I Am Stronger Than Mensa, Miller And Mailer, I Spat Out Plath And Pinter

"Poetry... is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts; I'm dealing with emotions."
Substitute 'poetry' with 'therapy' and the statement stands just as true. As a poet I do not seek to tell a story, I seek to off load my feelings, to make sense of whatever it is that I am experiencing; I am dealing with emotions. As a therapist, I work with people to deal with their emotions, to off load them and to make sense of what they're experiencing.
There is an article in Decembers Therapy Today magazine comparing these two disciplines, looking at the process of writing poetry and how that can be utilised to encourage counsellors and psychotherapists to become more creative in their work.
One of the most powerful tools for both a therapist and a poet is that of metaphor. For clients to be able to speak in metaphor and be understood can be a safe way for them to talk about an experience. My therapist encouraged me to use metaphor when exploring my relationship with food. It was an incredibly powerful way for me to talk about something I'd never been able to previously find the words or courage to speak about. It helped me make sense of it, to make sense of what I was feeling without the embarrassment of having to use the words I'd found so hard to say in the past. In the same way, I've used metaphor within my poetry to release a complete myriad of feelings around self harm. The freedom and release of putting to paper my feelings was (and is) immense.
Kate Evans also writes in the article about the way a poem forms. Of how it often starts with random scribblings and thoughts dotted around, chaotic and not linking coherently before a lot of work getting to grips with these scribblings and the poems begins to form. As a counsellor, you start with a disordered muddle, from which we work to find the beginnings of a structure and meaning.
The most profound part of the article for me is when Evans writes about poetry taking her out of the narrowness of the day to day experience, and part of being a counsellor is to encourage the client to unpack the unconscious responses and examine them. Being there to support the client to safely unpack their unconscious, to look at what their automatic responses are and why they are and to be able to leave them behind. To remove themselves from the narrowness they've got on their day to day experiences and be able to live a freer life.
At seventy, Freud wrote "The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied".