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Writing for protection: Reflectivepractice as a counsellorJeannie K. Wright Senior Lecturera Unit for Psychotherapeutic Practice and Research , University ofDerby , Mickleover Site, Derby, UKb Unit for Psychotherapeutic Practice and Research , University ofDerby, Mickleover Site , Derby, DE3 5GX, UK Phone: 01332 592044E-mail:Published online: 21 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Jeannie K. Wright Senior Lecturer (2003) Writing for protection: Reflectivepractice as a counsellor, Journal of Poetry Therapy: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Practice, Theory,Research and Education, 16:4, 191-198, DOI: 10.1080/0889367042000197376

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Writing for protection: Reflectivepractice as a counsellor

Jeannie K. Wright*Unit for Psychotherapeutic Practice and Research, University of Derby, Mickleover Site,

Derby, UK

Expressive and reflective writing has been one way of recording personal changes and losses. It has also

been key in surviving the sometimes traumatic work involved in working with clients in

psychotherapeutic relationships. This article explores some of the underlying research into writing

for personal and professional development with illustrations from both personal and professional life.

Keywords Bereavement; counselling; creative writing; poetry; psychotherapy

Intoduction

Khalida

‘She wears the scarf

White, fine voile

Pinned under her chin.

She says at a recent

Interview for a job

They asked her:

‘Would you take it off at work?’

Then laughed,

‘Would he take his trousers off at work?’

Then cried.

Most of the time

She cries.

Slow, cold crying,

Not hot, but old tears.’

(September 14th, 2002).

*Corresponding author. Senior Lecturer, Unit for Psychotherapeutic Practice and Re-

search, University of Derby, Mickleover Site, Derby DE3 5GX, UK. Tel.: 01332 592044,

Email: J.K.Wright@Derby.ac.uk

Journal of Poetry Therapy(December 2003), Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 191�/198

ISSN 0889-3675 print # 2003 National Association for Poetry Therapy

DOI: 10.1080/0889367042000197376

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The purpose of this writing was twofold: I had just met a new client, a Moslem

who was looking for a way to navigate through the contradictions of her life. Just days

after September 11th, this person seemed to embody some of the images of Islam

permeating the media at that time. Professionally, I needed to record my impressions

of the beginning of our therapeutic work. Personally, I also needed to write down the

feelings and powerful images left with me once our initial fifty-minute interview was

over.

In practice as a counsellor, trainer and supervisor, I encourage clients and

students to write: diaries, journals, unsent letters, and poems �/ for personal and

professional development. I am a habitual writer and would like to examine how that

expressive and reflective writing has become woven into my professional as well as

my personal well-being. The best way of undertaking reflective practice is to do it

rather than read about it (Bolton, 2001). Perhaps the motivation for writing is also to

connect with other practitioners who want to engage in the process of explorative and

creative writing.

Although this is a personal piece of writing, I am aware of the depth and breadth

of research that underpins the use of therapeutic writing, both in the laboratory and

in more naturalistic settings (Lepore & Smyth, 2002; Wright & Chung, 2001). The

voice I hope to use here is not an academic one. I am telling my story, a ‘narrative of

the self ’, using a form of ‘evocative’ writing. ‘Trying out evocative forms, we relate

differently to our material; we know it differently. We find ourselves attending to

feelings, ambiguities, temporal sequences, blurred experiences and so on; we struggle

to find a textual place for ourselves and our doubts and uncertainties’’ (Richardson,

1994, p. 521).

Like any other form of expressive art, creative writing is often a mysterious

process, ‘‘Creativity is not a tool. It is a mystery that you enter: an unfolding: an

opening process’’(Rogers, 1993. p. 105). Creative and expressive writing has

increasingly become a central part of my professional life (Bolton, Howlett, Lago,

& Wright, 2004). By encouraging clients to write and listening to their ‘astonish-

ment’ about the benefits of taking time to think and feel on paper, I have at times

neglected my own writing. This article is also a way of re-dressing the balance. In this

‘case-study,’ the data presented is myself: the self that works with clients who are in

some sort of pain or confusion; the self that reflects on that work in consultation with

colleagues; the self that hurts in just the same way when confronted with losses and

transitions; the self that writes poems and keeps them in a drawer.

