Writing and therapy
Writing is the foundation of the work we will be doing together.
Reading the following paragraph will help you understand what I mean and begin to explore how important writing can be to healing and growth.
Reading the following paragraph will help you understand what I mean and begin to explore how important writing can be to healing and growth.
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Why write? Poets and other writers write because they must. They are driven to use the written word as a way to take in, most fully, their experiences in life. Poets often write to express and clarify and understand the many complexities and facets of being alive - emotional, social, political, physical, sexual, spiritual, familial, religious, and cultural. But writing does not belong to the domain of "writers". No one owns writing. No one gender, class, race, culture, age group, profession. Writing is as available to lawyer as childcare worker. Anyone who has learned how to form letters into words can use writing as a tool, as a way to go deeper into the self and as a way to share feelings, thoughts and experiences with others. As a form of self-expression, writing can be a passageway into the self and a bridge to other human beings. For many people, writing -- letters to friends, journal writing, email, creative writing, recording one's dreams, jotting down fragments of feeling and ideas on scraps of paper, can be extraordinarily healing and grounding activities. Going back and re-reading these musings later can facilitate enormous understanding, focus, and healing. The written word has the potential not just to reflect our thoughts and feelings on the page but to show us the larger picture of our lives, as if looking down at many layers of sediment on the bottom of a clear blue lake.
Writing facilitates simple, accessible depth work for many people. When we examine and identify the voices that sit on our shoulders berating and judging us, when we bring the ghosts of disapproval out into the light of day, the voices and demons begin to recede into the backdrop. Over time, they sputter and flicker and their power over us starts to dissolve like a flame doused by water. As these ghost directives maintain less control, we are more able to look them in the eye. To understand how we can make necessary changes or to accept what cannot be changed in life and circumstance. All this is still a distance from being freed from the muck of women's oppression. But expression through the written word can be a bridge. A bridge between past and present, unconscious and conscious, thought and feeling, intuition and logic, story and experience, impulse and analysis, right and left brain, self and society. At its essence, the writing you do with me will simply involve a process of stringing words together. Sometimes this will happen as a stream of consciousness -- intensely free and creatively applied. Other times our writing will be conversational, more like talking with the written word. And at yet other points, your writing will be intentional and meditative, each word formulated with purpose, effort and rhythm. More like writing a long poem might feel, or doing yoga with language, slowly pulling, stretching, leaning, reaching new locus, possibility, ability and expression. |
And like myself lone, wholly lone, |