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This article was downloaded by: [Linnaeus University]On: 09 October 2014, At: 23:08Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Journal of Poetry Therapy: TheInterdisciplinary Journal of Practice,Theory, Research and EducationPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tjpt20
Writing for protection: Reflectivepractice as a counsellorJeannie K. Wright Senior Lecturera Unit for Psychotherapeutic Practice and Research , University ofDerby , Mickleover Site, Derby, UKb Unit for Psychotherapeutic Practice and Research , University ofDerby, Mickleover Site , Derby, DE3 5GX, UK Phone: 01332 592044E-mail:Published online: 21 Aug 2006.
To cite this article: Jeannie K. Wright Senior Lecturer (2003) Writing for protection: Reflectivepractice as a counsellor, Journal of Poetry Therapy: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Practice, Theory,Research and Education, 16:4, 191-198, DOI: 10.1080/0889367042000197376
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0889367042000197376
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Writing for protection: Reflectivepractice as a counsellor
Jeannie K. Wright*Unit for Psychotherapeutic Practice and Research, University of Derby, Mickleover Site,
Derby, UK
Expressive and reflective writing has been one way of recording personal changes and losses. It has also
been key in surviving the sometimes traumatic work involved in working with clients in
psychotherapeutic relationships. This article explores some of the underlying research into writing
for personal and professional development with illustrations from both personal and professional life.
Keywords Bereavement; counselling; creative writing; poetry; psychotherapy
Intoduction
Khalida
‘She wears the scarf
White, fine voile
Pinned under her chin.
She says at a recent
Interview for a job
They asked her:
‘Would you take it off at work?’
Then laughed,
‘Would he take his trousers off at work?’
Then cried.
Most of the time
She cries.
Slow, cold crying,
Not hot, but old tears.’
(September 14th, 2002).
*Corresponding author. Senior Lecturer, Unit for Psychotherapeutic Practice and Re-
search, University of Derby, Mickleover Site, Derby DE3 5GX, UK. Tel.: 01332 592044,
Email: [email protected]
Journal of Poetry Therapy(December 2003), Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 191�/198
ISSN 0889-3675 print # 2003 National Association for Poetry Therapy
DOI: 10.1080/0889367042000197376
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The purpose of this writing was twofold: I had just met a new client, a Moslem
who was looking for a way to navigate through the contradictions of her life. Just days
after September 11th, this person seemed to embody some of the images of Islam
permeating the media at that time. Professionally, I needed to record my impressions
of the beginning of our therapeutic work. Personally, I also needed to write down the
feelings and powerful images left with me once our initial fifty-minute interview was
over.
In practice as a counsellor, trainer and supervisor, I encourage clients and
students to write: diaries, journals, unsent letters, and poems �/ for personal and
professional development. I am a habitual writer and would like to examine how that
expressive and reflective writing has become woven into my professional as well as
my personal well-being. The best way of undertaking reflective practice is to do it
rather than read about it (Bolton, 2001). Perhaps the motivation for writing is also to
connect with other practitioners who want to engage in the process of explorative and
creative writing.
Although this is a personal piece of writing, I am aware of the depth and breadth
of research that underpins the use of therapeutic writing, both in the laboratory and
in more naturalistic settings (Lepore & Smyth, 2002; Wright & Chung, 2001). The
voice I hope to use here is not an academic one. I am telling my story, a ‘narrative of
the self ’, using a form of ‘evocative’ writing. ‘Trying out evocative forms, we relate
differently to our material; we know it differently. We find ourselves attending to
feelings, ambiguities, temporal sequences, blurred experiences and so on; we struggle
to find a textual place for ourselves and our doubts and uncertainties’’ (Richardson,
1994, p. 521).
