BookTherapy

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https://www.booktherapy.io/en-us/collections/online-bibliotherapy-courses/products/bibliotherapy-literature-and-mental-health?goal=0_ed359f248a-8dad64535a-357157300&mc_cid=8dad64535a&mc_eid=2dd2dc4883

Pure Gold

In his classic bibliotherapy treatise, THE STORY SPECIES, Joseph Gold says in his Appendix II: Literature is the most important tool in the kit for constructing identy and building the whole story that connects the "I" to the "not-I" across space and time...but writing does something that cannot be achieved in any other way. Literature is a major source of building materials...(re)construction is how writing functions in the healing process (because) the brain cannot process the reading of material we have written in the same way as it processes the writing of the material in the first place: Outside-in is not the same to brains as Inside-out. Language, as an organizing principle, produces the controlling activity experienced in story formation by the writer. Writing creates a brain association that was not there before. We feel better when we move emotion to our language center, where we can name and control it. Writing is being seen and heard, and even though we are the one who has written, we must decode and interpret the writing. When we write about how we feel, we are both learning and clarifying how we feel. Writing is an exercise in self-efficacy and self-knowledge. Health and balance require us to move away from overwhelming emotions toward organized objective reality. Feelings converted into language, establish order and control. Through the medium of lanuguage, chaos and confusion is tamed and can be used as an informative, manageable reference tool. How does writing therapy work? 1. Emotion moves between different areas of the brain--subjective versus objective--as it becomes language. 2. Objectivity creates a sense of "otherness" and provides distance necessary for critical analysis of experience. 3. Recording emotions frees us from carrying the sometimes overwhelming load of their chaotic influence, through the writing process, thus acknowledging and releasing them as history.