User:A.staleto/Writing Therapy

Two ideas: incorporating my work within the "writing therapy" under journaling and adding my section of poetry page OR "poetry" and adding a section that describes the benefits and then linking it back to the "writing therapy" page.

Things I want to contribute = poetry acting as a form of release between emotions, held/suppressed trauma while acting as a way to heal from these past events and feeling empowerment when you have the written word. Poetry works as a way to feel the different emotions and expressions and having it potentially resonate with your own experiences allowing a different way to heal (connecting to someone else's story and knowing you aren't alone) and learning how to cope with your own feelings.

Hello, this is Nadine, I added some comments to your peer review!:)

ROUGH DRAFT

Poetry has been a very powerful form of writing for many and there are beneficial factors that correspond with writing and reading poetry. Alicia Ostriker explains how personal experience and memories, whether traumatic or repressed, can be tackled by the person through the artistic ability of writing and facing these emotions that have been neglected in order to release and ease a writers pain. Robert Baden elaborates how poetry allows a wide range of emotions to be portrayed to describe the feeling or what the writer had felt within their experience to later allow others to engage and relate to their work. Baden expands this concept with the idea that no emotion is too grand or too small for poetry, which allows others to engage with the healing experience. Baden also points out that for there to be an act of healing and release between the emotions that have been held within the conscience, the writer must recognize that there must be a strong enough need to be vulnerable and willing to be able to confront these emotions and trust that the audience will them be able to relate and potentially make others want to use this written release within their own lives. Vasiliki Antzoulis believes that writers should be vulnerable because ignorance should never be the course of action when experiencing all kinds of emotion. Without the ability to talk about what the writer is experiencing, it becomes more difficult to understand what each of these emotions represent and how they affect the writers current views of life.

Dale M. Bauer provides insight that poetry has the power to allow people to be able to talk about inner suffering without judgment and rather gain the ability to have others be able to compare and connect with the writer's experience. Bauer goes on to say that these experiences, no matter if they are good or bad, correspond with the human experience. Being able to have others relate to them allows the writer to feel supported and reflect on what has been shared and what they have obtained with this release and be able to begin healing. James W. Pennebaker has discovered that "writing about trauma allows writers to externalize an event, thereby detaching themselves from the experience" (Writing to Heal 98). Pennebaker argues that once the writer is able to free themselves from what has been weighing them down, they are then able to begin healing and decide whether they are going to learn from the experience, or if it is something that has been long overdue for a release. Benjamin Batzer recognized that only the writer knows what they have gone through, so the first steps into healing and coping with what life has given, we must first be able to talk about these experiences in order to take back the power and decide the next point of action.