Like any other form of expressive art, creative writing is often a mysterious
process, ‘‘Creativity is not a tool. It is a mystery that you enter: an unfolding: an
opening process’’(Rogers, 1993. p. 105). Creative and expressive writing has
increasingly become a central part of my professional life (Bolton, Howlett, Lago,
& Wright, 2004). By encouraging clients to write and listening to their ‘astonish-
ment’ about the benefits of taking time to think and feel on paper, I have at times
neglected my own writing. This article is also a way of re-dressing the balance. In this
‘case-study,’ the data presented is myself: the self that works with clients who are in
some sort of pain or confusion; the self that reflects on that work in consultation with
colleagues; the self that hurts in just the same way when confronted with losses and
transitions; the self that writes poems and keeps them in a drawer.
Reflective and Expressive Writing in Supervision
I took the piece of writing ‘Khalida ’ (at the beginning of this piece) to supervision. In
the UK, accreditation by the professional counselling and psychotherapy organisa-
tions, the equivalent of licensing in the USA, requires a continuing form of
‘supervision.’ Not just for trainees or for those in the early years of practising,
supervision is a form of professional consultation, which all accredited practitioners
must be committed to throughout their career. Supervision provides opportunities
192 Jeannie K. Wright
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for support and challenge: sharing my work in confidence; getting feedback;
developing professional skills and ideas; letting off steam and acknowledging feelings
of distress, joy, and failure (Proctor, 1994). Reflective writing has become a very
enriching part of supervision, extending this way of staying sane, accountable and
competent as a counsellor.
Between finishing one job and starting another, I was ending with clients and
also with my supervisor. After leaving our final meeting to drive home I suddenly
turned off and headed not to the motorway but to open country. The day was warm
and clear, one of those blue and gold early Autumn gifts. I got out of the car on the
edge of the Peak National Park, which starts at the edge of the city of Sheffield,
feeling light and full of energy. Sitting too long is a downside of the talking therapies.
I walked up a hill, no one around, knowing I could swing my arms and shout without
inhibition. The following poem came to the end of my pen when I got back to the
car:
A Good Ending
Walking care
Free up the path off the road to Barlow.
Sun like summer in September
When the purple rose-bay willow herb on the roadside has
Burst, seed fairies flying
Amarcord �/ do you remember �/ the Fellini film?
I’ve got an apple �/ sharp, hard, local.
I’m happy.
After clouds to the ground
For days
Now the puddles shine.
The elation I felt could not have been explained to anyone. The fact is, at such times,
I often prefer to write.
Responding to Clients’ Stories
Some of the stories clients bring to counselling are so horrifying it is hard to put them
aside. Narratives of sexual, physical and emotional abuse can sometimes leak out of
the counselling room and out of supervision meetings to intrude into my everyday
life. The pain we witness as counsellors and psychotherapists is sometimes hard to
live with. ‘‘The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.
Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the
meaning of the word unspeakable’’ (Herman, 1992, p. 1). Even in supervision,
explained in the previous section, I sometimes find it impossible to speak about the
atrocities described to me in the counselling room. After a particularly difficult
constellation of clients, I wrote this poem:
Writing for protection 193
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A�/Z of Pain*
I witness pain .
That’s my job.
What am I good at?
Pain.
I could write an A_Z of pain,
The acute
Like axing an ankle,
Numb at first then swelling blue
As the bruises appear.
Acute pain takes your breath away.
Then there’s the chronic
Cruel, continuous,
Like heartache or toothache
Waves of it, peaking and troughing.
Some is just disheartening,
Like ageing
Or all the hot water draining out of the bath, ebbing slowly because
The plug doesn’t fit.
Not deep or dangerous at all.
Some pain is to be
Endured, or not
Epic, endless �/ even epidurals end.
Some is faintly fun
Like tickling (but not with forceps).
Then there’s the gigantic
Guilt,
Or the pain reserved exclusively for hospitals,
All wired up and nowhere to go.
Pain stops time.
Humiliation hurts more than hitting.
So do I want to stop at ‘H’?
I could finish this,
File it,
Organise it in alphabetical order.
But ‘H’ is for hope
The last loss of all and which,
Like pain
Cannot be so easily controlled.
Scientists of pain say that,
In suffering,
The cortex of the brain lights up.
