Bibliotherapy: Writing Personal Essays to Promote Healing (pt. 1)
Bibliotherapy: Writing Personal Essays to Promote Healing
“An untold story is an unexamined experience;
without the telling, its significance is diminished or lost” (Downs 303)
I first encountered the concept of bibliotherapy in Guy Allen’s essay “Language, Power, and Consciousness: A Writing Experiment at the University of Toronto.” In his essay, Allen discusses how the process of writing about disturbing experiences allows students to confront, understand, and overcome unresolved psychological and emotional damage, an effect Allen calls “the healing power of writing” (Allen 84).
Bibliotherapy is the practice of using the writing process and its effects to improve the writer’s mental, emotional, physical, and social health. It can also include sharing one’s writing with others to strengthen social ties between writer and audience. Although this concept is called bibliotherapy, the term “endographic therapy” would apply more accurately. “Endographic” means “to write from within,” whereas the current term’s prefix “biblio-” simply means “book.” Nevertheless, I will refer to the concept as “bibliotherapy” because this is the recognized term.
This essay focuses on how writing about and analyzing disturbing experiences can promote the writer’s psychological, emotional, physical, and social well-being, an effect that helps writers become stable, productive members of society and therefore benefit others as well.
First, I examine the concept of emotional literacy and how it influences an individual’s health. Next, I acknowledge the controversy surrounding the use of bibliotherapy as a teaching method in writing classes. After addressing this concern, I examine the process of writing about and sharing emotional experiences-and, more importantly, the effects of that process-by referring to anecdotes and case studies from my sources.
By exploring the process and its effects, I analyze how bibliotherapy can benefit writers by allowing them to understand their experience and how it affects them, and how sharing it allows them to strengthen ties with the community. As part of this focus on psychological and emotional well-being, I reference case studies not only of student writers but also those of terminally-ill individuals, which shows how writing personal essays helps individuals achieve psychological and emotional stability even when they can only cope rather than heal.
Finally, I apply this analysis of bibliotherapy’s effects to the writing class and suggest how instructors can avoid attempting professional therapy but encourage students to write about emotional experiences.
Emotional Literacy
Definition
Bibliotherapy helps writers develop emotional literacy. By addressing our thoughts and emotions, we develop what Daniel Goldman calls “emotional literacy” in his book Emotional Intelligence (qtd. in Bump 316). Goldman adopts Yale psychologist Peter Salovey’s definition of “emotional intelligence,” which includes five skills: knowing one’s emotions, managing those emotions, motivating oneself, recognizing emotions in others, and handling relationships (Bump 316).
Emotional literacy-specifically being able to identify, understand, and express emotions-allows people to overcome emotional inhibition, in which they avoid addressing their emotions. Psychologists David Watson and Lee Anna Clark found that emotional inhibition causes stress and thus increases the probability of illness (Nye 395). In addition, a study done by James W. Pennebaker that I will examine later in this essay suggests that emotional inhibition prevents the individual from processing experiences and thus resolving them.
Emotional inhibition also isolates the individual from others by creating a disconnect in communication and understanding (Pennebaker 15). When individuals feel they cannot communicate their emotional experiences to others, the people with whom the individuals interact cannot interpret behaviors and emotions connected to the emotional experiences (Pennebaker14). This disconnect leads to miscommunication and thus erodes trust in both parties. In addition, Pennebaker points out that the negative effects of emotional inhibition can distract individuals from showing appreciation of or listening to other people in their lives, further harming social ties (14).
To test this theory, Pennebaker and his colleagues attached tape recorders to research participants for several days before and after writing about emotional experiences. They discovered that after writing about their emotional experiences, the participants laughed more, talked more to their friends, and used more positive emotions in their daily language (14). These results support the theory that writing about emotional experiences benefits the writers' social health by allowing them to pay more attention to and thus strengthen their relationships with others.
By allowing people to overcome emotional inhibition, emotional literacy allows us to address and resolve experiences that cause negative emotions such as grief. Cecilia Bosticco and Teresa Thompson address the concept of grief in their essay “The Role of Communication and Story Telling in the Family Grieving System.” In this essay, Bosticco and Thompson explain how any event that threatens a person’s perceived identity and world view, such as losing a job or injuring oneself, can cause grief (257). Emotional literacy allows grieving individuals to recognize how such experiences influence their thoughts and emotions and thus allows these individuals not only to learn about their identity but also to alter their thoughts and emotions.
