Flare: A Series - Part 2: Magic Words
Bibliotherapy, Narratives, A surprising number of photos of my cat, and Tim Gunn again.
Some words have a magic of their own. Everyone has a set of words they love saying. For my sister, it’s onamonapias, like beep, crackle, and slush. For me, it’s often foreign words we’ve graphed onto English, a borrowed word, like schadenfreude and plotz, that doesn’t have an easy translation. I plotz a surprising amount for someone raised catholic. Don’t get me wrong, I have words that belong in other languages that I love to say, like féileacán (butterfly in Irish), aubergine (eggplant in French), or paisano (friend/countryman in Italian). One of my all time favorite borrowed words is zeitgeist. A shared feeling, a cultural mood of the moment, as if we are having a community experience.
Right now, we are all having a community experience around narratives. More specifically, we are all having a community experience around changing narratives. An email from Switch Research about their podcast caught my eye earlier this week about narrative therapy. It fit so well into the zeitgeist of narrative, but also into bibliotherapy, a concept I mentioned in Part 1 of this series on Flare.
What is narrative therapy? Switch Research defines it as the stories we tell our selves and how they shape our experiences, reactions and responses. They note narrative therapy is essential in overcoming low self worth and allows folks to both change internal narratives and make positive strides towards improving mental health through empowerment.
Empowerment is an interesting word too, an one to dwell on for a moment. Merriam Webster defines empowerment as “the process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one's life and claiming one's rights.” Others point to more of a powershifting element. For example, the MacMillan Dictionary Blog defines empower as:
1. to give someone more control over their life or more power to do something
2. to give a person or organization the legal authority to do something
A little digging turned up that empower moved into popular vernacular in the mid 1980s following use in academia, translated into social science and social psychology, and public health. It hit it’s zenith in the 1990s (see what I did there?). It’s undeniable that empowerment was part of a cultural mood around examining power structures and challenging privilege, part of the zeitgeist of the pandemic time.
MacMillan breaks down the origin of the word as well. “The word empower comes from the Old French prefix ‘en-‘ meaning ‘in, into’ and the root ‘power’ which comes from the early 1300s, meaning ‘ability, strength, might’.” So, by examining and changing our own narratives (narrative therapy), we give ourselves control over our lives, we are drawn into strength and ability (the definition of empower).
Narrative therapy can take place outside of the therapist’s office if you lean into bibliotherapy. I think that by reading other’s stories and listening to narratives, we get new options. For example, we might from a narrator’s internal dialogue and make it our own. I’m finishing All the Lonely People right now, and the main character, Hubert Bird, speaks in a West Indian manner - using me in place of I. How many times have I said to myself “me need a little snack real quick” while I was reading this book? Countless times. Good characters live in our brains because good stories break down the walls between our own experience and an imagined or literary one. It is as if our own narrative becomes permeable, susceptible to change.
When I taught yoga for body compassion (for folks with disordered eating and eating disorders), I’d explain that it provides both short and long term relief. It is an immediate intervention in that if you are in a yoga class you most likely are not inhaling the contents of your fridge in response to an anxiety trigger and then fighting not to transform and transfer those contents to your toilet later. It is a long term intervention in that by learning to interpret your feelings in the body, and becoming sensitive to them, you can then point yourself to a less harmful coping mechanism when faced with the anxiety trigger, whether practicing yoga or reading a book.
Which is the point of bibliotherapy. It is both short term and long term intervention. Reading not only provides a comforting momentary escape from the present potentially stressful moment, but it also has the potential for long term intervention. Just as I mentioned with Stevie Nick’s lyrics in Part 1 of this Series - telling an overwhelmed human that the water all around them is drawing them to the sea - presenting a new possibility or a different previously unthinkable conclusion is comforting in the moment, but it also teaches our brains to think of a different future. It is short term comforting, a distraction, and long term comforting, a different outcome.
Digging again into the roots of empowerment (as a word), it’s clear that bibliotherapy fits that construct. It draws us into strength, it pulls us towards ability. When we turn to stories about witches or songs by Stevie Nicks (debate whether that is different in the comments if you will) because we cannot foresee a future different than our current circumstances. And if those current circumstances are unlivable or unmanageable, we may turn not only to poor coping mechanisms (like food or drugs) but we may also give up. Giving up gives away our power. Giving up is a way of deciding our own power to act is mythical, like a unicorn. By turning to books about mythical creatures, we allow ourselves to think we too might be powerful. We might, just by choosing fantasy, be taking our power back.