Reflective and Expressive Writing in Supervision

I took the piece of writing ‘Khalida ’ (at the beginning of this piece) to supervision. In

the UK, accreditation by the professional counselling and psychotherapy organisa-

tions, the equivalent of licensing in the USA, requires a continuing form of

‘supervision.’ Not just for trainees or for those in the early years of practising,

supervision is a form of professional consultation, which all accredited practitioners

must be committed to throughout their career. Supervision provides opportunities

192 Jeannie K. Wright

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for support and challenge: sharing my work in confidence; getting feedback;

developing professional skills and ideas; letting off steam and acknowledging feelings

of distress, joy, and failure (Proctor, 1994). Reflective writing has become a very

enriching part of supervision, extending this way of staying sane, accountable and

competent as a counsellor.

Between finishing one job and starting another, I was ending with clients and

also with my supervisor. After leaving our final meeting to drive home I suddenly

turned off and headed not to the motorway but to open country. The day was warm

and clear, one of those blue and gold early Autumn gifts. I got out of the car on the

edge of the Peak National Park, which starts at the edge of the city of Sheffield,

feeling light and full of energy. Sitting too long is a downside of the talking therapies.

I walked up a hill, no one around, knowing I could swing my arms and shout without

inhibition. The following poem came to the end of my pen when I got back to the

car:

A Good Ending

Walking care

Free up the path off the road to Barlow.

Sun like summer in September

When the purple rose-bay willow herb on the roadside has

Burst, seed fairies flying

Amarcord �/ do you remember �/ the Fellini film?

I’ve got an apple �/ sharp, hard, local.

I’m happy.

After clouds to the ground

For days

Now the puddles shine.

The elation I felt could not have been explained to anyone. The fact is, at such times,

I often prefer to write.

Responding to Clients’ Stories

Some of the stories clients bring to counselling are so horrifying it is hard to put them

aside. Narratives of sexual, physical and emotional abuse can sometimes leak out of

the counselling room and out of supervision meetings to intrude into my everyday

life. The pain we witness as counsellors and psychotherapists is sometimes hard to

live with. ‘‘The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.

Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the

meaning of the word unspeakable’’ (Herman, 1992, p. 1). Even in supervision,

explained in the previous section, I sometimes find it impossible to speak about the

atrocities described to me in the counselling room. After a particularly difficult

constellation of clients, I wrote this poem:

Writing for protection 193

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A�/Z of Pain*

I witness pain .

That’s my job.

What am I good at?

Pain.

I could write an A_Z of pain,

The acute

Like axing an ankle,

Numb at first then swelling blue

As the bruises appear.

Acute pain takes your breath away.

Then there’s the chronic

Cruel, continuous,

Like heartache or toothache

Waves of it, peaking and troughing.

Some is just disheartening,

Like ageing

Or all the hot water draining out of the bath, ebbing slowly because

The plug doesn’t fit.

Not deep or dangerous at all.

Some pain is to be

Endured, or not

Epic, endless �/ even epidurals end.

Some is faintly fun

Like tickling (but not with forceps).

Then there’s the gigantic

Guilt,

Or the pain reserved exclusively for hospitals,

All wired up and nowhere to go.

Pain stops time.

Humiliation hurts more than hitting.

So do I want to stop at ‘H’?

I could finish this,

File it,

Organise it in alphabetical order.

But ‘H’ is for hope

The last loss of all and which,

Like pain

Cannot be so easily controlled.

Scientists of pain say that,

In suffering,

The cortex of the brain lights up.

So with hope

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Unpredictable, inexplicable,

Chaotic charge.