So with hope
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Unpredictable, inexplicable,
Chaotic charge.
I was preoccupied at the time of writing this (and still am) by questions about
where we as therapists carry the brutal stories we hear. Is there any parallel with what
neuroscience is now discovering about the expression of emotions (Pert, 1997)?
Where in our bodies does the pain we hear from others accumulate? Can writing
about those experiences protect us?
This preference for writing rather than speaking about my thoughts and feelings
has historical and cultural roots. I suspect this is true for many people and certainly
some of my clients, but here I will speak for myself. I am shy and come from a culture
and a family where demonstrating strong emotion was and is not encouraged. The
stereotype of the English maybe, and particularly the Northern English. There is a
certain stoicism, associated in my mind with the working class origins I know well
and recognise in clients, a pride in not being seen to be ‘weak’. This social and
cultural injunction is especially inflexible for men, but in my family also applied to
the women. There is too an embarrassment when faced with expressions of joy, fear,
grief and other primary emotions.
‘‘Cultures surely differ in how often their members express, talk about and act
on various emotions. But that says nothing about what their people feel. The
evidence suggests that the emotions of all normal members of our species are played
on the same keyboard’’(Pinker, 1997, p. 365). So, growing up, I would feel the need
to write about my feelings, rather than be accused of being over-demonstrative, or
more likely ‘showing off.’ Perhaps as in some cultures, the expression of negative
emotions is not encouraged for fear of harming both those who speak and those who
witness (Georges, 1995, p. 11�/22).
In most approaches to counselling and psychotherapy, the open expression of
emotion is encouraged. In the often quoted lines below, (Macduff, the aristocratic
Scottish warrior in Shakespeare’s play (1962) ‘MacBeth’ has just been given the news
that his wife and children have all been ‘savagely slaughtered.’ He is caught off-guard
and, in some productions, is seen to be ‘frozen’, unable to move or speak. He is
advised, ‘‘Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak Whispers the o’er fraught
heart and bids it break’’ (MacBeth, Act lV, 3, 209�/211).
The particular approach I bring to therapeutic work would argue that ‘‘giving
sorrow words’’ is indeed key to physical and psychological health (Pennebaker,
1995), but those words need not be spoken.
My inhibition about sharing strong feelings face-to-face with others is ironic for
someone who has chosen to work in counselling and psychotherapy. Perhaps my
fears about expressing emotions in writing are lessened because I am in control of the
autobiographical writing or ‘confessions’ (Abbs, 1998, pp. 117�/128). I can keep the
writing to myself until I am ready to show it to someone else. I am very private about
my personal writing until it seems the right time to share it with others. Perhaps it is
significant that I am choosing a journal, which is both based in another country and
respects poetry and its therapeutic potential! Certainly I take the time to explain to
clients that the safekeeping of their personal writing is important. As one person
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(Sylvia), who had never used writing before, never kept a diary or been a great letter
writer said, ‘‘I had a book and it was in an envelope and in a bag and in my wardrobe,
you know. It’s the same with any sort of diary because if you’re keeping a diary,
you’re pouring your heart out into it. And you don’t want anybody to read that really,
do you?’’
As a client, Sylvia used unsent letters to express anger she was inhibited from
venting in any other way in her family. She would also write dialogues to practise
awkward conversations in anticipation of conflict. Sylvia also encapsulated the
tension between destroying the writing in order to keep it private and saving it for
about re-reading: ‘‘There ought to be some way . . . I suppose what you ought to do is
write it and then destroy it; and then it’s out; it’s practised; it’s up here but then it’s
safely disposed of and gone. But I found it helpful to re-read the way I felt in the past.
I can’t put my finger on why, whether I’ve got such a bad memory and a period I feel
has passed in a way, but it’s good to be reminded of how I did feel.’’
Personal Writing
Perhaps the most difficult experience for counsellors and psychotherapist is when our
own losses become overwhelming. Faced with divorce, bereavement, or any other
major crisis that pulls the stability out from under you, it is sometimes not possible to
work with clients at all. I write a great deal at these times, letters, journals, dialogues
with myself.