Is it possible that in the permeable space between our experience and the literary one, we might find ourselves speaking in a blend of the narrator’s voice and our own? I think so. At some point, “me need a little snack real quick” can become “me need to zap this demon real quick.” In this way, I may be borrowing a narrative the way we borrow words like schadenfreude and plotz. An author’s ability to permeate the space between the running dialogue in my head and their story is magic. Books then are full of borrowed words in the sense that we borrow them into our everyday lives. These are magic words then, the ones can walk through pages.
As the publisher of the self-describing anthology of poetry Bright Poems for Dark Days put it:
Today, ‘reading for well-being’, or ‘bibliotherapy’, takes place in countries around the world for diverse ends—rehabilitation in prisons, improved health in seniors with dementia, enhanced mental health for veterans, emotional resilience in cancer patients and so on. Powerful creative writing is even used to shift public attitudes towards social justice and climate change. In these ways, the purpose of reading may be vastly different from what it was when you studied poetry at school. Literature is not something to be deconstructed in order to understand its technical virtues but rather is something to be savoured for its emotional ones. It is both a window and a mirror, through which we can come to better understand others and ourselves.
The idea of books as therapy, bibliotherapy, isn’t that reading is an escape. It’s the opposite. Reading increases our direct experience of the right now through the permeability of between the reader’s perspective and that of the narrator. At the same time, a book, at least a good one, presents the reader with a quest. A story should have conflict as well as resolution. That’s the empowerment part of it. As Stevie Nick’s sings in Crystal:
I turned around
And the water was closing all around
Like a glove
Like the love that had finally, finally found me
Then I knew
In the crystalline knowledge of you
Drove me through the mountains
Through the crystal-like clear water fountain
Drove me like a magnet
To the sea
Even microfiction, stories shorter than 300 words, should led the reader away from where they began.1 That movement provides the reader (us) with new options. And, the more we read, theoretically, the greater the variety of endings from which we can choose.
It’s not the ending, though, that is the important part of bibliotherapy. It’s the experience. Just as Mecca, Jerusalem, or even Lowe’s on a weekend isn’t the the important part of a pilgrimage trip. If the problem is the inability to see a different future, then the answer is any act at all. The act of choosing to start the pilgrimage is an act of faith. The healing can’t start until that part has begun.
Healing from any illness requires two beliefs. First, that healing is possible. Second, that the person to be healed deserves it. So too with books, right? Choosing a book because it seems interesting or even because your book club is reading it is a choice over how internal narrative can be shaped. You also declare that you are worthy of that change. In so doing, you choose to move into ability, you move into power, e.g., you empower yourself.
Another way of saying that might be that by choosing a book, or a pilgrimage, you are looking for a new way to make your life (or your internal thoughts about your life) work. Taken one step further, by choosing a book (or a pilgrimage - you are getting the theme of Part 3 now, yes?) you are opting for a different activity than merely beating yourself up into doing something in the same way as before. You might even be opting for doing something in a way different than you know, or different than you’ve been told to do it before. This makes sense in terms of reading about witches and mythical critters. Obviously, if my cat could make me pancakes, I’d opt for that over struggling to do it myself.
I’d opt for it, even if the known thing, the usual way, the thing we normally do, is to make pancakes ourselves. But I’d especially opt for having Ernie make pancakes on the day when vertigo has me on a personal tilt awhirl or when a migraine has stabbed it’s ice pick finger through my right eye. In those times, “normal” isn’t right. What I need is something that works for me, I need a way to make it work.
It all comes back to Tim Gunn after all. See?
Hyper-individuality (make it work) trumps conventionalism (make it right) as a go to strategy only when I know there is another option than the norm. I have to decide there is a way of being other than laying down and wishing for the vertigo to leave me be so I can make pancakes (or eat granola, or insert your breakfast option of choice). Pancakes are a pilgrimage when they require the same act of faith as any other experience whose purpose is to provide reflection and contemplation. We act in faith in all kinds of ways in our every day lives, not just in deciding to take a long strange trip. But that’s for Part 3.
Unless you are like one of the judge’s in the NYC Midnight program I recently had who possessed the reading comprehension of a deceased fruit fly. Godspeed to you dear judge, who did not possess sufficient recall to carry a detail from one end of a 100 word story to another. How you manage to follow traffic signs is beyond me.
I want to savor this piece ...