The Healing Power of Poetry by Steven T. Licardi, LCSW

One of the goals of therapy is to explore diverse methods to facilitate healing and self-creativity. Poetry stands out as one such tool I have used with my clients. When integrated into Social Therapy groups, in my experience, the transformative potential of poetry becomes even more profound and expansive.

Poetry as a Therapeutic Tool

Poetry has long been a medium for expressing complex emotions, thoughts, and experiences. As a young person on the Autism spectrum, I often struggled to articulate my emotionality to others. Even to myself.

Poetry became a mediator between my internal experiences and the outside world.

Poetry’s therapeutic value lies in its ability to:

Facilitate Emotional Expression: Writing and reading poetry provide a safe space for individuals to articulate feelings that might be difficult to express otherwise, while not being constrained by language. “I feel like a cloud of knifes,” for example, might better capture my experience than simply “anxious” or “overwhelmed”. The structural forms of poetry, such as haiku or the golden shovel, can further create a container to assist in making our emotional experiences communicable.
Promote Self-Reflection: Engaging with poetry encourages introspection. Many clients in my experience actively avoid or feel as though they cannot escape their thoughts, feelings, or sensations. Creating poetry, particularly in community with others, assists in gaining deeper insights into our thoughts, behaviors, and emotional states, and how they relate to the environments we are in and others around us.
Foster Connection: In many ways, the world has socialized us to disconnect — from our bodies, from our communities, and from our emotions. Poetry can create a sense of shared experience and community, particularly when taken from the page into the public. Later, after discovering poetry as a child, I discovered the communal power of spoken word, a poetic forms that emphasizes performance. Reading poems aloud with others in an affirming space can reduce feelings of isolation and promote empathy. I think attention is necessary for growth; why shouldn’t someone pay attention to us?
Enhance Cognitive Flexibility: Crafting poetry requires creative thinking and the ability to see things from different perspectives. This cognitive flexibility can help clients develop new ways of thinking about their problems and finding solutions, which is not to say we are doing it alone. I believe that poetry is not a solitary experience, but a dialogue; a conversation with words, with language, with the page, with our own emotionality reflected back on us.

Poetry in Social Therapy

In Social Therapeutics, we focus on building the group. This activity can be thought of as writing a song, creating a dance, or writing a poem. I like to think of each individual group member as a line in a poem — the poem is not complete without each member. So too is the group formed by everyone who is in it. There are other ways to include poetry in the work of building the group:

Group Poetry Writing: Therapists might encourage clients to write poems as a means of exploring and expressing their emotions. This can be particularly useful for individuals who find verbal expression challenging, which was certainly my experience as a young person. As social therapists, we consider how this activity can be made social by engaging in communal poetry writing. This most often takes place in groups, which each member literally contributing a line, word, or phrase, which becomes our poem. This can be a powerful tool in moving us from focusing on our individual experiences and to collective experiences.
Group Poetry Reading: Social therapists may introduce poems or quotes that relate to the work taking place in group, individual client’s experiences, or to facilitate exploration. The symbolic language of poetry can help the group connect with our feelings on a deeper level; stated another way, poems can help us better understand the emotional experiences we are creating in group.
Poetry as Relationship: In social therapy, poetry can serve as a way of developing our relationships: to ourselves, to each other, and to the poem. Group members can share their words, their poems, their writing, fostering a sense of community and mutual support by building trust. The poem can also serve as a shared experience for the group.

As a social therapist, while I don’t always make use of poetry in my work with clients, whether in group or individually, I feel that it is an integral part of who I am in the world. As a dear colleague of mine once said: “Steven, you are poetry.”