“But what if it takes away all the sadness?”

A writer friend and I are talking about therapy. He has had a tough year, on both personal and professional fronts, and I’m suggesting he see a therapist, someone to talk to, to help. I’m met with great resistance. Not because of any old-fashioned tabooish notions of what it entails to seek help for mental health issues, but because he feels it would be disastrous to his literary self. That it would take away his subject matter, even his ability to write. His reaction, though, isn’t new and unfamiliar. Another writer friend, who’s faced tremendous loss and trauma in the past, said the same thing. If the sorrow disappeared, what would happen to the poetry?

I do understand where they are coming from.

We tend to view writing as a process that draws from an inner pool of feelings, a reservoir of lived experience. And the emotions that affect us most profoundly — love and its loss — are the ones that shape our literary output, and the kind of insights, unique and wholly ours, that we profess. “Besides,” my friend continues, “didn’t Graham Greene once describe writing as a form of therapy?” It’s true, he did.

And there are several ways in which it’s considered so.

Within the field of psychotherapy, the concept of writing as a formally recognised approach to therapy was first introduced in the mid-1960s by Doctor Ira Progoff, an American psychotherapist known for developing what’s called the ‘Intensive Journal Method’. According to Counselling Directory UK, this offers a means of self-exploration and personal expression based on the regular and methodical upkeep of a reflective psychological notebook. It’s an integrated system using writing exercises in a setting of privacy and quiet to help a patient gain personal growth. Over the years, other forms of expressive writing have also become widely recognised for their therapeutic benefits, including “free write” or stream of consciousness expression, “poetry therapy”, “letter writing”, “dream journaling”, among others. More importantly, though, the Counselling Directory mentions that “whatever the form of writing used within a therapeutic context, the objective is not to produce a literary work of art.” Far more important than that is the emotional expression lying beneath the words, irrespective of written style or content.

What then if you’re a writer trying to produce a literary work of art?

Here too, as many would attest, lies catharsis.

That age-old reason to write (and watch tragic theatre). The bringing up of repressed emotions, of reliving past traumatic events, and allowing them to be expressed through a creative medium, for their affects to be discharged, and in some way purged from our system. The purification happens through the words, on the page. And even if catharsis remains elusive, there is always the chance that writing fiction offers a space in which to lay the sadness down. After I’d related to a poet friend the calamitous chain of events leading to the dissolution of my last relationship, she said something that stayed: ‘For all these terrible things that happen… we’re lucky, aren’t we? That we have our writing.”

She’s right. For many reasons.

Because, rather than burying trauma coastal-shelf deep, we may channel the hurt into words, and attain some healing and relief.

Because, if writing is a process by which we also work out how we think or feel, then it helps clarify, our heads, our hearts. Writing takes fragmented experiences and fictionalises them, by which I mean it orders into a narrative out of which we derive a sense of order.

Because the act of writing is all-absorbing. And apart from you and the page, the world, and everyone in it, recedes.

Because, above all, isn’t this how fiction works?

To mine from life.

I’ve often said, not half-unseriously, “great literature better come out of this.” This pain, and grief, and infinite sorrow. Hopefully, it will all be used as literary fodder. Emotional exploitation, even of oneself, is what fiction does.

Which brings me back to my writer friends and their hesitation to seek counselling, when they’re evidently struggling to deal with events of the recent and not-so-recent past.

For someone who writes, and who has been in therapy, all I can say is this: nothing makes the sadness go away. Who we’ve loved and who we’ve lost remain indelibly a part of us. Going to a therapist does not drain our pool of emotion. It doesn’t steal away our lived experiences.

It means merely that we are offered tools, psychological and otherwise, with which to deal with trauma. So we can dismantle guilt. Confront abandonment. Live with uncertainty. All this to move, slowly, haltingly, away from feelings of lack of self-worth and self-love. To imbibe stronger analytical understanding of not just how we feel, but also why. By recognising our splintered selves, we are less likely to repeat unhealthy patterns of behaviour.

With therapy does not come literary barrenness. If anything, it enriches the reservoir within you. Through life, the pool will expand and deepen. There is no other way. And that is what we learn to live with.

J anice Pariat is the author of Seahorse; @janicepariat

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