Disturbing experiences affect not only emotional health but mental and physical health as well by disrupting daily patterns and causing fatigue. Grief can cause negative emotions like guilt, anger, loneliness, feelings of abandonment, fear, disbelief, vulnerability, and an uncontrollable need to cry (Bosticco and Thompson 256). These negative emotions can harm grieving individuals by disrupting the stability of daily life, including sleeping, eating, and even breathing patterns. By doing so, grief forces the individual to invest energy into maintaining a sense of control, which causes fatigue when combined with the disrupted sleep patterns (Bosticco and Thompson 256).
If unresolved, negative emotions caused by intense experiences can damage the individual's long-term health. For example, individuals who do not resolve feelings of helplessness, for example, can develop “learned helplessness” in which the individuals assume they cannot change a situation in which they can, in fact, exercise control. Unresolved trauma, then, can lead to anxiety and depression (Bosticco and Thompson 268).
By allowing members of society to address and resolve disturbing experiences, emotional literacy improves society's overall health by eliminating the harmful effects of emotional inhibition. Writing about these experiences offers one way to address them. This is why D.H. Lawrence describes bibliotherapy--whether intentionally or unintentionally--when he claims that “one sheds one[‘s] sicknesses in books-repeats and presents again one[‘s] emotions to be master of them” (qtd. in Berman 291).
How Language Helps Build Emotional Literacy
A disconnect can exist between an experience and our memory of it. Alice Brand explores this disconnect between experience and memory in her essay the about the brain’s evolutionary biology, titled “Healing and the Brain.” Brand explains how our emotional and cognitive reactions to an event can occur separately, which means we can experience emotions without knowing what caused them or why. This occurs due to two organs in the brain, the hippocampus and the amygdala.
The hippocampus helps us form memories by processing spatial, contextual, and relational information (Brand 206). The amygdala, on the other hand, attributes emotions to the memories. When an event stimulates both the hippocampus and the amygdala, it forms a “deep memory” that carries with it both contextual information and strong emotions (Brand 207).
Intense emotional events motivate us to examine both the experience and its emotional effects in more detail than insignificant events (Pennebaker 11). A study published in the journal Nature shows that individuals in intense emotional experiences release stress hormones that enhance the individual's memory of the experience for “survival value” in case the same experience reoccurs (qtd. in MacCurdy 164). This explains why such events attract attention; they impact the individual more than less significant events.
We react emotionally to situations before we react to them cognitively (Brand 207). In 1989, neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux discovered nerve pathways that led directly to the amygdala, allowing stimuli to reach it first and thus bypass the hippocampus (Brand 201). People with phobias like arachnophobia-the fear of spiders-experience this information processing hierarchy when they see not only spiders, but even objects that resemble spiders. Before we realize what we’re looking at, we feel the jolt of adrenaline and jump away. We do not realize that the “spider” is actually a ball of string until after the amygdala attributes fear to the image and then passes the information onto the hippocampus.
This hierarchy of information processing makes it harder than normal for individuals to verbalize memories of intense emotional experiences; our brains store those memories as nonverbal, sensory images (MacCurdy 162). Our disconnected emotions are, as Herman Melville would say, “like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of [their] paternity lies in their grave, and we must there [sic] to learn it” (487). In this case, however, the secret to our orphaned emotions lies in our unexplored memories.
Writing about these experiences can help writers bridge this disconnect and therefore better understand the experience. Writers must first access their memory of the experience, which they can do by describing the stimuli that trigger emotions connected to the memory. Describing those stimuli allows us to evoke the information needed to access the experience itself and thus communicate it.
By giving us access to important memories, writing allows individuals to understand the experience and to adjust their thoughts, emotions, and behavior. By giving writers this power, writing therefore influences their mental, emotional, physical, and social well-being.
