0 I think that I shall never see--welcome to poetry therapy

Linda Wasmer Andrews wrote about this. Poetry therapy goes back to the shamans, who used to chant poems for sick people.

There is a National Association for Poetry Therapy. www.poetrytherapy.org.

The therapy part can come from reading or writing.

But aren’t poets er…crazy? Supposedly, creative people have a higher incidence of mental disorder—especially female poets.

Poetry, this author says, has many opportunities for distortion or fragmentation, which can attract certain thinking. But this doesn’t mean it causes mental illness—and it may help it.

The author wrote first about a miscarriage she had suffered. It helped her. It can help people get a grasp of difficult emotions. Doing the poem might even have been a sort of birthing experience in itself.

Disclosing emotions—even in a poem (or in my case, a website) be beneficial without the aid of a therapist.

The other day on my Recession site (http://hopeycopey.blogspot.com) a reader suggested my post was personal as was his comment. Yes, I do that—it helps me and maybe someone else, too.

I hope anyhow. Our experiences are not so totally unique as we sometimes think.

Try dragging out a poetry book, reading a poem each day...Can lead you some places.