How Poetry Can Ease Pain
Poetry can ease the pain during those times in your life when you feel like your heart is broken into a thousand pieces. When your thinking is fragmented and you feel exhausted. When you have a hard time moving on and end up sinking into depression. And when you feel the storm is here to stay.
These are the times when you can turn to poetry. That’s because, thanks to her, you can relieve some of that pain. Read on and travel the wonderful link between art and health. Discover how poetry can help unload some of the suffering you carry in your emotional backpack.
art and health
Art is a powerful vehicle that functions both as a support and as a means to express conscious and unconscious issues. Through different forms of art, people can express what they feel, what they think and even how they are. This allows them to let it flow and reflect on themselves.
Likewise, art is used in the health field as a tool to relieve pain. There are even several types of therapy that involve music, painting, photography, theater, etc. Everyone does better with an art form. For example, people with terminal cancer benefit from the humor of the performing arts. That’s why, in some hospitals, there is clown therapy . Other forms of therapy use smells to stimulate people with Alzheimer’s and help them release their emotions. As you can see, many people deal with their traumas through art.
This is not to say that art stops pain altogether. Keep in mind that health is an integral issue, that is, it also involves the mental and social aspects. However, pain may subside when there is a sense of interconnectedness.
poetry can ease the pain
According to the dictionary, poetry is the “manifestation of beauty or aesthetic feeling through the word, in verse or prose”. Words communicate emotions, thoughts and actions, and through them anyone can reach a state of calm. But how?
The poems are full of symbols, stories and expressions that can touch the human soul. They are so powerful that they harmonize with the depths of your being. So you can feel that someone shares what is happening to you.
It’s like they capture the moment and say what you can’t put into words. The poetry narrates so clearly that it seems to know its innermost secrets.
Psychotherapy, school and community
Poetry as a therapy to relieve pain
People have been using poetry for therapeutic purposes for a long time. For example, Aristotle even discussed catharsis through poetry for emotional healing. Also, in the early 19th century, psychiatry recommended it for the mentally ill thanks to Benjamin Rush.
The author of therapeutic poetry was Eli Griefer, a volunteer poet at Creedmoor State Hospital in New York, led by psychiatrist Jack J. Leedy. Together they wrote the principles of this type of therapy and suggested its use in the treatment of emotional disorders.
In 1981, the National Association for Poetry Therapy was created , which holds conferences annually in the United States. In recent years, more and more books on poetry and therapy have appeared. The best known collection that recognizes poetry as a medium for psychotherapy is “The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics“ .
To delve into recent scientific research, you can explore the Journal of Poetry Therapy .
Poetry allows people to express themselves from a safe space and open up little by little. Through metaphors, it helps you to transcend the meanings of the word and connect with the depths, as well as visualize your feelings, thoughts and attitudes.
Likewise, writing also relieves pain. On the one hand, it allows you to sublime the anguish and, on the other hand, it allows you to immerse yourself in symbols, words and images that help you generate content that you don’t know how to put into words through everyday language.
Poetry in education and in the community
Poetry can be an educational resource to increase emotional intelligence in the classroom. It is a highly researched subject, but little applied in the academic world, despite being as necessary as any other discipline.
Likewise, poetry enhances creative expression and leads to self-knowledge. It allows you to express parts of your darkness, be compassionate and empathetic, create content with depth, identify yourself, ease tension, and transform suffering into learning, among others.
Poetry can also be used in working with communities. That’s because it can connect the emotions, thoughts and actions of the people who make them up. Furthermore, it promotes creation based on an individual’s roots, traditions and beliefs.
Communities can be deepened through collective poems that unite and help the community to transcend. In addition, the poems bring the population together by rescuing the value of ancestral metaphors in which stories full of learning are told.
In short, the poetry brings people to their darkest places and helps to build a road through the words to shed light on a new horizon. Soothes the soul with the expression of its shadows. Finally, it’s a way to delve deeper to find the light that soothes pain and helps you transform and transcend it.
