What is bibliotherapy?

Dear Friends and Family

Books, stories, and other forms of literature can help us build greater empathy, insight, and compassion. When we explore stories that relate to our own experiences in some way, it becomes easier for us to re-imagine our own. If you think this type of therapy might be right for you, or someone close to you, keep reading to learn more about how it works and how it can help.

When we are coping with strong challenges, like loss for example, it can be challenging to make sense of our thoughts and feelings, especially if we don’t have any previous experience to compare it to. The Bibliotherapy component of the Narrative Arts Therapy programme is a way to help bridge this gap. We inevitably recognise ourselves in humanity's stories. 

An all-time favourite biographical story of mine belongs to the holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, Victor Frankl. I love how his logo therapy, created almost a century ago, has seeded many different forms of therapy and continues to resonate with creative therapies, like narrative therapy.

Here are the bones of his story: 

Victor Frankl was a philosopher and psychiatrist who survived the German Nazi war camps after the second world war, where he lost all his family and friends to the gas chambers. His famous book, The meaning of life (1945) is a reflection on what kept him going in the Nazi camps. This is one of his most enduring quotations:

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

In other words, Victor Frankl could not change the situation (stimulus) in the camps. Instead, he discovered how his emotional survival depended on pausing in the space between stimulus and his responses to it. 

In this space, this pause, he found a sense of spiritual and intellectual freedom that helped him to transcend the moment, and survive psychologically. We are all capable of pausing in Victor Frankl’s “space”, so that we may re-imagine our response to the problem at hand.

Can you think of an instance in your life where you can do with pausing between stimulus and response? 

Practicing the “pause” can be a profound form of witnessing and self-intelligence. It resonates with one of narrative therapy’s key pillars: the problem is the problem. The person is not the problem.

When we pause and create a space between the problem story and ourselves, we can look at it from a bird’s eye view. This idea of a distance between stimulus and response is extremely valuable in any form of therapy.  

When we are dealing with conditions such as anxiety, or coping with grief, it can often be challenging to make sense of what is happening inside of us. Bibliotherapy eases this disconnection by connecting us with other people's similar stories.

I rely on a wide range of sources in my practice, ranging from short parables to traditional narratives, novels, short stories and poetry, or extracts from inspiring authors. I offer these resources to my students and clients as part of our larger narrative arts therapy programme, to help them find their way to edit and re-author their narratives.

When we create a space between the problem in our story and ourselves, we become a witness to our story. Different, more profound truths emerge during this pause.

If you want to explore this idea further, do make use of my complementary WhatsApp appointment. A click on the top right hand corner of this page.