WYP (Write Your Part)

WYP (Write Your Part) is a written self-inventory used at VAV to have participants acknowledge their own part in abuse. Its requirement that a participant write and read an account before returning makes it both a reflection exercise and a condition of re-entry. In Soo-Lin Lee-Segal’s case, the exercise becomes a test of how far personal accountability can be expressed within the group’s prescribed language.

Purpose and Procedure

Soo-Lin explains that WYP is pronounced like weep, not wipe. The inventory asks participants to own their part in abuse; if someone slips into what the group calls victimhood, the person is expected to TORCH themselves, or use a Time Out, Reality Check. After Soo-Lin is TORCHed, she is forbidden to return until she has written her part and read it aloud. She spends three hours writing before sending the result to Audrey Griffin.

Soo-Lin’s Account

In her WYP, Soo-Lin describes a work relationship with Elgin Branch that began roughly and then flourished: he requested what seemed impossible, she delivered, and his praise made her feel that they were falling in love. Her own parenthetical reality check corrects that shared-sounding account: she was falling in love, not Elgin. The distinction shows the inventory doing more than recounting events; it makes her examine where her interpretation exceeded what she could know about his feelings.

Soo-Lin locates a turning point in Elgin’s decision to invite her to lunch and confide in her about his wife. She says she tried not to engage, while acknowledging that their children attended the same school and that this blurred the boundary between their work and personal lives. The WYP thus places her account of the relationship alongside her recognition of the circumstances that made distance difficult.

Dispute over Victimhood

When Soo-Lin later reads her WYP at VAV, the group again TORCHes her, judging the account self-pitying. In defending herself, she says that pregnancy meant Elgin was revictimizing her. The group’s framework rejects that description: if a person is revictimized, it treats the person’s allowance of the victimization as making the self a new abuser, and therefore denies that revictimization has occurred.

Soo-Lin then argues that the baby is a new victim, but the group turns that claim back on her, saying she is victimizing the baby; another member’s reasoning makes her the one victimizing Elgin because the baby is his. The exchange reveals a consequential limit in the exercise as practiced: a method presented as self-examination becomes a strict interpretive rule that leaves Soo-Lin unable to describe harm in the terms she considers accurate. She protests the group’s treatment, leaves, and cries in her car after getting ice cream. The account marks this confrontation as the high point, giving WYP a sharply different outcome from its stated purpose of helping a participant recognize her own part.