You got all that from a poem?
There was a young woman I saw several times at the correctional facility I work at. Several sessions into our work together, we began discussing her past in the context of more recent grief issues that had come up for her. As we talked, it became clear that she was holding in a lot of anger, resentment, and pain from past traumatic experiences and that she had buried her emotions so deeply that she had, in essence, forgotten how to "feel" them. She would talk about the experiences and losses with about as much emotion as she might talk about what she ate for dinner yesterday. There appeared to be a complete disconnect.
I thought about asking my client to start a journal to begin the process of reconnection, thinking that free-flow writing might begin to awaken and evoke those emotions, and help her to identify her feelings. I had seen these results in other clients who have used journaling as an effective therapeutic tool. However, my client's reading and writing skills were limited and she had exceptional difficulty expressing herself verbally. In addition, I am generally hesitant to recommend journaling exercises to clients in a correctional setting due to the lack of privacy and potential risk that being totally open, honest, and candid about one's feelings could easily be misconstrued by other staff who may not be aware of or sympathetic to the therapeutic benefit of such writings.
My client indicated that she expressed herself more easily and comfortably through art, but that she had not done so recently due to increased feelings of depression and lack of motivation. I encouraged her before our next session to use drawings, poetry or other artistic methods as a means of identify the feelings she continued to struggle with related to her grief issues. She agreed to give it a try and we met again the following week.
My client shared several poems with me that she had written in response to my 'homework' assignment. We processed them all, in a fair amount of detail. I asked her to explain what was thinking about as she wrote each one, how it felt to write them, and what, if any, physical or emotional sensations they evoked (there were few). We paid particular attention to one poem that my client felt was, upon re-reading, disturbing. We talked about each section of the poem and what all of the various metaphors and analogies meant for her in the context of her own life. As the discusssion progressed, she disclosed having been molested as a child. She then expressed fears that other children may be at risk of victimization by the same individual. We talked about the importance of protecting children in the community and her willingness to report the suspected abuse. While my client was initially hesitant, in the end she agreed to do so and another meeting was scheduled when the call to Children's Services could be placed.
As we were about to end the session, my client said, "You got all that from a poem?" I was surprisingly struck by the comment, and had to think about it for a while to really understand how and why it affected me so profoundly.
For me, I think that this one, simple comment encompassed everything I believe therapy should be about: Drawing connections where you might least expect them to exist; not being afraid of not knowing the answers, but asking the right questions to help your client figure them out (even if you have no idea why those questions are the right ones, or even if they are at the time); recognizing that, sometimes, the smallest changes are the biggest ones; flexibility.
As we started off that session, I had no possible way of knowing that it would progress in the way that it did. My "agenda" in the beginning was to find a way to connect my client to her feelings related to the death of a close family member. Being open and flexible to the new direction that her poetry took us allowed for her to begin to experience of healing in a new and unexpected way... the decision to place the call to Social Services was empowering for her, and was a way of taking back some of the power that had been taken from her at such an early age through her own experiences of abuse. The simple act of making that call helped her to feel stronger and more in control. She did for other potentially at-risk children what she wished someone would have done for her when she didn't have a voice of her own all those years ago.
I believe that the simple act of making that call, a call was not planned or predicted, allowed my client to come one step closer to being more integrated with her thoughts, feelings, and emotions. There's a good chance this might not have happened if I'd been inflexible and tried to sick with the original "plan" I had for therapy that day.
So, I suppose I did get all that from a poem.
I thought about asking my client to start a journal to begin the process of reconnection, thinking that free-flow writing might begin to awaken and evoke those emotions, and help her to identify her feelings. I had seen these results in other clients who have used journaling as an effective therapeutic tool. However, my client's reading and writing skills were limited and she had exceptional difficulty expressing herself verbally. In addition, I am generally hesitant to recommend journaling exercises to clients in a correctional setting due to the lack of privacy and potential risk that being totally open, honest, and candid about one's feelings could easily be misconstrued by other staff who may not be aware of or sympathetic to the therapeutic benefit of such writings.
My client indicated that she expressed herself more easily and comfortably through art, but that she had not done so recently due to increased feelings of depression and lack of motivation. I encouraged her before our next session to use drawings, poetry or other artistic methods as a means of identify the feelings she continued to struggle with related to her grief issues. She agreed to give it a try and we met again the following week.
My client shared several poems with me that she had written in response to my 'homework' assignment. We processed them all, in a fair amount of detail. I asked her to explain what was thinking about as she wrote each one, how it felt to write them, and what, if any, physical or emotional sensations they evoked (there were few). We paid particular attention to one poem that my client felt was, upon re-reading, disturbing. We talked about each section of the poem and what all of the various metaphors and analogies meant for her in the context of her own life. As the discusssion progressed, she disclosed having been molested as a child. She then expressed fears that other children may be at risk of victimization by the same individual. We talked about the importance of protecting children in the community and her willingness to report the suspected abuse. While my client was initially hesitant, in the end she agreed to do so and another meeting was scheduled when the call to Children's Services could be placed.
As we were about to end the session, my client said, "You got all that from a poem?" I was surprisingly struck by the comment, and had to think about it for a while to really understand how and why it affected me so profoundly.
For me, I think that this one, simple comment encompassed everything I believe therapy should be about: Drawing connections where you might least expect them to exist; not being afraid of not knowing the answers, but asking the right questions to help your client figure them out (even if you have no idea why those questions are the right ones, or even if they are at the time); recognizing that, sometimes, the smallest changes are the biggest ones; flexibility.
As we started off that session, I had no possible way of knowing that it would progress in the way that it did. My "agenda" in the beginning was to find a way to connect my client to her feelings related to the death of a close family member. Being open and flexible to the new direction that her poetry took us allowed for her to begin to experience of healing in a new and unexpected way... the decision to place the call to Social Services was empowering for her, and was a way of taking back some of the power that had been taken from her at such an early age through her own experiences of abuse. The simple act of making that call helped her to feel stronger and more in control. She did for other potentially at-risk children what she wished someone would have done for her when she didn't have a voice of her own all those years ago.
I believe that the simple act of making that call, a call was not planned or predicted, allowed my client to come one step closer to being more integrated with her thoughts, feelings, and emotions. There's a good chance this might not have happened if I'd been inflexible and tried to sick with the original "plan" I had for therapy that day.
So, I suppose I did get all that from a poem.
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