Coming to terms with my father’s sudden death several years ago was a lonely
time. In dreams I saw him again, talked to him, felt comforted. It has taken a long
time to re-read some of that writing without distress. I still can’t read the following
poem without re-entering the grief of that time:
Why I’m a Counsellor, Not a Chiropodist
When my dad was dying,
That April,
He couldn’t bend to cut his toenails.
He sat there, heaving for breath,
I sat there, making
Excuses:
The chiropodist will come.
What about the nurses?
I didn’t know he was dying.
And when he had,
All through May I woke up sweating
Seeing him, sitting up in the ward
With the oxygen mask over his mouth
Worrying about asking someone
A stranger,
To cut his toe nails.
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He didn’t know he was dying.
I could listen as he talked,
Mostly about the War and pre-War,
Stories of scams and slow fox-trots.
When it was time for the mask again,
Stopping words,
I’d bent over and kissed him.
Walking out of the ward, bright with tulips,
I did look back and see him
Sitting up in bed, breathing.
Writing this poem, ‘confessing’ my inability to help with my father’s physical
needs gave me a way to acknowledge what I could do for him and overcome some of
the feelings of guilt around my squeamishness. Guilt, that ‘wasteful emotion’ and
such a painful part of the grieving, seemed to burn into my sleep at that time. For
many reasons I could not talk about how I was feeling. The writing gave me a release.
It also helped me to start to say how much I missed him.
Conclusions
With a particular audience in mind, this article has been intended to communicate
something of my experience of writing for personal and professional growth. It has,
more importantly, been about writing for self-discovery (Kellogg, 1994). At the
outset, I had no idea where I would end up, but hoped the process would be
illuminating, much as when I sit down to write in a journal (Adams, 1996), ‘‘Writing
is both constructing experience and reconstructing it. . .. Reality as Virginia Woolf
wrote, changes as we look at it. More disconcerting than situations and ‘reality’
changing at different times is the realisation of the self, or selves, changing. This is
one of the most difficult, and also the most worthwhile, aspects of journal writing. It
introduces the writer to the writer’’ (Holly, 1989, p. 76). I had also realised that after
several years of researching how therapeutic writing benefits clients, it was time for
me to be ‘exposed’ as a person who uses writing for protection and survival. The
professional role and interests I have pursued as therapist, teacher and researcher
involves asking others to reflect on the experience of writing (Sylvia’s words, quoted
above, are from just such an evaluative study). I have sometimes felt uneasy (even
squeamish perhaps) about the ethics of asking former students and clients to ‘open
up.’ Perhaps I am attempting here by disclosing more about myself to reciprocate and
to break away from the traditional academic ‘insistence on the prosaic and external.’
Maire (1989) noted: The realm of the poetic, I’m therefore suggesting, is crucial
for any beginning understanding of human experiencing. Unless a psychology of
psychotherapy attends to imagination and imaginative participation, we will end-
lessly miss the point and belittle what we are trying to pin down. The poetic
imagination creates our world and does not just describe it. . .. A properly sensitive
psychology of psychotherapy has been stunted in its tentative development by our
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massive emphasis on scientific method. It has, I think, been crushed by method, and
an insistence on the prosaic and external (p. 68). Pennebaker (2002), scientist and
pioneer of the ‘writing cure’ writes about the ‘essence’ of writing about emotional
events nearly twenty years after his initial experiments: ‘‘To me the essence of the
writing technique is that it forces people to stop what they are doing and briefly
reflect on their lives. It is one of the few times that people are given permission to see
where they have been and where they are going without having to please anyone’’
(pp. 281�/291). Pennebaker is not given to ‘the realm of the poetic’ in his academic
work, though I found in his more personal writing, for example in ‘Opening Up: The
Healing Power of Expressing Emotions’ (Pennebaker, 1990) he knows how to tell a
good story.
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