Surprising the therapeutic power of literature, in these times when we are overwhelmed by sadness, anxiety and disgust, reading books and poetry can help transform feelings, emotions and thoughts.
Through words we can understand our own mood and profoundly improve our behavior because, one way or another, we can find ourselves in the leaves of a good story or a beautiful poetry.
- The brain has the ability to experience what we read and empathize with words that help us name and express what happens within us.
- A fact that has been widely documented since the Greek Golden Age.
It is curious to see how Aristotle accomplished this centuries ago when he invites us to make sincere and expressive reflections on what people with the gift of writing put into words. Similarly, in 1904, Kafka made this reflection in his Letter to Oskar Pollak:
“If the book we read doesn’t wake us up like a punch in the skull, why read it?To make us happy? Oh, my God, we’d be happy too if we didn’t have books, and we could, if necessary, write the books ourselves that would make us happy.
But what we must fear are those books that rush towards us like bad luck and that deeply disturb us, like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, like suicide. What do we have in us?
Literature is a gentle remedy that brings us closer to “healing” because it often allows us to normalize and validate what we feel, as well as reason in a correct and healthy way.
Finding examples that allow us to eliminate our own pain is a deeply complementary therapeutic blessing in the process of improvement and “emotional healing. “Partly because it educates us and helps us understand what’s going on.
In other words, it gives us tools and resources to stimulate our lucidity in times of stagnation. With this in mind, The Reading Agency and the Society of Chief of Librarians have decided to select and collect the best books and poems to combat anxiety and depression. .
We bring here some of the items in this list that go from the manual to feel good?From David D. Burns, to a brief history of the world?From Ernst H. Gombrich, to other works of humor such as those of author Bill Bryson.
In conclusion, literature can be extremely transformative. Because through it we manage to organize the chaos and internal disorder that reigns in us after bad times or traumatic episodes.
Therefore, I recommend that you do not miss the information I propose in this article, because a good book or beautiful poetry can make you recognize, relieve and heal, over time, the emotional pain that at times envelops in a frozen sea.
The Reading Agency; Society of Chief Librarians (2015). Read the cookbooks well: 2014-15 evaluation. October 2015, 36 pp. Available in: http://readingagency. org. uk/news/RWBOPEvaluationReport2015. pdf
Baikie, K. y Wilhelm, K. (11 August 2005). The physical and emotional health benefits of expressive writing. Retrieved from BJPsych Advances.