I was preoccupied at the time of writing this (and still am) by questions about

where we as therapists carry the brutal stories we hear. Is there any parallel with what

neuroscience is now discovering about the expression of emotions (Pert, 1997)?

Where in our bodies does the pain we hear from others accumulate? Can writing

about those experiences protect us?

This preference for writing rather than speaking about my thoughts and feelings

has historical and cultural roots. I suspect this is true for many people and certainly

some of my clients, but here I will speak for myself. I am shy and come from a culture

and a family where demonstrating strong emotion was and is not encouraged. The

stereotype of the English maybe, and particularly the Northern English. There is a

certain stoicism, associated in my mind with the working class origins I know well

and recognise in clients, a pride in not being seen to be ‘weak’. This social and

cultural injunction is especially inflexible for men, but in my family also applied to

the women. There is too an embarrassment when faced with expressions of joy, fear,

grief and other primary emotions.

‘‘Cultures surely differ in how often their members express, talk about and act

on various emotions. But that says nothing about what their people feel. The

evidence suggests that the emotions of all normal members of our species are played

on the same keyboard’’(Pinker, 1997, p. 365). So, growing up, I would feel the need

to write about my feelings, rather than be accused of being over-demonstrative, or

more likely ‘showing off.’ Perhaps as in some cultures, the expression of negative

emotions is not encouraged for fear of harming both those who speak and those who

witness (Georges, 1995, p. 11�/22).

In most approaches to counselling and psychotherapy, the open expression of

emotion is encouraged. In the often quoted lines below, (Macduff, the aristocratic

Scottish warrior in Shakespeare’s play (1962) ‘MacBeth’ has just been given the news

that his wife and children have all been ‘savagely slaughtered.’ He is caught off-guard

and, in some productions, is seen to be ‘frozen’, unable to move or speak. He is

advised, ‘‘Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak Whispers the o’er fraught

heart and bids it break’’ (MacBeth, Act lV, 3, 209�/211).

The particular approach I bring to therapeutic work would argue that ‘‘giving

sorrow words’’ is indeed key to physical and psychological health (Pennebaker,

1995), but those words need not be spoken.

My inhibition about sharing strong feelings face-to-face with others is ironic for

someone who has chosen to work in counselling and psychotherapy. Perhaps my

fears about expressing emotions in writing are lessened because I am in control of the

autobiographical writing or ‘confessions’ (Abbs, 1998, pp. 117�/128). I can keep the

writing to myself until I am ready to show it to someone else. I am very private about

my personal writing until it seems the right time to share it with others. Perhaps it is

significant that I am choosing a journal, which is both based in another country and

respects poetry and its therapeutic potential! Certainly I take the time to explain to

clients that the safekeeping of their personal writing is important. As one person

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(Sylvia), who had never used writing before, never kept a diary or been a great letter

writer said, ‘‘I had a book and it was in an envelope and in a bag and in my wardrobe,

you know. It’s the same with any sort of diary because if you’re keeping a diary,

you’re pouring your heart out into it. And you don’t want anybody to read that really,

do you?’’

As a client, Sylvia used unsent letters to express anger she was inhibited from

venting in any other way in her family. She would also write dialogues to practise

awkward conversations in anticipation of conflict. Sylvia also encapsulated the

tension between destroying the writing in order to keep it private and saving it for

about re-reading: ‘‘There ought to be some way . . . I suppose what you ought to do is

write it and then destroy it; and then it’s out; it’s practised; it’s up here but then it’s

safely disposed of and gone. But I found it helpful to re-read the way I felt in the past.

I can’t put my finger on why, whether I’ve got such a bad memory and a period I feel

has passed in a way, but it’s good to be reminded of how I did feel.’’

Personal Writing

Perhaps the most difficult experience for counsellors and psychotherapist is when our

own losses become overwhelming. Faced with divorce, bereavement, or any other

major crisis that pulls the stability out from under you, it is sometimes not possible to

work with clients at all. I write a great deal at these times, letters, journals, dialogues

with myself.

