recognition can become measures of worth.

The image says:

“If I can become successful enough, I will know that I am enough.”

The danger is that I can become very good at achieving what matters to everyone else while losing contact with what matters to me.

4 — I am special.

The picture is of someone who is deeply authentic, unique, significant and fully themselves.

There is a longing to discover the real me, the person beneath the ordinary surface.

Being ordinary can feel like disappearing.

The image says:

“There is something uniquely me that needs to be discovered and expressed.”

And so comparison can become painful: Why does everyone else seem to have what I am missing?

5 — I am wise.

The picture is of someone who is knowledgeable, capable, self-sufficient and able to understand how things work.

Understanding becomes a form of safety.

If I know enough, prepare enough and understand enough, perhaps I won’t be overwhelmed by life.

The image says:

“If I can understand the world, I can find my place in it.”

The mind becomes a place to retreat to when the demands of life feel too much.

6 — I am responsible.

The picture is of someone who is loyal, prepared, dependable and responsible.

I anticipate problems. I think things through. I try to make sure people are safe and that nothing important is overlooked.

The image says:

“If I am responsible enough, prepared enough and loyal enough, I can prevent things from going wrong.”

There can be a deep belief that it is my job to notice what others might miss.

7 — I am happy.

The picture is of someone who is positive, optimistic, adventurous, free and full of possibilities.

Life should remain open.

There should always be another option, another experience, another possibility.

The image says:

“If I can keep life interesting and positive, I won’t get trapped in pain or limitation.”

Pain can then become something to move through quickly rather than something to stay with.

8 — I am strong.

The picture is of someone who is strong, independent, powerful and able to handle whatever life brings.

Vulnerability can feel dangerous.

Dependence can feel risky because it creates the possibility of being controlled, betrayed or hurt.

The image says:

“If I am strong enough, no one can overpower me.”

So I learn to trust my strength and may find it harder to recognise my tenderness.

9 — I am peaceful.

The picture is of someone who is easy-going, accepting, harmonious and able to get along with everyone.

Conflict feels threatening because it risks separation and disconnection.

The image says:

“If I can keep things peaceful and stay connected to everyone, everything will be okay.”

My own priorities can gradually become harder to hear when maintaining harmony becomes more important than taking up space.

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We’ll recognise pieces of ourselves in all of these, but usually one becomes the lens through which we organise our lives.

Ironically, the strongest clue that you’ve found yours is that you probably won’t like it.

There’s often something in us that doesn’t want to be seen holding that image.

But the image itself isn’t the problem. It developed in a context. It made sense.

If we can understand the conditions in which it was born, we can respond with curiosity.

“Oh yes… of course.”

Instead of:

“Oh no… what’s wrong with me?”

Even though the adaptation was protective, it still shapes how we relate to ourselves and others today.

These images shape our relationships, careers, parenting, spirituality and our sense of self.

When our identity becomes tied to them, they can begin separating us from the gloriously imperfect, contradictory human being we actually are.

Our identification is the problem, not the ideal.

In fact, every one of these images contains something beautiful.

Goodness.

Love.

Competence.

Authenticity.

Wisdom.

Responsibility.

Joy.

Strength.

Peace.

These are all deeply human qualities.

The difficulty begins when personality mistakes one of them for the way we have to be.

When a part of us believes:

“Only if I become this person will I finally be enough.”

Instead of looking for a type on the Enneagram, we might ask something slightly different:

What image have I spent my life trying to become?

What is the person I carry around in my mind—the person I believe I should be?

And if I no longer had to live up to that image…

Who might I become instead?

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A final reflection

If this resonates, you might become curious about the voices that keep comparing you to this idealised image.

I’ve recently developed an Inner Critic Assessment that offers a breakdown of your dominant critic characters and how they tend to organise around these images.

If you’d like to explore them, you can complete the assessment below and I’ll send you an individual report.

Inner Critic Assessment

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