When people come to therapy they rarely feel particularly poetic. I observe people feeling frightened, traumatised, depressed, angry and bewildered, but not usually poetic. As a profession we therapists have developed incredible ways to support people, working through past patterns, current disasters, difficult attachments, dark fears - a lot of our work in the early stages of a therapy is making the relationship strong enough to hold the painful initial work of encountering the difficulties. However, the poetic is what spins the world on its head and brings the lasting, extraordinary flash of transformation.
Poetics are when we see things cleanly, succinctly, and precisely. In therapy, insight comes when we can reposition ourselves outside of our difficulty and see it with new eyes, and that is what a poem does. The poetic imagination cuts away everything that is not true and leaves you with the truth of the experience you are encountering. The poetry I love is a way of knowing that I have to listen really carefully for. And that is therapy. The really good stuff often happens when we have gone way beyond where language is going to help us. Then we, somehow, find words. Somehow, we make sense.
Somehow, we find a way to express the new truth - words, images, dreams. What has happened in a therapy that goes like this is that we have allowed ourselves to open to the space of imagination.
I am going to be writing a lot about the imagination on here, and about therapy, poetry, alchemy and the beauty of it all. Please subscribe so you will know when a new post comes out.