Coming to terms with my father’s sudden death several years ago was a lonely

time. In dreams I saw him again, talked to him, felt comforted. It has taken a long

time to re-read some of that writing without distress. I still can’t read the following

poem without re-entering the grief of that time:

Why I’m a Counsellor, Not a Chiropodist

When my dad was dying,

That April,

He couldn’t bend to cut his toenails.

He sat there, heaving for breath,

I sat there, making

Excuses:

The chiropodist will come.

What about the nurses?

I didn’t know he was dying.

And when he had,

All through May I woke up sweating

Seeing him, sitting up in the ward

With the oxygen mask over his mouth

Worrying about asking someone

A stranger,

To cut his toe nails.

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He didn’t know he was dying.

I could listen as he talked,

Mostly about the War and pre-War,

Stories of scams and slow fox-trots.

When it was time for the mask again,

Stopping words,

I’d bent over and kissed him.

Walking out of the ward, bright with tulips,

I did look back and see him

Sitting up in bed, breathing.

Writing this poem, ‘confessing’ my inability to help with my father’s physical

needs gave me a way to acknowledge what I could do for him and overcome some of

the feelings of guilt around my squeamishness. Guilt, that ‘wasteful emotion’ and

such a painful part of the grieving, seemed to burn into my sleep at that time. For

many reasons I could not talk about how I was feeling. The writing gave me a release.

It also helped me to start to say how much I missed him.

Conclusions

With a particular audience in mind, this article has been intended to communicate

something of my experience of writing for personal and professional growth. It has,

more importantly, been about writing for self-discovery (Kellogg, 1994). At the

outset, I had no idea where I would end up, but hoped the process would be

illuminating, much as when I sit down to write in a journal (Adams, 1996), ‘‘Writing

is both constructing experience and reconstructing it. . .. Reality as Virginia Woolf

wrote, changes as we look at it. More disconcerting than situations and ‘reality’

changing at different times is the realisation of the self, or selves, changing. This is

one of the most difficult, and also the most worthwhile, aspects of journal writing. It

introduces the writer to the writer’’ (Holly, 1989, p. 76). I had also realised that after

several years of researching how therapeutic writing benefits clients, it was time for

me to be ‘exposed’ as a person who uses writing for protection and survival. The

professional role and interests I have pursued as therapist, teacher and researcher

involves asking others to reflect on the experience of writing (Sylvia’s words, quoted

above, are from just such an evaluative study). I have sometimes felt uneasy (even

squeamish perhaps) about the ethics of asking former students and clients to ‘open

up.’ Perhaps I am attempting here by disclosing more about myself to reciprocate and

to break away from the traditional academic ‘insistence on the prosaic and external.’

Maire (1989) noted: The realm of the poetic, I’m therefore suggesting, is crucial

for any beginning understanding of human experiencing. Unless a psychology of

psychotherapy attends to imagination and imaginative participation, we will end-

lessly miss the point and belittle what we are trying to pin down. The poetic

imagination creates our world and does not just describe it. . .. A properly sensitive

psychology of psychotherapy has been stunted in its tentative development by our

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massive emphasis on scientific method. It has, I think, been crushed by method, and

an insistence on the prosaic and external (p. 68). Pennebaker (2002), scientist and

pioneer of the ‘writing cure’ writes about the ‘essence’ of writing about emotional

events nearly twenty years after his initial experiments: ‘‘To me the essence of the

writing technique is that it forces people to stop what they are doing and briefly

reflect on their lives. It is one of the few times that people are given permission to see

where they have been and where they are going without having to please anyone’’

(pp. 281�/291). Pennebaker is not given to ‘the realm of the poetic’ in his academic

work, though I found in his more personal writing, for example in ‘Opening Up: The

Healing Power of Expressing Emotions’ (Pennebaker, 1990) he knows how to tell a

good story.

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