Poetry as Therapy
From a paper entitled "The Little Sounds of Grief: Poetry and Grief" by William Lamers, MD, former HFA Medical Consultant.
During my life, certain poems have become therapeutic resources for me, resources that I have shared informally with others or formally in the poetry therapy sessions I have conducted in mental hospitals and in public seminars. The memories, images and even fears evoked by certain passages of poetry have multiple impact on the one reading, reciting, or listening to it. Poetry has the potential to help us in a number of ways. Poetry.
- Enables us to think the unthinkable, to master our fears, to begin to imagine a positive outcome.
- Assures us that others have experienced our pain and have survived to write about it.
- Acknowledges our fears, calms our fantasies, synchronizes our feelings, helps clear our confusion, offers a positive image and opens the possibility of hope.
- Is always available to us, whether we have come to rely on a specific poem that we have memorized or one which we carry in our purse or pocket.- Sensitizes us to the world around us, to relationships and their meaning.
- Encourages reflection, perspective and insight, terms that suggest new ways of looking at the world and at ourselves.
- Helps to restore an element of control in our lives. It helps us put thoughts into words.
- Encourages us to put feelings into words and phrases.
- Sensitizes us to look for comparisons and contrasts.
- Encourages us to make contact with others, to share our feelings.
- Triggers our awareness of similarities in things in the external world in a way that enables us to identify previously unrecognized feelings, ideas and abilities.
- Enables us to view ourselves in new and constructive ways.
- Can provide meaning in a world that has become devoid of meaning.
- Can provide consolation to those seeking solace and support.
- Can offer explanation in a situation that challenges reason.
Several years ago a professional colleague wrote to me during a period in which she was extremely despondent and depressed. She had recently suffered another in a sequence of personal losses. A beloved friend had been killed in a plane crash. Prior to this she had experienced the death of her husband, the murder of her brother, and the deaths of both her mother and her father. She sensed that she was truly alone. All her knowledge and experience as a therapist was of little assistance to her.
I phoned her and wrote to her, enclosing copies of several poems with which I thought she might identify and which I hoped would be supportive of her plight ("Revisitation", by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Rilke's, "It's possible I am pushing through solid rock."
Her response shows the depth of her grief and also the positive impact of one of the poems.
"I have been flabbergasted to experience for about 14 days PTSD intrusive imagery, old imagery (of the times of my brother's murder --- untreated in those days) melding with the violence of a plane, crashing another beloved face into blood and coldness. I have been astounded to feel the downward pull of depressive mood jettisoning me into workaholism in order to avoid all the pain and darkness. The decision to get out of it was firmly made with the arrival of (Bill's) poem, Revisitation, written by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, another person losing to a plane crashing. For a while I read that poem every evening... Today, I am at the better end of it, I hope."