The Controversy Surround Writing as Therapy
Disclaimer
Professors and psychologists both disagree on whether or not writing about emotional events benefits writers over time, let alone whether or not writing instructors should encourage such practices in their classrooms. For example, in his book Ground Zero, Andrew Holleran criticizes writing about emotional topics like AIDS by claiming that its only function seems to be “to relive the writer's anxiety and depression" (qtd. in Nye 387). Good writing does engage the reader, but as we will see later in this essay, studies done on writing about emotional experiences report benefits such as improving overall health and giving both writers and readers insight into their identities and into the influence of society and nature.
Some research does suggest that writing about emotional experiences may not benefit individuals with impaired cognitive processing or severe depression. James W. Pennebaker published an article in The Journal of Literature and Medicine titled "Telling Stories: The Health Benefits of Narrative" in which he cites a study conducted in Israel among fourteen post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients. In this study, the experimental participants who wrote and expressed their experiences worsened compared to the control participants (Pennebaker 16). Pennebaker attributes this to the "absence of cognitive and/or coping skills training," which suggests that individuals must first learn how to structure their experiences into coherent memories, how to effectively cope with such experiences, or both (16). The term "and/or" in the previous phrase does not clarify whether or not both skills need to be learned or just one, though.
Wendy Bishop clarifies the difference between the term "therapy" and what occurs in writing classes in her essay "Writing Is/And Therapy?: Raising Questions About Writing Classrooms and Writing Program Administration." According to Bishop, therapy is a process controlled and prescribed for the specific fields within the trained professional’s profession, and because "processes themselves are not 'therapy'," the term "therapeutic process" may be more appropriate than any term like “bibliotherapy” that includes the word "therapy" (qtd. in Bishop, scr. 1). In addition, Bishop encourages teachers and program administrators to read about counseling but also to "investigate other avenues of support," such as the campus counseling center or the psychology department (scr. 10).
In her essay “From Trauma to Writing: A Theoretical Model for Practical Use,” Marian MacCurdy acknowledges that writing teachers should not try to provide professional therapy for their students. Not only do writing instructors lack the professional training required to attempt therapy, but the writing class does not share the same goal as therapy; the former aims to improve writing skills while the latter aims to improve mental health. MacCurdy also acknowledges that some students need professional psychiatric help, in which case writing teachers should refer students to support services (178). Still, she thinks both processes can "inform each other" (161).
Based on my research, I understand and support the safeguards that enable only professionally-trained therapists to provide therapy. I do, however, share MacCurdy’s opinion that the writing process itself provides therapeutic benefits that instructors should not attempt to direct themselves but should encourage the students to explore.
Where Writing Classes and Therapy Overlap
MacCurdy claims that the same methods that produce good writing also facilitate healing (159). She gives examples of writing that fails to achieve both effective writing and therapy, such as writing in which students use emotional labels, clichés, and intensifiers; such writing not only bores the reader but also dulls the topic’s "emotional impact" (MacCurdy 167). So, teaching students how to write effectively inevitably shows them how to explore experiences.
Using descriptive language is an example of a writing skill that overlaps with therapy. Based on both Brand and MacCurdy's research on sensory images, using descriptive language not only produces effective writing but also allows writers to access and thus analyze their experiences. Using specific, sensory images requires the writer to remember such details from their experience and thus bring the latter into the writer’s consciousness (MacCurdy 167).
Teaching students how to write effectively can also achieve-whether directly or indirectly-the purpose Gabriel Rico states as the goal of her book Pain and Possibility: Writing Through Personal Crisis: for people who do not write often to “discover writing as a tool [that enables] them to move from passive suffering to active participation in healing" (qtd. in Nye 411). As we will see later in this essay, dozens of studies link writing about emotional experiences to improvements in mental, emotional, physical, and social health.
In her collection of essays The Peaceable Classroom, Rose O'Reilley states that most healing in the English class happens through the students themselves and that the instructors, rather than counseling, should provide “an atmosphere of safety" and let the students explore their experiences by themselves (qtd. in Nye 410). MacCurdy supports this view, emphasizing that students need the safety of being able to write about topics they choose rather than being forced to write about a mandated topic, even if the instructor thinks the student needs to address such topics to develop as a writer (195).
Instructors should avoid forcing students to address emotional experiences, but they can give the students the opportunity to do so. Instructors can give the students the choice to explore their experiences in more detail while providing the tools necessary for exploration: a safe environment and effective writing skills.