Therapeutic Writing

Creative writing is therapeutic, even if the writer never intended it to be. The pen can often take the writer by surprise. A character will do something unexpected or a story will take on a new and unplanned twist. This is one of the things that makes writing both compulsive and exciting for me. A friend spoke to me recently about the therapeutic aspect of writing.

'I never really understood what you meant by it,' she said. 'Until my Mother died and then I sat down and wrote about her. Now I understand the meaning of therapeutic writing.'

You don't have to wait for such a sad occasion to start gaining the benefits of therapeutic writing. If I'm going through a hard time I write about it in my notebook and it helps. It doesn't make the hard times go away but it clears my head and allows me to work out pathways around my troubles. Sometimes I end up writing about something completely different or I realise that what I considered to be a problem wasn't such a big deal after all. I worked through it on the page.

I am a member of Lapidus, an association that promotes healing and personal growth through writing and reading. I have written about Lapidus on my blog posting called What is Lapidus?

In 2007 I went on a course which I heard about through Lapidus. The course was called 'The Healing Word'. It was run by Victoria Field who, for the three days we were with her, provided us with both learning and therapy. It was an amazing experience. The following is an extract from an article that I wrote about the course for the Lapidus Quarterly Magazine.

Wearing Two Hats by Rosalind Adam

'Someone's come all the way from Gloucester,' I was told when I arrived at our Truro base. 'I've come from Leicester,' I said and my comment was met with incredulous stares. According to Google Map I was 290 miles away from home but if that made me feel like a stranger in a strange land the feeling did not last for long. Both Victoria and the other course members saw to that. This course, we were told, was to be informal and informative with lots of hard graft along the way, but then that was why we were there. Not only were we to take part in three days of intensive therapeutic writing exercises, but we would also be learning how best to run different styles of therapeutic writing workshops and how we might run our own with our own groups. We were course members wearing two hats, one as client, the other as facilitator and this was no mean feat.

Healing Word Course

As I arrived my mantra had been 'Please don't make us play one of those well worn warm-up games'. It turned out that others in the group had been feeling the same way (workshop facilitators, please note). Our worries were unfounded. Victoria started the course as she was to continue it; sensitively, clearly and with lots of valuable material that we could take away with us and use. We were asked to say a few words about our name, nothing threatening in a name, nothing difficult and yet, as with everything we did during the three-day course, the ensuing discussion could have taken up a whole morning's workshop. Unfortunately there was so much ground to cover that we could not allow such luxury.

We worked with published poems. We discussed the value of metaphor. Together we demonstrated the ease with which words of a song could inspire a group poem and how a photograph could stimulate our minds into making a rapid recall of twenty memories. This was an excellent demonstration of the healing value of list writing, especially when we were asked to home in on one specific memory and amplify it into

what was for me a particularly powerful piece of prose. So many times I surprised myself with the content of my writing, memories I had forgotten and emotions I was unaware of. And all the time we were following up with analyses of the facilitator's role. How much should discussion be free flow and how much should be steered? Should intervention be open-ended or specific? If a client opts to discuss the technical aspects of a piece of writing, thereby stepping back from the emotional content, when would it be advisable to accept this and when should the facilitator nudge the client back into the emotional?

We agreed that it was important to establish ground rules for a group at the outset. These should cover such issues as confidentiality, respect for others in the group and rules about reading aloud. No one should ever be made to read aloud and not all work is to be shared. The group should be told in advance if they are going to be invited to share their writing. I soon discovered for myself how much difference this can make. Following a five minute meditation Victoria gave us our instructions.

'Pick up your pen and write starting with the word "Now" and this work is not to be read out.' For me this piece of writing was so powerful that it moved me to tears, another point to note in the ground rules. Tears are not a problem.

At the end of three days I was no longer a stranger and this was certainly not a strange land. We posed for our group photograph amid calls for a follow-up course, a reunion, an exchange of emails. We had shared so much, possibly more than we would ever share with a member of our family, that the bond was an inevitable bonus to what had been a most informative and stimulating course.

RKA Writing

Therapeutic Writing

Pick up a pen, write down your thoughts and dump your baggage

Wearing Two Hats by Rosalind Adam