Can poetry be used as therapy?

Someone once told me that the cheapest form of therapy is actually writing. The most important step in wanting to get help is the willingness to talk about the situation to someone who can help. Most people don’t do this due to various reasons, which might include being shy or not wanting to air their dirty linen in public.

So if one doesn’t want to talk about his/her problems to a person, the question that arises next is what can a person do to help him overcome his problem, or in other words, get therapy without seeing somebody.

The answer is rather simple. If one can’t talk to someone else due to whatever reason one has to talk to oneself. Talking to oneself in our head will not work though, because thoughts will always get muddled up. They will collide with one another thus causing a person to lose focus.

Writing forces someone to focus on these muddled up, collided thoughts individually because we can only write a word at a particular time and therefore writing enables a person to focus more on the important things, fishing out the main problems in a big dea of emotional stress.

I had a friend who once told me that when she was upset,she would write everything she was feeling onto a piece of paper. Then she would throw away that paper and this whole act was very therapeutic to her. It didn’t solve her problems, but it helped her clear her head abd thus she was able to focus and plan her next step.

Poetry, specifically, helps greatly with focus. Modern poetry and free style poetry do not have that many characteristics to define them as poetry but they have certain things that enable them to be called poetry. Poetry has form, has a pattern. In order to create this pattern, one needs to have a certain amount of control over one’s mind.

Poetry is not only therapeutic when it is being created.It is also so when it is being read. Poetry is about emotions. Getting help and therapy from professionals is important but what is also important is connecting emotionally with people that have gone through similiar experiences as you. Once again, it might be hard to open up to people this way, so what a woman who has been abused by her husband, for example, can actually do to get support and help is find poetry that was created due to this same reason. She can conect to this person’s emotions through poetry and then in turn be inspired to do more to help herself get better, to help herself to solve her problems.

Therapy though is a really broad subject and comprises of many different elements. Talking and getting focused is just one small stepping stone to many other equally small baby steps.

So, to finally answer the question, yes, poetry can be used as therapy. It can be used to let someone know that he/she is not alone; to give a voice to someone. Poetry can be a stepping stone, but it most definately cannot be the only form of therapy.